If you have a lower place to direct the water or a storm drain, you can install a drain grating and run the water underground. It could be DIY or contracted for leass than you may think. Pictures would help.

Drainage problems are a very common problem on new and existing landscapes alike. The problem in getting you an answer is most people have a hard time picturing what your problem may look like and harder to tell you how to correct it. Post some pictures and you can get some help.

Here is a link that might be useful: lawn care tips

Hi,
You might try hand digging a terrace with a hand shovel. What I mean by terrace is a slight swell or shallow trench to direct the water away. You would be surprised how much you can dig in an hour's time by hand. I had to hand shovel out dirt to divert water from washing into my yard. To dig into very hard dirt I first had to dig into it using a transplanting fork. Then once I had enough loose I would use my shovel to move the dirt. If I needed to break up the clumps of dirt in order to spread it out smooth I used my 22 pound Mantis tiller. If a 62 yr old 115 pound person can create terraces and trenches to divert water than just about anyone can. :-)

(See thread: "Understanding Water")

Perhaps this dilemma is exemplary of a common misconception that landscape design requires that you must always do something more. Oftentimes, the exact opposite is true: You need to remove something  in fact, several things.

Commanding first attention would be the "the natural (???) flow of sprinkler water". YIKES!!! If you canÂt better control the wasteful amount of water being applied, improvement in other areas seems unlikely.

Placement of this island is problematic. It is like parking your car in the middle of a busy intersection and then complaining about it getting hit. Perhaps you should review some of the past threads on rain gardens. Instead of going up with your bed, you should probably think about going down; if not eliminating it all together.

Simply: Water is a primary landscape design issue that must be seriously addressed. Stop-gap remediation never produces satisfactory results. If this problem is beyond your comfort zone, at least consider consulting a professional. Resolution of water issues is very site-specific.

IronBelly

In view of other discussions - take a quick look intio rain gardens, as suggested. Here's a pretty good basic overview: www.mninter.net/~stack/rain

Sometimes a successful model is all that's needed. Rain gardens are quite popular in the Twin Cities, and catching on up here after the university did major installations around much of their hardscaping - particularly to catch and clean up the runoff from the parking lots. Not only functional, they're quite attractive.

Don't put gravel at trhe end of the island - that will only get stones in your grass.

Using the water for a rain garden is a good idea. You could also research bog gardens - basically the same thing.

If you like your island as is, consider putting a small dry river bed down the middle of the iland. this is basically a narrow ditch to allow water to run through the bed and out the other side. If this is narrow your plants would hide it. Or make it wider and more distict and give some character to the bed. Extend the ends of the dru river bed out both ends of the bed to make it more realistic looking.

At the risk of sounding like John Madden again,....

Water runs downhill. If you make a place that is more downhill than the water and there is no uphill between that water and your place downhill, the water will go there. If there is an uphill between that place and the next place downhill, the water will stay there until it piles up high enough to be higher than that uphill. Then that higher water will go downhill untill it is blocked by another uphill.

Adding stone does not improve drainage. It adds bigger voids to the volume of soil that it displaces (if it is displacing soil). That provides opportunity to hold water which gives it more time to be absorbed into the soil. If it is added on top of the soil, it displaces volume of water that could otherwise occupy that space which often makes a small puddle turn into a big puddle.

I'm having a hard time visualizing what contours you're talking about (not because of anything lacking in your description - i'm just not a good visualizer). But i'm wondering how far away this drainage issue is from the gutter system of your home. If it's close enough, maybe you can link the two?

I had a drainage issue that i thought was hopeless, but i ended up resolving it with a drain and a length of pipe, the latter of which was buried and cut into the house gutter. Now, an area that used to "flood" is draining right out of the house gutters. Knock wood, it seems to be working really well.

Would this approach be an option for you?

Hi, folks. Apologize for taking so long to post the pics of my drainage problem, but would appreciate further feedback, now that I have uploaded my photos. Really would prefer to forego the idea of a rain garden. Feel that it would really ruin the appearance of my lawn layout as it is now. Been thinking about my issue further and wondering if circling my mulch island with retaining bricks to make it like a raised bed would help out at all. It might keep the water run-off out, but the water would still flow across and down my lawn, I suppose. Been also contemplating if I might somehow create a dry creek for the section of lawn that has much of the water run-off, but I think it would just look horrendous stretching across my front lawn. I feel like I'm screwed with this issue, unless I spend big bucks to regrade and reseed the lawn; money which I certainly don't have.

This first pic is looking at the water flowing into the back side of the island:

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This next pic is looking at the water flowing over the front side of the island. Note that the neighbor's yard slopes down towards mine, and the water run-off begins in the area just right of the front corner of my house, straight down into the island:

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This next pic is looking at the water run-off across the lawn. The front of the island is seen in the background. So, the water exits the front edge of the island and then comes down a few more feet and then flows all across the bottom of the lawn before crossing over the sidewalk and into the grassy strip along the curb, which is badly washed out and contains just weedy growth and rocks.

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This last pic shows a similar problem at a smaller mulch island around my lamp post at the front corner of the driveway. No problem with noticeable water run-off in this lawn area per se, but water does collect in the edge of the island just due to the slope of the lawn here.

{{gwi:52746}}

This is probably a really stupid question but... Why do you have a problem with the concept of a rain garden? Do you intend to plant these islands with something in addition to the lonely evergreens and the sea of mulch? Or is it some local preference that a sea of dead plant material (which is all that wood mulch is really...) is preferable to living plants? My apologies if I sound cranky..., it's been a long winter and my lawn is still largely under snow... :-) I have heavy clay soil here and the neighbour's property drains on to mine. Given our repeated summer droughts lately, I'm happy to take all the water I can get to build soil moisture reserves! Given a choice, I'd rather garden on my clay soil that on nearby sandy soil that drains well but is nutrient-poor and terrible in drought. Plant things in those island that would be happy to slurp up a lot of that moisture! That's a gardener's answer though....

Thanks for the response. I am looking at the area in question here, from all angles, front back and side. I just don't see where a raingarden in back or in front of the island is going to look good to my eye. I definitely don't want to see a snaking raingarden stretching across the front of my lawn near the sidewalk. I've looked at a number of photos online and agree that a raingarden can look very nice in certain settings. I just don't envision liking it in my front lawn area.

As far as the mulch island itself, I only finished it last fall and quickly got in what I could. Transplanted 3 dwarf alberta spruce, I have 3 small birch clumps around the boulder, and 4 low growing evergreen shrubs. I have plans to put a lot more plants in the island. Just didn't have time to get them all in last fall. Same for the mulch island by the lamp post. A gardener friend drew up some sketches for me and gave me ideas of what to plant.

Oh, one other clarification, from a respondent last fall, the sprinkler system is my neighbor's whose property is a few feet elevated from mine. I don't have an irrigation system, although I ws planning to get one installed as soon as I can afford it. I will obviously look to figure out what to do with the water run-off issue first before exacerbating the situation with an irrigation system of my own.

I live in the Merrimack Valley region of MA, close to Nashua, NH. I have been told that my soil is very clayish, which I know contributes to poor absorption. Also, the subdivision builder seeded my lawn space VERY late on November 1st, 2005, so the grass never had a chance to grow in and help protect soil washout from the winter snow and spring melt. The grassless lawn area just got wiped out that spring, and some of the topsoil went with it. I got the builder to reseed the entire lawn area in May 2006, but the groundwork for the pending problem was already in place. Not an ideally graded lot, not a whole lot of topsoil, very rocky in large sections. UGH!

If you are planning on throwing money away, mind throwing some in my direction? I'll even split it with you, you can keep half the money for the irrigation system, and I'll take the other half.

Seriously, you should not even begin to need an irrigation system to grow grass. The problem is the soil compaction, so the rain doesn't seep in, and stay as a ground reservoir for the grass to draw on when needed. That is also what a rain garden is - an area where the water can seep into the soil. Lawn and rain gardens are not mutually exclusive. You can have a rain garden where the plants are turf grass. There aren't a lot of pictures of those because they look an awful lot like, um, lawn. To break up the compaction you can either get out there with a digging fork or something like that and dig it up, or throw some white clover seed around. I personally go for the clover. The roots can break up the clay so the water can go in.

I have a lawn tractor and a spike aerator attachment. I have used the spike aerator only once in 2006. I thought it did a rather lousy job and wasn't worth the 100 bucks I dropped on it when I bought the lawn tractor. Maybe it's due to my rocky, cement-like soil. I should try it again and add as much weight to it as I can to get some spike penetration; at least in this area of lawn where the water run-off is......

I hate to beat a dead horse, but please check out this link to university of maine cooperative extension. I you scroll to the end of the file, there are two planting ideas for rain gardens, that are shaped like the 'mulch bed'. One is for shade, and I think your area is very sunny, so I would choose that one, accommodating for the fact that this one was planned with the wet area in the center.

The problems you are having are very typical of new construction areas. You will probably continue to have similar problems because of the soil compaction, lack of topsoil etc. Good luck with the mulch bed.

Here is a link that might be useful: university of maine