Newbie gardener, waterlogged, mossy 800sqm garden!

Hey!

I've had a little look through through site and found some really useful tips on how to cure my waterlogged lawn and treat the (probably!?) clay soil.

The house is 1930s, previously had an elderly lady and the garden was mature but not really cared for. The neighbours had been cutting the overhanging hedges. Weve had a few trees removed so that we can have a fence to secure the boundary (we have a whippet!). When it rains the garden is WATERLOGGED the puddles stay for days and days and it's pretty extensive. Even when there is no visible puddles, the ground is squelchy and in the worst places muddy enough to take a shoe off you're foot haha. Through the summer (when me bought it ) the garden was very lush and green, it looks very sad now!

We've had a quote for a land drainage system with a pump station. For the size of the space (800sqm) the quote was for £5k does anyone have any experience with this sort of work? They're planning on laying 200m of pipes and 6 ton of pea gravel.

After this is laid the garden will undoubtedly be a complete mess. Especially as time restraints mean we need to get the work done in the next few weeks (when it's still wet ). So from reading around on the site I was thinking of turning the soil manually and adding in some grit? I wondered what would be advisable to do with the mossy grassy layer that's there already? Remove from the site completely?

I read that top soil might not be needed which would be great!

Any suggestions and tips would be great! ❤

 

Hi @Supaspurds and a very warm

Sorry can't help you but I'm absolutely certainly some really knowledgeable folk with soon come to your aid.

Just want to say what a really super garden!!! Once you've sorted it out , you'll be the envy of everyone!!!!

 

Aww thanks! It's our first ever garden haha, we've been living in apartments and houses with yards for 10 years now so this is all very new for us! Hopefully by the summer we can get some pictures of it looking healthy and pretty again

 

Hello @Supaspurds and welcome to GC

I wouldn't pay that much to have it done.
Here's a video I'd do this

 

@Supaspurds A couple of questions: is your soil heavy clay? Is all the water from rain or are you getting run off from neighbouring properties.
If it was me I would get another couple of quotes from drainage engineers and then decide which route to go down.
If it is as bad as you say I would get the job done professionally.

 

@NigelJ thanks for responding I'm not sure what sort of clay it is to be honest. I'm going to have to dig a hole sharpish!

So after a normal rain fall the puddle/lake will stay for a few days. Even when there's no visible puddle, the ground is very wet to walk on even if its been dry for a few days.

Both gardens either side of ours have had drainage installed in the past and are slightly higher than ours. We're at the bottom of a slight hill too which probably doesn't help.

@Logan I'm definitely interested in doing as much as we can to solve the drainage naturally but we're both pretty useless at DIY and general home and garden related things

 

OK I've just been to buy a shovel haha

This is what it looks like. There's tree roots really really close to the surface. They're bright red!? We dug about a foot and half down and it started to be yellowy coloured.

Walking on it now is near impossible, we both almost lost our wellies to the squelch!

 

Does that mean somebody's quoted £5,000 for a drainage system without even digging a hole to check the nature of the soil?

And have they confirmed that your local water utility's regulations permit discharge of groundwater from land drains into their drainage system?

 

We all learn through time how to garden and there's lots of information about on YouTube and here.

 

They didn't dig down no but they know the area well and could see the issue from walking around the space and seeing how bad it was, they stated on the quote that it was clay soil, would local Knowledge not be a good measure in this instance?

We have a combined sewer so where soakaways can't be used (clay soil doesn't usually work with soakaways from what I've read), the next option would be to connect to our rain water drains and onto the main sewer. They stated there was no need to consult building regs, I had another guy say the same but I'm still awaiting his quote.

Thanks for replying!