How to Drain a Lawn

Hi this is Yolanda Vanveen and in this segment we are going to talk about how to drain a lawn. So we buy our nice beautiful new homes in the new developments and we didn't realize when we bought them that they were actually built on swamp land. Because a lot of the new houses are built in areas that would not have been built on 20 years ago. And so the ground is soggy, wet, and it never dries out and you're trying to put a lawn on top of it. And so there is no compost, there is no material, you're putting lawn right on top of gravel, or no, you're putting the lawn right on top of the claw and the muck and so it's just going to rot in the winter time. And so to drain it out you can solve the problem and you can try to get your lawn to grow. But before you drain it out you might address the issue of why it's so wet there and if you just lay a bunch of gravel down and a foot or two of compost over that gravel and raise your lawn up, then you will find that it will drain really well just by raising it and that you're not addressing the issue of the muck underneath. Because whether you're draining it or not usually there is still no compost underneath your lawn and it's still right on clay. So even if you're draining it it's not going to grow very well because it's just muck! So you can drain it by putting any types of drainage system in and basically you're just making any type of canal or a little hole or just cutting a slit around through the grass and you can put pvc pipe in there and then fill it back in with gravel and put it in with dirt and thats really all that a French drain does that or any other type of drains. And basically that's all you're doing is taking the water out of your lawn and you're putting it back into the street or into the storm drains where it belongs. And so you can do that and spend all the money on a drain system but in the end I'm not sure that your grass is going to grow that much better because it's still on muck. So the most important thing you can do before you even put your drainage system in is put the system in but make sure you put lots of compost, gravel, organic material underneath your grass, bring it up, and you'll find it will grow really well and even if you live in a swamp you can have a lawn.