Avoid garden drainage dramas this winter

If areas of your garden are damaged by water, consider adding some drainage to your landscaping.

If you've noticed a build-up of water in certain areas of your garden, you may need to consider landscaping for better garden drainage. You'll certainly need to look at this if erosion is occurring after heavy rains. In this case, diverting the water away from the damaged areas of the landscape is a priority.

Issues faced with garden drainage

Garden drainage problems are something you can address by using your observational skills and some basic landscape gardening techniques. Start by working out which parts of the garden are being damaged by excess water, and how this is occurring. Is it a build-up of water in certain areas of the garden, making them soggy, wet and unstable? Or is it a case of water runoff eroding parts of the garden?

Erosion

Soil erosion is quite common in the tropics and other regions that receive very sudden and heavy downpours. Sometimes rain and runoff damages garden beds by washing soil away. Sometimes the damage is more serious and enduring, for example, when rain continually erodes parts of the garden, weakening them and making them unstable.

Whether the water is pooling and making the ground soggy or moving and eroding the earth, the objective in both cases is to drain the water away from these areas and safely into stormwater drains. In soggy areas, a simple drainage solution is to dig a dry well, lined with rubble and gravel and with a pipe leading out of it to take the excess water away - preferably to a drain that leads off the property.

Digging some trenches can help with erosion, by directing the water to travel underground rather than along the surface where it does the most damage. When erosion on a slope is a concern, dig some trenches about half a metre deep and lead them diagonally across the incline. Fill the trenches with about 20 centimetres of rubble, then a thin layer of gravel, and cover with topsoil.

If you can see the damage caused by rain and runoff but don't know how to fix it, consult a qualified landscape gardening or drainage professional. These guys do it for a living and will be able to advise on garden drainage solutions to remedy the problem: