Garden - dig a hole

[TopStar74]

Probably very naïve question, please bear with me. The very far end of my garden floods every year, in autumn and winter and water collects sometimes for weeks if it is constantly raining. Currently, I am saving all the washing up water in the kitchen to water my garden. I was wondering, can I just dig a hole in my garden at that far end, where it floods each year, to see if I can find water? I searched to see how much a borehole costs and that is definitely out of the question! I was just wondering off the chance that maybe, every few days if I dig, maybe I might hit a low lying spring or something

[staffordian]

My initial reaction is that the reason for the flooding is most likely to be a very heavy clay soil which rainwater cannot percolate through. So it sits there, at the low point in the garden until it eventually does seep away or evaporate.

If this is the case, I suspect the chances of finding any water source below are low to zero. Additionally, if the ground is heavy clay, digging to find out would be back breaking work...

[DrFfybes]

Is it damp all year around? What you describe sounds more like surface runoff and poor soil drainage, but hard to tell without more info.

To be honest I suspect you are on a hiding to nothing, storing water in quantity is difficult and expensive. You could bury some ''bunds' that would fill and you could pump out of them, but the return on effort and cost would not be great. If you are just diong it to save water, then OK, but on a cost/L basis it will not be cheap.

As an example.... We had a couple of sheds built last year and put Butts on the downpipes on water harvesters, we already hadd the butts so it only cost us to build the block stands and for the connectors. We have some old plastic bins and barrels we fill from the existing butts when they get full, so far we've managed to refill them 3 times from the butts, but we were going to link a couple of those caged 1000L cubes - IBC tanks. At £75 a go and about £2.50/ton for water we pay Severn Trent we'd need to fill and empty it 30 times to break even, probably take about a decade.

Paul

[richlist]

Water costs are very low. I pay approx £1.50 for a cubic metre.....that's 1000 litres or 220 gallons. Then about the same again for sewerage, so at £3 for 220 gallons it's hardly worth the effort & cost surely ?

We had a similar problem at the paddock end of our garden. We had a land drain installed & connected to the surface water drains about 15 years ago.....it don't flood any more.

[UncleEbenezer]

My initial reaction is that the reason for the flooding is most likely to be a very heavy clay soil which rainwater cannot percolate through. So it sits there, at the low point in the garden until it eventually does seep away or evaporate.

Probably right. I'd just take issue with your "eventually" clause: what clears winter mud (and with clay there's lots of mud) is when the vegetation starts growing vigorously in spring, and takes up the available water.

To the OP: there might be some mileage in collecting some of that winter surplus in a butt. That works nicely if it has somewhere unobtrusive to sit and can be well-fed: the classic case is if it's fed by a pipe coming down from a roof/gutter. But that's not so likely at the bottom of a garden!

[Boots]

Try dowsing - it'll cost you nothing. You never know, it might show something, people have done it for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

[Breelander]

....I was wondering, can I just dig a hole in my garden at that far end, where it floods each year, to see if I can find water?

Possibly, but you'd have to dig deep.

Why not make a feature of it? Dig wide and create a pond to collect and keep the water. Then you can just dip your watering can in it during the summer.

[stewamax]

Try dowsing - it'll cost you nothing. You never know, it might show something, people have done it for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

For some unaccountable reason, and irrespective of the "Rubbish; its's pseudo science" comments, dowsing does work - at least for me.

My largish lawns are on heavy Leicestershire clay soil and have land drains that are not shown on the site plan.
I needed to find where each fed into the public storm-water drain so I dowsed, dug down and found them. I even noticed a hysteresis effect whereby if I were more or less at right-angles to the drain run, I would overshoot the position and overshoot by around the same amount when coming back in the other direction; the overshoot was roughly proportional to the depth of the drain. I found out later that this was a known quirk.

Since I am very sceptical of anything paranormal and am not the least 'sensitive' to such things, it surprised me that it worked.
But I live in a farming area where it is a not an unusual practice, and dowsing is not thought of as totally bonkers.

Exactly how it works I have no idea whatsoever.

[sg31]

I had a rural property in Lincolnshire many years ago, the waterboard came out for some reason and the workman proceeded to dowse for the path of the supply pipe. He found it quite quickly but I thought it was just some prank they liked to pull on townies. He actually showed me how to do it and together we traced the complete path of the pipe. We also found an old well that was covered over and looked like it hadn't been used in decades.

I have used dowsing on many occasions since. Brass rods seem to work best but I've used old wire coat hangers when nothing else was available.

I don't understand how it works but there is a force that woks on the rods when they cross water. I live in rural Worcestershire now and dowsing is used by most of of the farmers I know.

[bungeejumper]

Likewise. We have three or four artesian springs that surface in our garden (at subsoil level, so invisibly), and I've had to install several french drains to keep parts of the garden from bogging down. So one summer, when sister in law was staying and the talk turned to dowsing, she bet me that she could find the drains, and the watercourses too.

She wasn't wrong. Using a bit of old coat hanger wire, she located the french drains with ease, and she had absolutely no foreknowledge of where they were. When I tried dowsing for the springs instead, I was almost alarmed at the assertive ways that the rods behaved. Bucking and swivelling in my hands. A very weird sensation.

Much later, I decided to confirm my findings with a much less alternative method for tracking the water flows. I bought three or four of those cheap humidity and ph meters that people use to check whether their plant pots are dry, and they allowed me to map out several areas of the garden in pretty good detail. (And quickly - the meter readouts are instantaneous.) And they substantially matched what my dowsing had already told me.

So I'm a convert. And I don't think we need to invoke the paranormal here. It's probably just a bit of physics that we don't understand yet.

On another note: A wet patch in a garden is a great place to plant a willow, which will gratefully soak up any water that it can find. Also good for wet-loving plants like zantedeschia aethiopica (calla lilies). And finally, my sweetcorn really love the ground above the watercourse. Nine foot high plants, and probably about eighty great big cobs going into the freezer this autumn. Same as last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.

BJ

[TopStar74]

I bought three or four of those cheap humidity and ph meters that people use to check whether their plant pots are dry

Hi BJ Please can I have a link for the humidity and ph meters. My elderly mum is always overwatering plants and killing them Over the years, all the shouting I am doing to her reminding her to first check the moisture level by dipping her finger in the soil doesn't work! Sometimes she just scratches the surface, finds it dry and panics Seems like an out of control obsession.

[TopStar74]

Why not make a feature of it? Dig wide and create a pond to collect and keep the water. Then you can just dip your watering can in it during the summer.

This is exactly the intention! Just dig a hole and see what happens. If nothing, then I fill the hole back, if not and if I see water collecting that will be good! But before that I wanted to gather some comments and views! Thank you!

[bungeejumper]

I bought three or four of those cheap humidity and ph meters that people use to check whether their plant pots are dry

Hi BJ Please can I have a link for the humidity and ph meters. My elderly mum is always overwatering plants and killing them

Simple humidity testers, for example, for £6.49 at at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09FM15CY8/ ... _detail_0?. Or humidity and ph together for £8.69 from https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B077WX15NF/ . Although actually the ones from B&Q @ £7 are perfectly good (https://www.diy.com/departments/verve-m ... 906_BQ.prd).

None of these need batteries. Don't pay too much, because they last about five years and then the special tips on the prongs corrode and you have to junk them. But very effective, I find. Good luck!

BJ

[TopStar74]

Good luck!
BJ

Thanks. I had already checked the ones on Amazon and found that most had mover 10% 1 star reviews, with most saying the needle barely moved even when dipping in moist soil and still showed dry. Was wondering if I can get a reliable recommendation. Thank you!

[Mike4]

Try dowsing - it'll cost you nothing. You never know, it might show something, people have done it for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

I have seen dowsing done for real, in a mundane situation - looking for a buried stopcock in a HUGE garden. It was bewitching.

I'd called the water board out (late 1970s) and the bod who turned up said "We have no card in the index file for this property, I'll find it by dowsing", and proceeded to walk around the vast lawn apparently randomly then said "Its here. Dig here".

So I dug in the middle of this vast garden and he was right. There was the stopcock. Just amazing.


(Edit to add some missing words, to make it make sense.)

[brightncheerful]

My initial reaction is that the reason for the flooding is most likely to be a very heavy clay soil which rainwater cannot percolate through. So it sits there, at the low point in the garden until it eventually does seep away or evaporate.

If this is the case, I suspect the chances of finding any water source below are low to zero. Additionally, if the ground is heavy clay, digging to find out would be back breaking work...

The best time ime to dig heavy clay is when it is wet. Damping dry clay with a sprinkling of water enables the spade to slice the earth.

[staffordian]

My initial reaction is that the reason for the flooding is most likely to be a very heavy clay soil which rainwater cannot percolate through. So it sits there, at the low point in the garden until it eventually does seep away or evaporate.

If this is the case, I suspect the chances of finding any water source below are low to zero. Additionally, if the ground is heavy clay, digging to find out would be back breaking work...

The best time ime to dig heavy clay is when it is wet. Damping dry clay with a sprinkling of water enables the spade to slice the earth.

Very true. Dry clay is best treated as though it was concrete, whereas dealing with wet clay is simply backbreaking

[richlist]

.....and extremely messy.

[Kantwebefriends]

The way to dig heavy clay soil is to hire someone else.

[sg31]

The way to dig heavy clay soil is to hire someone else.

If there is access the easy way is to use a substantial mechanical digger.

A friend is a digger owner and operator so it was easy for me to dig drains and move over a hundred tons of soil to improve and landscape my heavy clay garden. I paid him his normal day rate which was a pittance compared to using hired manual labour.

Most areas have digger services available.