Paddling Anyone?

Oh what a shame, are all the neighbours' gardens affected the same? Maybe you need a soakaway.

Thanks Dawnsaunt, it's just ours, the one next door and another just futher down but the latter is only sightly! Our next door neighbour brought in a mini JCB to his own garden and dug down about 12ft, made trenches, put in gravel and soakaway pipes but still it does this! Our neighbour has said he wont raise his garden because they only have grass and also to save my plants. If he did raise his, ours would no longer exsist, it would be totally covered!

The water isnt getting away, is it? Are you on clay? Parts of my plot is the same, looks like you need to create a way for the excess water to escape, poor you, more work and money.

Oh dear, that happens here because we are 3ft lower than our neighbours, luckily only in the part we use for our dog run and I can sweep it back up to a drain, that sounds a bit cockeyed I know but its uphill to the drain, lol.......

Oh dear....that is a mighty problem....there must be a solution but like a lot of problems it could be an expensive one!

Will it take long to drain away once the rain stops/lessens?

Perhaps someone on GoY will have dealt with the same problem...maybe a mention of this on the Questions section would help? Just a thought. I hope you are able to find an affordable solution, Helen.

Poor you, Helenium - you must get really down when this happens after all your hard work getting your garden to look nice.

Have you tried contacting your local water authority to see if they have any helpful suggestions for you ? Might be worth a try.

Well, soldier on - let's hope it gets better over time.

A simple solution = buy an inexpensive pond pump, secondhand or whatever. Dig hole at what you consider to be the deepest part of the water area. Place pump in it, with a length of hosepipe going off to a drain. Hopefully you shed has an electrical supply which can be activated wirelessly from your house. Job done.

Oh dear, that is bad :( I hope you'll be able to do something about it. It needs a lot of drainage and i hope your idea of raising the ground level works. It must be very unpleasant to have that in your garden.

Oh, poor you.... adding this to GoYpedia :
"Flood and Rain Damage"

OH, that's awful! When we enlarged our beds we had to get a pneumatic drill to dig them as the ground (clay) was so compacted. They are fine now of course, but parts of the lawn are still very wet and it really 'should' be lifted and the earth under it loosened in the same way. Oh, what a mess A! Hope you find a solution somehow, but it looks like it could be expensive to me. :((

Thanks everyone for your kind comments. Most of the garden is clay, but the really wet parts just look like black soup! The top part of the garden, (the one in the blog ready steady) before it's makeover used to be waterlogged too! Now it only gets really wet in two places and both are only about 2ftx2ft. But if we try to raise it that high, I think the water will get closer to the house maybe in it, as it has to go somewhere. Thanks for your really good suggestion Jasonf, in theory it would work, but this garden is surrounded with water on three sides. The nearest drain is about 100ft away out on the road.The only other place to pump it, would be the neighbour's garden on the other side, who would not be happy at all and (one of those types, who complains about everything and anything anyone does) wouldn't be helpfull even if they could!

I wonder if a few narrow trenches from the lowest point could be dug out, maybe a spade's width and as deep as you can dig and then fill with gravel or stone so the water can permeate down. I wonder if the council or environmental agency can help.

Oh my goodness. I think I'll pass on the paddling. Looks too cold and dirty for me LOL.

Looks like you may need raised beds. What a shame, considering you didn't want any raised beds.

I hope your garden recovers from the flooding.

Are you on a council estate, Helenium? I am sure that you have approached them about drainage but this is something that they should be taking care of eg by putting a drain to the road drain.

Dawnsaunt, our neighbour dug down 12ft, put in gravel and soak aways but that didn't work!

Thanks Alexb! It usually between 1-3 days to drain depending on how much water there is.

Bulbaholic, there's a drain in the road, but the planning department wouldn't even allow any of us to put our driveways on a downward slant so the water would drain from them into the drains, we had to put them at a slant pointing towards the house! Trouble is where I live is just a little town (with city status) with too many new houses being (I don't mean 1 or 2 I mean a few hundred, with one thousand more gone through with plans of a new housing estate, which also adds to our already congested roads) built all around, and only old Victorian pipes to cope with all the things pipes cope with! When our council is approached about things like this their answer? We've no money!

I can only sympathise. Its distressing to hear the authorities say excess water should run towards the house rarber than the expected, away fom the house, shocking.

Thanks Dawnsaunt! I can't see any other way of dealing with it, other than raised beds which I really don't want! But.. I suppose.. it's better than no garden at all!

If it's rented property, couldn't the landlord do something? (if prodded sufficiently!) 20+ inches doesn't sound healthy, or that it's doing the structures any good.