Laughing Dragon Garden Look Back: Part 1 — The Spring Swamp

If there's one thing that experience has taught us about gardening and urban homesteading, it is that you never know what to expect!

Whereas we didn't have a particularly cold winter this year, we did have a very wet one. Our home, and thus the Laughing Dragon Garden, is located on a gently sloping hillside and we have quite a lot of land above us most of which belongs to neighbors and the rest of the neighborhood.

Our little garden mascot in winter

You don't have to have a degree in rocket science to understand that water tends to run downhill! During heavy rains most of the groundwater tends to stay below grade and the remainder is handled by various artificial culverts and ditches, and typically directed out towards the streets.

Sure, we sometimes end up with a soggy lawn and a small stream running down the driveway, but those have historically dried up again within hours or days, once the rain stops.

Something unusual and quite unexpected happened when we went out to first start looking at the garden back in March.

Whereas it was definitely very green and lush looking out there we didn't get more than half a dozen steps in before there was a squishy sound underfoot... and after another ten feet or so we were standing in about six inches of wet mud!

We hadn't previously paid a lot of attention to it although there was a rather frequent and persistent runoff stream of water going down our driveway, starting at the gate to the garden. The reason we didn't pay attention to this was that it has happened in the past and it would usually dry up again once the rain stopped.

By whatever mechanism that makes water choose the path of least resistance down a hill, something obviously had changed close to our property line because all of a sudden our lovely Laughing Dragon Garden — which is normally pretty dry — had turned into the Laughing Dragon Swamp!

What a mess! Just walking back and forth a few times created a giant mud pie!

Naturally, this was a fairly depressing situation, and for the first few weeks we just kept an eye on it thinking that maybe the swampiness was simply the result of unusually much rain and that it would naturally dry up.

However even after we had a period of quite dry weather for several weeks in early April, the swamp persisted.

Would we have to give up our lovely garden?

And what would have to be done to get rid of the water?

And why was there so much water, all of a sudden?

Our initial intention was to try to simply dig a hole to serve as a collection point of sorts and then to put a hose in it and hopefully be able to siphon it out to the street, well below the level of the garden. At least we might learn how quickly it might fill.

In addition, we have rather thick clay soil, so maybe we just needed to get down to some sandier substrate?

It was not easy to dig a hole back there because once you get more than about 6-8 inches down — this is also why we have raised beds — the topsoil give way to very rocky clay fill that is almost impossible to make progress through.

The hole filled up again, almost immediately... a matter of 3-4 minutes!

In time @denmarkguy dug a hole big enough to put a 5 gallon bucket into and then we used a very long garden hose to siphon from the bucket down to the gully by the street below our house. Thankfully, there's about a 9-foot drop between where the garden is and the street.

However, once drained, the hole quickly filled up again and after repeating the draining process four or five times we could only determine that there was a considerable and constant inflow of water from up the hill, causing the effective water table to be right at surface level. Hence the mud.

For a few days we considered simply working around it by laying down wooden pallets to walk on and working in the raised beds which — after all — were still well drained but that just seemed like too much work so we started looking towards a more permanent situation to drain the swamp.

Starting the process of digging a trench against the back retaining wall. Backbreaking and messy work!

So the next step was to dig an entire trench along a rock retaining wall that seemed to be bleeding most of the inbound water, with an eye towards catching the inflow in the trench, and then putting in a flexible pipe that would redirect it to the gully by the street.

This, of course, tunred out to be a huge amount of back breaking work, and once we got to laying the final piping, it would have to go under a couple of stretches of fencing, as well as potentially under our tool and potting shed, or possibly the garage.

Aaaaaackk!

After a couple of days of digging — more like a week, given that there were breaks for rain — we effectively had a moat at the back of the laughing dragon garden. A moat filling quite rapidly with water, and still no signs that the rest of the garden was draining significantly.

This was quite worrisome, because we have apple trees, roses, forsythia and lical bushes back there, and they would not survive long with their feet so pervasively wet. How much would we lose?

Then we had an unexpected stroke of luck!

While trying to deepen the hole at the lowest point in the back corner of the garden (where we used to grow rhubarb because it was always somewhat damp back there) @denmarkguy accidentally — and quite unexpectedly — punctured some old corrugated drainage pipe that seemed to have been put there, possibly decades before we ever moved in; likely when the neighborhood was first parceled out, in the 1950s and 1960s.

There's actually a deliberately designsed drain at the bottom of that deepest part on the left!

Anyway, we cleared back rocks and mud and cleaned out the hole, connected the newly dug (and water filled) trench, and the moat quickly drained!

With the muddy water gone, we were able to poke around a little bit or an expose some more of the plastic piping and make a hole large enough to help drain the garden while still having enough rocks over it to keep it from clogging up with vegetation and grass.

Soon we were able to out out our chairs and sit, without sinking into the mud!

All in all, it took about two weeks before the wet swamp gradually turned to mud and eventually to firm ground again. We were very relieved that it actually turned out to be a relatively small job get the garden back to working condition, even if it meant that we would start on a lot of things about four weeks late.

Almost two months later, there is still a steady trickle of water flowing into various parts of our trench, and then into our drainage "exit hole." We have no idea what caused the change in water flow, but the garden itself as now as dry as in years past.

We're still evaluating any permanent damage caused by the swamp.

So far, we have lost our forsythia... ot simply "drowned." It's also touch-and-go whether our lilacs will survive. Some blackberries died (no great loss!). On the other hand, our apple trees look like they will provide a bumper crop, in another couple of months.

And that's the end of Part One of this year's backstory. Part two will mostly be about our ongoing battles with an exceptionally stout "crop" of pests and varmints!

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