Garden drainage

[user86386427]

If your garden slightly slopes, what do you have at the bottom of the slope to assist drainage? If anything? Our side garden slightly slopes towards our house (along the side) and it just goes from grass to brick wall, I'm worried this will cause a drainage issue and damp. For the back of the house we have thin pebble borders between the patio and house, is that sufficient or should it be the grills? I'm worried our garden is quite boggy and not draining properly but we've obviously had a lot of rain and snow recently.

Anyone?

French drains.

Our house is on a shallow slope from front to back. The front of the house used to get waterlogged and the back garden turned into a bog last summer with heavy rains. (None of which we knew prior to purchase a year ago)

Anyway, I've dug out French drains along the front garden, down the side of the house all the way to the end of the back garden, and it has solved the problem. I dug then alongside existing pathways and topped in stone that's similar in colour so they blend in. I used about 50m of perforated pipe (eBay), 2x20m roll of lining (halved it) and a couple of tons of 20-40mm stone (£130ish). We also got a trenching shovel (£30ish).

It's time consuming but good exercise.

Having looked into other measures we're planning to cut and gravel a channel around the house and I'll be digging a swale beside the front hedge in the spring.

What level is the grass to your damp course? If a couple of bricks lower then you shouldn’t have an issue but you always install french drains, or a simple flower bed. Just dig deep and have free draining soil. More of a drastic option is to create gully’s to divert runoff but that usually isn’t needed

In our last home we had very deep flower beds. The water would run there and during heavy rains, would look flooded.

In our current house, we too have French drains plus a soak away. A soak away is where a hole is dug into which water is diverted, it’s filled with rocks/gravel. Ours just looks like a gravel path. Our patio ever so slightly tilts in that direction (not noticeable looking at it). When we first moved in, after one serious storm, we had water at our back up to the edge of our sliding doors. Had it rained more, it would’ve been in the house. So we had this done, never had another problem (15 plus years).

French drains and soak aways are far less money to install and less damaging to your garden as to install pipes for the grills for drainage requires a lot to be dug up and pipe work. French drains and soak aways, you could if you choose, do yourself. They don’t really require heavy machinery.

To the front we have drains (grills) but had the entire front dug up to work on drains from the house and added these drains for rain water. This was then combined with new driveway as of course old driveway had to be dug up.