Dealing With Drainage Problems

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Gardening is great, except for when a slight drizzle turns into a puddle that won't drain for hours. When this happens your plants get over watered then they start to wilt, or the fruit will get water logged and start to rot, just a lot of terrible things happen that make your garden not only worthless but look terrible too.

Soil is the root of drainage, if you have good soil you probably have fast drainage as well. The best type of soil is going to hold onto water but still be loose enough to allow it to drain quickly.

Sandy soil is not going to hold any moisture, so mainly just plants like cactus are going to be able to survive in this type of soil. Then on the opposite end of the spectrum would be clay, which would be to compact and not allow any water to even sink into the earth at all.

Both are basically terrible and so what you want to do is till the earth so you get reasonably deep. If you have too much clay in your soil get some sort of sand to even it out with, and if there are large amounts of sand get some clay.

Apart from clay and sand, soil needs organic matter: manure, compost, garbage, worm excrement, any of these will work beautifully. Soil has got to be packed with nutrients for the plants to grow properly and neither clay nor sand will provide this.

Once you have evened your soil with clay, sand and organic matter, build raised beds. Raised beds are going to prevent excess water from damaging your plants, by creating a pipe line for the water to travel on.

The bed of soil will hold enough to water to support good plant life, without over watering and damaging the poor plant. You can also build a bog garden by planting plants that require an excessive amount of water.

Putting these near your regular garden will allow them to soak up any extra water that may be disadvantageous to the plants in the raised beds. The key thing to be sure of with raised beds is to make sure that water is going flow down a route away from the plants.

If you want to make the water run off a little less noticeable you can fill the divots with gravel. Water can easily move between little rocks, so it won't slow the run off at all but it will still allow for protecting your plants from over watering.


About the Author:
Destry Masterson is an author who has written hundreds of articles. She publishes articles about landscaping and Orbit sprinkler heads for Sprinkler System Store.

Contact Info:
Destry Masterson - MyOnlineArticleWriting@gmail.com - Twitter: @DestryMasterson



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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