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“gravel gardening.” The reader comments seemed to say it’s not as maintenance free as it sounds.

Yes, I'm getting that impression (in this thread and elsewhere).

I think we need something that we can get our hands in and work on, and I don't think gravel is that thing... I may pay someone to do poison ivy care, and then if we can do hostas and some phlox (if there's a shade-loving variety), plus re-do the ugly cinder blocks, that might be enough to get over the uber-ugly look we have going on now!

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Anyway... also not in the photo -- well, actually, see the pink azaleas on the far right of photo #2? They are growing on a ridge (hill? slope?) which is not part of our property. Water runs down that slope and in heavy rains, the box drain over flows and the water pools all around the front of our porch and goes toward the window wells and then bad things happen.

Those ugly cinder blocks send the water away from the house and out into the yard and other places where it can continue to go down hill and away from our house.

There are actually three "walls" in the flower bed: one that is red with rounded tops, one that is on the far side of the dogwood, and then the actual cinder blocks.

If we could get them to be more decorative, and then surround them with greenery... hostas? I think it would be nice.

Have you considered regrading or creating a swale closer to the property line so you can redirect the water before it gets to the area that's next to your house?

I'm not very familiar with box drains but people around here bury their downspout extensions and put pop-up drains downstream to move water away from the house (and to keep downspouts off of sidewalks so you don't have to step over them).

What water is going into the box drain at your house? What are the objections of water solutions and Roto-Rooter people? I may be missing something, but if you have water going in there from somewhere and it's not able to drain out and is overflowing, then that needs to be addressed. And I still am unconvinced that the blocks and stones sitting on top of the dirt are doing anything to redirect the water, but I'm just looking at picture so I may well be missing something.



I had the same idea that Mik did about putting dirt in the cinder blocks and then planting something in them and letting it cascade. But they still look like cinder blocks in the winter when everything dies back. At least I'm assuming that this stuff will die back...maybe in your climate it doesn't?

Rather than the mix of cinder blocks, rocks, bricks, and concrete edging, I would just pick one and stick with it. I think it would look more pulled together.

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Originally posted by wtg:
Have you considered regrading or creating a swale closer to the property line so you can redirect the water before it gets to the area that's next to your house?

A swale is like a ... gutter sort of, right? Or a gully? But grass-lined maybe? If I'm thinking right, that's what we have along the road in the front.

The other thing not shown in my photos is where the driveway is. But there's a driveway and eventually we'd like to get it re-done and also put a garage back in there where you can see the sidewalk going back. So I don't want to spend any money on that side (where the ridge goes up) until I have a better idea of what we can do when.

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I'm not very familiar with box drains but people around here bury their downspout extensions and put pop-up drains downstream to move water away from the house (and to keep downspouts off of sidewalks so you don't have to step over them). What water is going into the box drain at your house? What are the objections of water solutions and Roto-Rooter people?

The problem with buried drains is that you make a mess getting them buried and then you have to un-bury them if there are maintenance needs. We were all set to pay to have the drain line snakes out, but based on the explanation, which I'm not able to re-create now, since it was 2 years ago, I decided that it wasn't a good use of the money.

And in terms of getting new in-ground drains, there's a sidewalk in the way, and probably more tree roots than I want to think about. We had a huge tree removed from the front yard, and the stump ground, but there are sure to be huge roots all over the place.

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I had the same idea that Mik did about putting dirt in the cinder blocks and then planting something in them and letting it cascade. But they still look like cinder blocks in the winter when everything dies back. At least I'm assuming that this stuff will die back...maybe in your climate it doesn't?

Some things are green all year long, others are not. We'd have to choose carefully.

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Rather than the mix of cinder blocks, rocks, bricks, and concrete edging, I would just pick one and stick with it. I think it would look more pulled together.

Yeah, we know it looks terrible, don't judge us!! Mr. SK literally pulled stuff together from things in the back yard and basement, I think he only bought maybe two blocks, the rest was already lying around somewhere.

ETA: we didn't intend for the blocks to stay there for so long, but then covid happened and we didn't go to HD or Lowes for over a year I think, or closer to two years...
/defensive

No, no...no judgment...I get using materials you have on hand; I do it all the time. I just thought it was part of what makes it look messy, which seems to be the problem you're trying to address!

I added something to my earlier post about the existing non-functioning box drain. It's part of your water problem if there's water going in but not going out where it should, instead overflowing in the area.

Just sayin'.....

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No, no...no judgment...

So, the box drain is sort of functioning... When the is hard rain or rain over a long time, there's an outlet by the street and water does come out, but the area around the box drain also pools water etc.

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And I still am unconvinced that the blocks and stones sitting on top of the dirt are doing anything to redirect the water, but I'm just looking at picture so I may well be missing something.

There's enough of a slope that as long as we get the water away from the area where the porch is, it goes out across the side walk and then finds a ... maybe it's a kind of a swale actually, in the front yard... it's hard to tell, but if you look at the last photo, the left side/outside of the sidewalk where the monkey grass is, there's a dip and it guides water along the side walk. Where the side walk starts to curve toward the house, there's what looks like a patch of dirt -- that's actually a raised up ridge, the water hits that spot and it goes along the front there towards the street that you can see in the back of the last photo, which is actually down a hill.

Anyway, those ugly cinder blocks send the water out to that dip and it works really well. You can see it clear as day when it's raining.

So yes, a swale is a depression/little valley that catches the water and directs it to where you want it. They are often part of the grading done in a subdivision when it's originally planned out, but over time they get filled in either by natural forces or by people regrading areas because they don't know why there's a valley at the edge of their lot.

My neighbor across the street had a problem with the ground being too high and flat between her house and her neighbor. The water would pool, and because the top of her foundation was lower than the neighbor's house, the water would go over the top of the foundation wall and run down the inside into the basement. She had a guy with a Bobcat create a swale which she threw some grass seed on. Problem solved. At least for 20 or 30 more years....over time the water draining down into the soil will flatten it and probably fill it in. That's just maintenance that sometimes needs to be done.

Maybe the box drain at your house is old and made of sections of clay pipe. Tree roots can grow in between the pipe sections and clog the drain, as they can with the sewer line that comes from your house. We've had the sewer line problem here. We had a backup because of tree roots and had to have a section of the sewer line replaced. But now they use solid PVC where the sections are glued together, so roots and dirt can't get in, and the PVC won't collapse like clay pipe can. There really shouldn't be any maintenance to speak of.

We are just getting ready to bury the downspouts that we've been stepping over for the last 40 years. We have to have the brick walkway around the side of the garage taken up because we're putting in a new driveway and have a low spot where the driveway meets the walk. As long as we're doing that, we're just going to have them bury the downpouts and have them drain out into the yard....it'll mean digging a trench into the yard, but I'll have them use straight edge shovels and I'll save the turf to put back after they are done. No big....

Re the swale, hmm... I wonder if there was one along the ridge (in the far right in the photos) and it's just gotten flattened. That's worth revisiting for sure.

Hmm, back to the box drain... I haven't spoken to any contractors about it in at least a year... Reading your comments, I am pretty sure no one suggested pvc to me. I would have remembered because that's what the drain out for sump pump is. Maybe we should revisit the box drain issue.

Also, we have more financial resources now, and I maybe wrote something off originally because of the expense that maybe now we can reconsider.

On the other hand, if it's working now and we can pretty it up for less money... we do want to build a garage soon ... :grin:

BTW as I recall... the company who did our crawl space doesn't do outdoor stuff, I did talk to them about the box drain but they said they don't do that kind of work. (Which I thought then and still think now is annoying!)

Hmm....

Where's the water in the box drain coming from?

The ridge, I guess?? That ridge lines our property all along that side. On the other side of the box drain, it looks like grass but that's actually ... clover-y things on top of broken up asphalt, that's the back end of the driveway.

I think that's why it's bad there because water runs down the ridge and then across asphalt, so it can't soak in. And then it gets to our flower bed.

In pics 3 and 4, there's a curb that looks like it comes forward from the back of the house at an angle. I always thought if only there was a ditch (gutter?) along the outside of that curb...

But the problem is that from that point up, follow the direction of the curb to the road, well that's the problem, it's up -- uphill. So the natural flow of water is down the ridge and along the front, in front of the porch. So the ugly cinder blocks redirects the water and then it goes out into the yard.

Your topography is more complicated than what's typical here. We're sort of flat as a pancake. But even pancakes can be cockeyed...

The neighbor I mentioned previously was having all kinds of problems with water in the basement after she had a garage built with a breezeway to attach the garage to the house (she is on a corner lot). She tried all kinds of short term solutions (every contractor had an idea that she implemented) but she still had water problems.

She only got relief after I suggested she hire a surveyor to check the elevations around her property. Turns out her whole house was just in a really low area relative to everything around it. It's about 14" below street grade, something you would not really notice until you looked carefully. And she had the problem between the houses. And another side was 10" low.

Her old garage and driveway were at the far end of the lot and when she built the new attached garage and moved it close to the house (with a big hulking driveway) she totally messed up the water flow on the lot. And the guy who did the construction ignored the architect's instructions to put in french drains. Total cluster.

The surveyor marked out where the swales should go. Then she hired a guy with a Bobcat to dig out the swales, and a landscaper to re-seed the areas that were dug up. And we helped her plant some water-hungry trees in the low areas to help with the water; she has a couple of nice river birches west of the garage and we put some dogwoods in another area. Problems solved, but only after a lot of aggravation.

Be sure to take everything into consideration when you go to put in that garage, even if it's at the far end of the property.

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Your topography is more complicated than what's typical here.

Yes, I think it is. (You may remember I grew up in IL). In the older neighborhoods, like ours, the houses are far apart, there aren't sidewalks, the land is sort of rolling...

Our house is on 3/4 of an acre, we're a corner lot. On the west and south sides of our lot is an L-shaped strip of land that's not big enough to make into a separate house, but it's a wooded barrier between our neighbors on those sides. And on that west side is the ridge. If we walk out to the street and then head west, we're walking uphill... Or if we turn around and go east, we're walking downhill (obviously...)

Our house has a walkout basement, that's on the east side of course. And the backyard has two distinct levels. I actually want to build stairs out of stones or something because there's an awkward steep slant to walk across the backyard from west to east.

It's lovely back there, we really love it. But yeah, lots of ups and downs and it took us a while to learn about how water moves around here.

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Be sure to take everything into consideration when you go to put in that garage

I already had that on my radar but your friend's story certainly underscores it!! Wow!

In our case, when you turn into the driveway from the road, it really does go downhill, so to get water, for example, to flow away from that box drain is a literal uphill battle.

What works better, I think, is to have water flow around it and to direct that flow so it goes out into the yard... Anyway, now I'm probably starting to repeat myself :P

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I actually want to build stairs out of stones or something because there's an awkward steep slant to walk across the backyard from west to east.

This is not explained right, but it's also not relevant to our current task, which is to make the front of our house, that flower bed, not look so awful.

Short story: Mulch, not pebbles. Pebbles get kicked all over the place. You can put more mulch on top of mulch when you need it.

I also love hostas! And vinca (periwinkle).

[Thanks Adagio!

I do love periwinkle, but doesn't it take over?

Vinca is considered an invasive plant (at this point, still "plant", not "weed") around here. It's discouraged, but not prohibited. It is very hardy, though.

Around here, since we are so hilly AND wet, people add swales to their yards. Usually, they dig a bit of a trench, then fill it in with medium-size (golf-ball to tennis ball) river rock.

You might think about putting in a swale all along the bottom of the ridge to steer the water away from the house. If you can hire someone with a Bobcat, a shallow trench can be done in an afternoon.

Wow. 3/4 acre. That's a pretty big lot.


I guess it makes sense to pull out the monkey grass. If you just let the lawn grass move back in along the sidewalk, it will be much easier to see the poison ivy. Did Mr SK apply the Roundup (or another chemical) with a paintbrush? That's the best way to get it on what you want it on and not what you don't.