garden work

I have three 45 gallon water butts to feed my plants and this week, I drained them and relocated them in, what i think is a better place, I finished them this morning and repiped them up to the shed roof, This afternoon the rain filled them all up and, flooded the garden, we must have had a record amount of rainfall today

Tom, I know little to nowt about gardening but, when you say your garden was flooded, do you mean your lawn?

I only ask this because of the last deluge when you tried to sail one of your boats on it.

Yes Mollie the lawn was underwater and again I could have sailed a boat on it, We are in an area of clay, Which is good for building on but, bad for drainage,

I have been using a spare wheely bin at the back of the greenhouse for a water butt and it is half full. The back garden yesterday where I am revamping was flooded but all the water had soaked in this morning but will not walk on it yet,

Tom, I am also in an area of clay and it is so very hard to dig over, or doing anything with; but do try to aerate your lawn using a gardening fork. That's what I used to do when I still had a lawn, otherwise the water would have built up and drained into the under-pinning of the house.

About 40 years ago when I was in my 30s I manually turned over a 12ft by 9ft patch and one foot down to form the foundations for my patio. My word it was darned hard work, and I kept throwing the clay, soil and rubble over my shoulder and, when I'd finished, I had a mountain behind me! I got some silt delivered which I spread into the cavity I'd dug and my cousin flagged it for me, so I do know how hard it is to dig through clay. I'm only a little 'un and you're a big strong boy so, if I can do it, so can thee. At the time, me mam said I favvered a navvy!

When I first moved in I noticed the water logging and decided to build a 'soak away' pit, So I started digging and dug a hole 4 foot by 4 foot square and, like you described, Its hard work, I went to six feet deep but, It is still clay, I sought advice from a resident who was knowledgeable and he told me, He had gone 20 feet down and still not found the bottom of the clay, So I thought, I'll just fill the hole with gravel and hope it works but, it didn't. So , I'm stuck with ' Toms Flash' in the wet seasons but, Every cloud has a silver lining and my silver lining is, I can launch my boats out there and today, I christened the newest boat,

j God loves a Trier Thomas...

When my husband and I moved back to Wigan I set about "trying" to dig out, from the roots, lots of blackberry bushes that had grown which mum couldn't cope with.

I have no clue how far I dug into that clay as it's too long ago now, but our next door neighbour at the time asked if I was trying to dig as far as Australia! Well, they were so deeply rooted that I didn't manage to get them. all, The fruits are nice in jam, I suppose, but not growing wild.

Tom

Have you not got a grid at the back of your house ? because it might just be a case of 'bad drainage' rather than living in an area prone to flooding, because you sit much higher up than Poolstock Brook, so you should not have any flooding problems.

talking about things going down the drain, how is WR site going on, Tom