Water Pooling in Your Yard is a Sign It Needs Grading

When water is pooling in areas of your lawn, study the rise and fall of your landscape to determine the route the water takes to get there. Pooling water is a sign that your soil is compacted and your landscape grading needs a change.

When I bought my current home, there were a handful of nasty areas on my lawn that would take days to drain after a hard rain. When the storm was in July or August, those lingering pools of water were notorious for drawing mosquitoes and gnats. Even after aerating my entire yard, these pockets were still collecting water. After a hard storm, they were like sponges that wouldn’t dry out.

Obviously, no lawn is perfectly flat – it has its share of slopes and troughs. But no matter the terrain, water should never sit on your lawn –  if it is, your problem may be that the lawn and soil aren’t healthy enough to manage and absorb storm runoff. A healthy lawn with plenty of air pockets, deeply rooted grass, and biologically active soil can absorb enormous amounts of rainwater. But if the soil is compacted from repeated use of synthetic fertilizers or high foot traffic, it loses its ability to absorb and drain water, becoming something close to cement (if you’ve ever tried to dig in compacted soil, you know what I mean).

Grading these areas wasn’t too difficult. But I discovered that if your lawn is weak and the soil isn’t cured of its compaction problems, you only succeed in re-routing the water to a different trough or pocket.

How to grade your lawn inexpensively

The first rule of grading is that rainwater must run AWAY from your house. Make sure you don’t adjust the grade of your lawn towards your home’s foundation.

Watch where the water flows and collects on your lawn

After a few unsuccessful grading tries with nothing but new rainwater pools to show for my efforts, I thought it might help if I saw the water as the water saw the yard. In the worst area, I laid down with my head at the collection point and looked out in every direction. This helped me see the potential flow of water – where the lawn rose and where the troughs were.

With a manual aerator, I went to work on the areas where water pooled. With the aerator I pulled lots of plugs out of each pocket, leaving small holes behind, extending out from the edges one additional foot. I also aerated along any trough and track that looked like it might drain in or out of the pocket.

Add amendments to your soil and seed it

I then added new topsoil, finely ground compost and peat moss to fill in and even out every part of the newly aerated pockets and troughs. Then I seeded it and used the back of a garden rake to mix the grass seed in with the soil. Once I determined that it was relatively level, I covered the seed with burlap and pinned the burlap to the ground with “U” pins. The key to success was keeping the burlap moist – I made sure that the newly seeded areas never dried out and I didn’t remove the burlap until the grass underneath was off to a good start.

Obviously, I’m not a professional landscaper and my lawn grading efforts were admittedly rudimentary, but they worked. I used this method over a few seasons to eliminate all of the areas where water collected, and I’m happy to say that you won’t find any water pooling on my lawn today.