Gardening Your Drainage

Refeicul

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May 25, 2022
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I just saw your recent video. It made me ponder. Why havent you made a decorative pond in the back or in the lowlands of your property? Like a trench in your trouble areas and even under your beds? 4" or 100mm pipe filter fabric or sock and gravel around it leading to the drainage pond? then a solar fountain or 2 to keep the mosquitos down. You said your area is clay ridden so it wouldent have to be lined, and to boot you get to play with a digger!
 

Mandy Onderwater

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Mackay area, QLD Australia
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I'm not entirely sure why but my best guess would be that Australia's winters are dry regardless, and as the video shows the summers are already to wet. Having the ground saturated before it even rains might pose a bigger issue.

After typing this I started looking around, turns out he did have a dam!



As the second video shows, the dam used to leak and only the deeper (clay) levels would stay wet. I can't find it in any more recent videos, even after some digging. Maybe he hasn't gone back to show us, or perhaps it perished after some floods, who knows. I hope this helps though!
 

Grandmother Goose

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Broken Hill NSW
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I just saw your recent video. It made me ponder. Why havent you made a decorative pond in the back or in the lowlands of your property? Like a trench in your trouble areas and even under your beds? 4" or 100mm pipe filter fabric or sock and gravel around it leading to the drainage pond? then a solar fountain or 2 to keep the mosquitos down. You said your area is clay ridden so it wouldent have to be lined, and to boot you get to play with a digger!
I love your idea, rainwater drainage to make a pond, I'd love to do that myself except... I'm in a desert, it's going to require a bit more than some drainage pipe for me to do something that awesome.

The problem Mark has with too much water isn't a normal one, well, it wasn't a normal one, climate change might be changing that and making it become normal in the future, but right now it's just a very unusually terribly wet season in that part of Australia. Large areas of eastern Australia have had record breaking rains and floods for months now and the rain just keeps coming. There have been entire towns drowned under 14 metres (45 feet) of water, to have the water drain away only to rain and flood again, and again. Thousands of people are homeless because of it, and the disaster area at it's peak covered areas larger than Hurricane Katrina destroyed in the USA. The fact that Mark's property is as soggy as it is, is a mere inconvenience compared to what others are and have been going through. So yeah, his yard is a bit wet, but there's really no where for the water to go except down hill, and Mark is lucky enough to have been able to buy a property that's elevated enough that he doesn't need to use his boat to get to his chickens. It'll dry out all in good time, it's not something that would normally need extra drainage and right now, extra drainage isn't really going to help much. I guess we can only hope and pray for the rain to stop for a while.
 
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