This isn’t directly about Beanie, although it does show how getting a dog changes your outlook on things.

Our house was newly built when we moved into it around eight years ago, and like many new properties it had a garden with very poor quality soil. Or to be more accurate, the top few inches loosely qualified as soil, while everything below that was either clay or compacted building site rubble. As a result, our garden would be wet pretty much all year round, and more like a swamp in winter.

We’d been prepared to live with that, but when we got Beanie we quickly found that ten minutes playing in the garden would leave her muddier than an hour running about at the park. It didn’t take long before we realized we’d have to do something to seriously improve the drainage.

There’s no shortage of advice about garden drainage on the Internet, and the most promising approach involved using a buried, perforated pipe to take excess moisture straight into our land drain and out of our garden. This sounded like a lot of work and expense though, and we weren’t convinced it would work. It seemed to rely on water being drawn through the soil into the pipe, but with all that clay to get through I couldn’t see it happening.

Eventually we gave up on the DIY idea and hit the Yellow Pages to look for local drainage experts. We settled on Cherry Landscaping, who seemed to have a more viable approach. They still use a perforated pipe, but they also remove a layer of clay and replace it with gravel to ensure that surface water can make it through to the pipe. We gave them a go and in three days our garden went from this:

(pictured before work started, and after we’d dug and refilled an
exploratory trench)

to this:

It wasn’t cheap by any means, but it’s certainly working. We’ve had very heavy rainfall over the last few days and it’s all drained away – no more impromptu lakes! Unfortunately we’ll have to keep Beanie off it for a couple of weeks to let the new turf bed in, but then she’ll have a brand new garden to play in. What’s betting she tries her hand at digging?