Top 5 Things to Do When Your Garden is Too Wet
Published 08/31/18
Water is important to your garden, but you can have too much of a good thing. If you feel like you’re swimming through your garden or that you’re actually living in a swamp, you could have problems with water in your garden. The squish, squash of your boots as you walk up the path to your home is a tipoff that you need to deal with your garden landscaping. How can you manage a garden that has an overabundance of water?
1. Know Where the Water is Coming From
To manage water in your garden, you need to understand where it is coming from in the first place. You could have an underground spring. You could have a garden with a distinct slope that makes it difficult to manage the water flow in your yard. You could also be rerouting your water from your home in the wrong direction, either on purpose or inadvertently.
For instance, if your downspout is pointing toward your garden and flooding it or if your gutters are broken and leaking, then water will move into places where you don’t want it to be. Download our free gutter guide for more information about how gutters and gutter guards can impact the water in your garden.
If you can’t manage the amount of water coming in, you can manage where it goes. Add a French drain or swales, trenches dug on contour. These can channel the water into new areas of the garden or encourage it to sink into the ground.
2. Improve Your Soil
Sometimes problems with water aren’t water problems at all: they’re soil problems. If your soil is full of clay and the water has nowhere to go, you can work to improve the drainage in specific areas of your garden. Better Homes and Gardens recommends “If the drainage problem is not too severe, you can lighten the soil by working in lots of organic matter.” Adding compost and grit every year will make your garden have better drainage over time. However, if you have an entire yard full of clay soil, this can be an intimidating proposition.
3. Add Raised Beds
If your garden is really wet and the drainage is poor, you can add raised beds to grow plants that don’t like the water. This allows you to avoid tampering with the natural soil conditions and slope and focus on what you want to do, which is grow certain types of plants.
If you are living in a wetland, embrace this and plant with wetland species. 4. Grow Plants That Use Moisture
According to Saga, if you find that you have too much water in one part of your garden, you can “Create a woody canopy using shrubs and trees.” This not only changes how much water falls to the ground, but certain tree species like willow vigorously soak up the water with their roots. Since the trees are using the water, the total amount of water you have to manage is reduced.
5. Grow Plants That Love Moisture
If you have a very wet part of your garden, you can also decide to enjoy plants that naturally thrive in a wetland environment. These include plants such as rushes, cattails, and mallows. By growing plants that love moisture, you turn your water problem into an important and positive feature of your garden.
At Lednor Home Solutions, we’re here to help you with your home and garden problems. Talk with us about renovating your home with gutter covers or a gutter replacement to better manage water flow. Schedule a free estimate today.
