Hi, Thank you for all your posts. It is so helpful and I am grateful you have taken the time from your day. I will try address some of the questions. I will have to do the water drainage test as suggested by SC77. My intuition is that it drains okay. The soil has a heavy clay component but is brown and rich. I do not feel it is hydrophobic as the ground stays wet for a long time. However, I am more than happy to be wrong. The grass is not happy at all and is filled with moss and weeds. For the pictures, it was really pouring at that time and I thought it gave a good illustration of my concerns. Water is flowing across my yard from left to right and exiting into my neighbor's yard at the far right. The downspout you see in the picture would be very difficult to reroute. I have two others at the left side of the picture that you cannot see that would be better candidates. The front of my home has the yard sloping gently towards the road. I could bury a pipe and redirect the two downspouts that are currently contributing to the pool on the far left of the picture towards the road. The is no storm drain per se, just the gutter of the road which lesds towards a drain farther down off my property. In the meantime, I might get a 10' pipe and extend the downspout you do see further from the house. I would hope it might allow that 10' to be drier closer to the house. So, my Spring project is a DIY grading mostly to fill in local impressions & reroute some of the downspouts. I will also test my soil to see the absorption rate and treat with surfactants if needed. Then, when we replace our current patio in a few years, we will readjust with the help of a professional. I would go the professional route faster but we are first time homeowners with quite a laundry list of improvements and limited means. Have I missed anything?

Why bother? You'll just be doing it again next year. It crushes, it takes in silt, it goes up and down and all around putting silt and clay into solution where it pitches fast and depositing it in the rippled pipe when it slows down (and right now it hasreally slowed down). But, it is fast to install, especially with a little duct tape. Just start over using perforated pvc with a uniform pitch in a peastone filled trench. It will pick up water where it is saturated and pour it out where it is not. It will move the water at a uniform speed through the pipe reducing the loklihood of depositing silt or clay. Get schedule 40 and you can drive over those trenches if you need to.

Aargh! So here's the latest: The waterproofing/drainage guys visited today. They said it was possible that the pipe is perforated and is somehow channeling underground water to one spot at the lowest point in our yard. They said it's also possible that the water is actually coming from the property next door with the massive new build (which is on the opposite side of the property from where the water is collecting, at a much higher grade). Either way, all they can do is excavate the pipe and see what happens next. They suggested it would be wiser and cheaper to have a handyman or landscaping firm do that. I put in a call to our lawn guys in hopes that they can do that. But what worries me is that the waterproofing guys said that if eliminating the pipe doesn't resolve the water pooling, any other solution is going to massively complicated and expensive (like, tens of thousands of dollars.) Our house is bounded on either side by other homes and by other homes behind us on a cul-de-sac, and there is only about an 8 foot side yard to direct any water out to the front of the street - and that slopes in the wrong direction. I feel a little sick about the whole thing. Yaardvarck, you asked about the house directly behind our fence. Without specific measurements, my sense is that our muddy spot is in fact the lowest point between our yards. The previous owners installed a row of pine trees on their side of the fence to shield the views (which we appreciated since they had painted the house neon yellow.) Do you see any other options for dealing with this? Spending thousands to dig up a pipe we didn't even know existed and doesn't appear to have a purpose seems painful, especially if that is not even likely to solve the water problem.

Whatever you do, don't put rocks in them :) They will just take up space and reduce the space available for materials that will break down and produce nutrients. I know it is hard when you have limited money with which to fill raised beds, and I always have the same concerns about the "wood" compost, but I am filling some new beds myself and have a sort of method that is working out for me. It is based on the newer method of raised beds called "hugelkultur." I have a couple new 4x8 beds that are 12" deep. The "soil" they sit upon is really "fill"--gravel and sandy sterile dirt put there when the house was built I guess. So it is hard and not useful for gardening, but will drain fairly quickly. I built a bed, then I dig down into the rocky "fill" inside the box another 12" below grade (this bed will be for veggies with large root systems eventually). Then I filled that space with pruning wood from an old apple tree I have, stomp it down and fill it again and stomp it down, so there is an almost 12" deep layer of wood. building the bed and part of the pruned wood I will fill it with This is the second mass of wood before being stomped down Ready for the next layers After that I covered the wood with a layer of grass clippings I don't have photos for the other layers, but then I added a layer of horse manure and alder sawdust. The horse manure is from a neighbor (look on craigslist under "free" or "farm and garden") and is not completely "finished" composting and neither is the sawdust, but it doesn't have any manure or ammonia smell anymore. I added some compost from my own pile, but that isn't completely composted either. The top layer is only a few inches of whatever *good* soil I can scrape together--usually a mix of peat, old container mix, vermiculite, etc. Then I add amendments (= fertilizers) that I buy in bulk by the pound by the local eco-groovy farm and garden store: a nitrogen (N) source like fishmeal, bloodmeal, cottonseed meal, bat guano, or alfalfa dust; a phosphorus (P) source like bonemeal or soft rock phosphate; a potassium (K) source like greensand, and other rock dusts, kelp meal or whatever for micronutrients and minerals. The best "top layer" if you had nothing to work with would probably be a mix of purchased material , if you had the money, like a good compost mix, peat or coir peat, and something for drainage like perlite or rice hulls or vermiculite. Plus amendments for N, P, K, and micronutrients as mentioned above. A little goes a long way. Extravagances if you had the money might be worm castings, biochar, or some really nice bagged planting mix with compost. Filling a 12-inch deep 4x8 bed takes a full yard of soil, so it is too expensive for me to buy that amount of good growing mix at the moment. The wood acts as a water reservoir as it rots and gradually holds more and more water after the winter rainy system and gradually composts down there. It also probably has air down there that helps. The grass clippings and manure are both high in nitrogen that will help balance out the carbon in the wood to compost down. I honestly didn't think I would grow much in this bed in the same month I filled it, because there was only a few inches of soil before the more unfinished materials below, but I planted fast-growing green veg in the cabbage family that like high nitrogen in it: bok choy, broccoli raab, kale, and mustard greens. These are absolutely thriving--here it is 35 days later and this is after I have been eating a lot of the greens already: Only the 4 plants in the far back corner were planted as starts. The rest were all directly seeded into the bed. I estimate I have eaten at least twice as many greens from this bed already as you see presently, by harvesting/thinning plants and cutting leaves from plants as the babies sown in between the rows start needing sun. I could actually have five productive rows in here and probably eat greens every day or two and they would be replacing that growth almost at the same rate. These plants in the cabbage family can be harvested only about 35 days after planting from seed--super productive and super healthy either raw or in stir-fries or added to pastas, etc. The more bitter ones, like broccoli raab and mustards (Brassica rapa) are very yummy when quickly sauteed with chopped garlic and some olive oil, a little squirt of lemon after, maybe some chopped nuts, and added to pasta or eaten alone like that. Here is what the bed looks like 24 hours of the day apart from when I water it, using just black poly pipe from Lowes or Home Depot for hoops If it's not covered, cabbage family plants here get decimated by the little green worms that come from the white cabbage butterflies. Aaaand, I'm going to do a second bed like this and plant with non-cabbage green veg: lettuce, chard, orach, spinach, cilantro, and basil. It won't have to be covered for the worms, but will be covered the same to protect from deer. This works as a mini-hoophouse and can be made warmer with perforated clear light plastic row cover, or for overwintering greens can be covered with greenhouse film purchased by the foot. My tomatoes this year are going into large black plastic nursery pots, with a bottom layer of rocks for drainage and to fill up extra space that the tomato roots probably won't need. Maybe a layer of mesh over the rocks for easily removing later. Tomatoes take a huge amount of raised bed space and the soil between is pretty much wasted in terms of producing green edible food. That's why I usually do them in pots or grow bags. I'm trying to do whatever is most efficient use of space for producing the most food, and the cheapest right now. Any of the 6" deep beds would be perfect for strawberries--delicious, superfood, produce all summer into fall, probably enough to feed you a meal every day. I am expanding my strawberries yet again this year. Lots of production, just like the brassica greens and non-brassica greens, and the tomatoes once they are producing.