How do I get rid of standing water in my Columbia MD yard? It’s a question we get quite often, because let’s face it, nobody likes having water pooling on their property. It’s an eyesore. It gives you less usable yard space, and if the water is collecting in an area too close to your house, it can cause serious damage to your foundation, leading to staggering repair bills. Not a happy situation.

Unfortunately, there’s no one simple answer to the question. A cookie-cutter solution won’t work, because there are so many possible causes. In this article, we’ll talk about the most common causes of standing water and the things you can do to fix those issues.

These types of issues can be broken into two basic categories: Habit-based and design-based. Habit-based issues arise from things you are doing that cause or contribute to the problem. Design-based issues are issues that arise from specific features or characteristics of your property. What you do or don’t do doesn’t really impact them.

Of the two categories, answering the question ‘how do I get rid of standing water in my Columbia MD yard?’ tends to be easier when dealing with habit-based issues. Simply change what you’re doing and the problem goes away. Where those types of issues are concerned, the two most common are overwatering and homemade decorative planting beds.

Overwatering is the easiest of the problems to resolve, but what about decorative planting beds?

The issue here is that often, people build these beds without thinking about drainage, so they don’t incorporate an adequate channel that allows excess water to escape the bed. The worst instances of these kinds of issues arise when people build decorative beds right next to their homes.

Often, the people who do this don’t take into account the downspouts connected to their rain gutters, which wind up emptying into their decorative beds. With no channel to allow the water to escape, the result is that you wind up with pools of water right next to your home, which is a disaster waiting to happen.

Again though, the solution is a simple one. Create a more robust drainage channel and angle your downspouts away from the beds, and that should be the end of it.

Now let’s talk about those design-based issues. Answering the question ‘how do I get rid of standing water in my Columbia MD yard?’ is more of a challenge in these cases, but certainly doable. Here are the most common types of issues you’ll see:

Clay

Soil composition is a very big deal. If the soil in part of your yard has a high concentration of clay, it’s going to be virtually impossible to water to drain from that area without help. The solution in these types of situations involves building a drainage system to move the water from wherever it’s collecting on your property to somewhere else, usually a drainage ditch, nearby stream, or a small decorative pond you’ve built, or will build for that specific purpose.

The wrinkle here though, is that before you install a drainage system to answer the question ‘how do I get rid of standing water in my Columbia MD yard?,’ you’ll want to spend some serious time thinking about the other landscaping you may want to do in the future.

If you have a long wish list of projects you’d like to undertake, you’d be well-served by taking the time to create a Master Landscape Design document, which captures all of your landscaping goals, putting them in one place so you can prioritize them and take them into account as you do your other work.

We can help you put that document together, and armed with the details it contains, we can make sure that we design and build the drainage system with your future landscaping initiatives in mind.

Poor or Improper Grading

This is another common issue. While it’s possible to call in heavy equipment and dramatically change the grading of your entire property, a drainage system is a simpler and more cost-effective solution. The same notes we made above regarding other landscaping you plan to do in the future apply here as well.

Thatch

This term describes the layer of organic material that is just under your grass, resting atop your topsoil. Over time, the thatch layer can become highly compressed and tightly interwoven, which makes it increasingly more difficult for water that falls on it to filter down to the topsoil.

In this case, the answer to the question ‘how do I get rid of standing water in my Columbia MD yard?’ involves removing the thatch layer and aerating your lawn. This solution requires the use of some specialized equipment but is generally something a diehard DIYer can do if they want to. If you’d rather not have to deal with it, we’ll be happy to take care of it for you.

Hardpan

In a nutshell, hardpan is a layer of tightly compacted soil just beneath the layer of topsoil covering your yard. It can occur naturally, or it can be created by the presence of heavy equipment passing over a given area.

The solution to this problem is to break up the hardpan, which requires specialized equipment and is usually a bigger job than even the most committed DIYers want to try and tackle on their own.

Whatever the ultimate cause of your standing water issue, we’ve got you covered. As the area’s top-rated landscape design company, our team has the skills and experience to diagnose the problem and propose the best and most cost-effective solution. Give us a call today.