Preparing Your Landscaping For Flooding

If a little more than drizzling puts you on red alert about your landscape taking on water, then you must go through the following tips to prepare your landscape for flooding.

How To Prepare Your Landscape For Flooding?

Create A Rain Garden

Creating a rain garden is one of the most effective and easiest landscape flooding solutions. It is one way of whipping out a possibility of visual delight from the point of the problem. Usually, water runs down to and accumulates in areas of depression in a landscape. Turning those areas into rain gardens would mean planting small trees, grasses, and flower plants that sustain the best in a large amount of water. The more water these plants soak up for their use, the less puddling you will find in your landscape.

Add Mulch

Another smart way of preparing for flooding is incorporating mulch. Made of organic material like wood chips, grass clippings, sawdust, etc. mulch effectively absorbs water, serving as a wonderful solution to flooding in your landscape. There is no restriction as to where you can add mulch. Be it in your flowerbeds, in your rain garden, or in between the plants which border the base of your house, the mulch will absorb the excess water, keep the plant roots cool and prevent the runoff of the fertile topsoil during times of heavy rain.

Create Swales

It is almost impossible to not discuss an effective drainage system when the subject of concern is preparing for flooding. So our third tip on the list is creating swales. Swales start with a raised structure called a berm that slopes down along the contour of your landscape. As the water runs down into the swale, it gets redirected into other regions and absorbed into the soil instead of pooling in one place. Planting grasses and other plants along the path to the swale enhances its efficiency by reducing the water’s ability to create gullies with its force or erode the soil.

Construct French Drains

You can also create a french drain to divert water from waterlogging areas to relatively dry ones, either all by yourself or with the help of a landscaping professional. French drains are simply underground creeks in which pipes are laid to redirect water. You can cover the trench with stones, gravel, or grass to preserve the aesthetics of your landscape.

Conclusion

Hope these tips are enough to help prepare your landscape for flooding. There are a plethora of other techniques you can try too. But the key to managing your landscape during flooding remains to identify the areas from where water enters and pools in your yard. A proper drainage system, strategic plantation, and incorporation of mulch can make monsoons more about enjoying the rains rather than worrying about the flooding of landscapes.