Has anyone put a pump in their garden to tackle flooding?

[LaBaDeeLaBaDa]

Just that, really. We bought the house two years ago and now realise the garden is under water probably 20% of the year. No exaggeration: after snowfall in December the water stayed for 6 weeks, after heavy rainfall it stayed for 4...you get the drift.

The soil is heavy clay, it's compacted from building work, the water table is high (there's a small river about 400m down the road) and we're a foot lower than the garden that backs onto us, and a few inches lower than the gardens on either side. So it all ends up in our garden. A friend suggested if we rotavated and aerated the soil that might fix the problem (by allowing the water to drain through the soil more easily) but seems to me that there's nowhere for it to drain away to?

It's really depressing! The kids can't go out except in wellies, lawn is ruined, there seems no point in planting anything. Really want to returf, put some beds in, and make it a lovely garden, but obviously don't want to put money and time and effort into that and then have it unusable/ruined by standing water.

I've had an impossibly expensive quote for a drainage system and electric pump (14k, absolutely no chance of affording that). Wondering about getting a quote for "just" a pump, which would be cheaper but still expensive. But if it doesn't work, it'll be an incredible waste of money at the cost of other things we really need.

So: have you had a flooded garden, did you put a pump in, did it work? Or if any gardeners have any ideas, all thoughts gratefully received before I jack it all in and go and live in a desert somewhere 😭

No, they didn't, a few years ago both neighbours chose to raise their gardens, because they had exactly the same problem. One of my worries is that if we level ours up, we'll go back to just sharing the problem: at the moment they have puddles after heavy rain, whereas we have standing water everywhere.

No, not beneath. There's a drain we could connect to a few feet up, under the deck. But we would need to pump any water upwards to get it into the drain.

It was a power rake pulled by a big tractor, but my husband did it and found it hard to get the level and spend all day doing it - that's what I'm meant by overworked. But crucially I think the ground wasn't dry enough. If we'd done it in the middle of summer when the ground was dry I think we would have had a much better result. So make sure, because of your clay soil, you do any work when the ground is really quite dry. Stay off it when it is wet.

Google suds @LaBaDeeLaBaDa Sustainable urban drainage. There will be a few ideas for improving the garden. The swale has already been suggested but ponds, French drains and land drains are also options.

We moved house and had this exact problem. we had really bad weather and had to run a pump

Our garden seems to be the run off from all the other gardens and we had camera investigations which showed the drainage pipes were all cracked from trees roots.

In the end we put in a very big gravel soak away more than twice the size needed in the area where the kids play football, we rerouted all the drainpipes into a root proof large gravity planned pipe which now feeds out to the drain out the front and got a good drainage sorted, we didn’t need a pump in the end.

Onc the weather gets warmer we’re going to add some more top soil (less clay) and add a few trees with good soakage like alder.

but it’s so much better now. But it was expensive but we said we would do it once and do it right

Hi, searching the internet as we have exactly the same problem with surrounding gardens etc. We invested in a submersible dirty water pump. Great little piece of kit. Ensure it comes with long hose. Not all that expensive either. Ours has been sat in the garden for a few weeks now as we're constantly flooding with all these storms. 😒 Good luck.