Lawn Water Management & French Drainage

While water is important to any landscape, excess water can damage your property. Directing water to the proper areas of your property is a must. This helps you avoid water in the basement, muddy puddles, and permanent damage to your turf. Overwatering actually causes more problems than underwatering, and oftentimes this excess of water comes straight from mother nature. Ensuring that overwatering is avoided means the general use of extended downspouts to keep water spread out away from your structures, but sometimes that is not enough. Standing water that accumulates in your yard can cause human health problems, attracting critters, causing messes, and creating mold. Once these problems get bad enough, the costs of removal will be extreme. Preemptively addressing these issues through active lawn water management will keep natural irrigation evenly dispersed.

Proper drainage is the solution to excess standing water, runoff, and the problems they cause. While this may initially sound like an expensive eyesore, innovation in modern landscaping practice means that drainage can be virtually invisible. French drains can be trenches filled with gravel and a slotted pipe, or a trench that houses a perforated pipe, wrapped in an aggregate and sealed in a mesh. These drains are used to move surface and groundwater away from problematic areas to the places on your property that will maximize daylight evaporation and soil infiltration. While water loves to expand, moving with gravity towards the lowest point it can find, a french drain provides a dedicated route for water to take. Because the pipe itself is belowground, the visible trench can be beautifully landscaped like any other area of your property.

There are multiple routes that can be taken with a french drain in combination with water management best practices. Even if you do not currently have issues with flooding in your landscape, installation of a french drain can give you the confidence that your lack of issues will continue. Our team can consult you on the best location for a french drain, and how you can landscape the area to seamlessly fit the theme of your property.