Curing My "Bed-Wetting" Garden
If you've got a vegetable plot with soggy soil, why not try this grower's drainage methods?
May/June 1985
By Alden Stahr
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With a hillside-clearing ditch, between-bed gutters and underground drainage pipes, my garden has finally stopped wetting its beds — for good!
MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF
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It was planting time, and my new garden was a soggy mess! During the previous (dry) fall, I'd dug up and de-stoned the entire 2,660-square-foot plot with a spading fork and then tilled in four trailerloads of manure. The soil should have been ripe and ready for growing, and I was looking forward to getting an early start on my vegetable raising.
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But then I came face to face with spring — and springs! April's skies rained and rained and rained-so hard that little wetweather springs appeared here and there in my garden! When the deluge finally tapered off, I planted some peas and potatoes, but they prospered only in patches. And my bean seeds actually rotted in the ground (I had to start my second batch in trays).
Everything I raised-bush beans, corn, broccoli-grew in rows that were marked by stunted growth wherever they crossed wet areas. In fact, although sunnier weather finally dried much of my garden's surface, several trails of weak, yellowed plants still ran diagonally across the plot, marking the courses of underground streams.
I had to take action, so that fall I decided to [1] install drainpipes and [2] make raised beds. Working a couple of hours a day for about a week, I dug two trenches 18 inches deep by 45 feet long — one down each side of my garden. Then I laid 6-inch-diameter perforated drainage pipe in these troughs and covered them with hay, sand and gravel (to prevent clogging by the clay subsoil I used to finish filling the ditches). I extended these trenches beyond the fence at the bottom of my garden to dispose of the downgrade runoff and then dug an additional 8-inch-deep trench above the plot to divert surface runoff:
To shed any moisture my trenchwork didn't reroute, I decided to rebuild the garden into a series of long cross-slope beds with paths-or, more accurately, gutters-between them. I borrowed a heavy-duty, rear-tined tiller that had a furrow attachment with wing extensions capable of creating a trench 24 inches wide. I ran the tiller at low speed down my soon-to-be gutters and watched the newly tilled soil curl to both sides like waves before the prow of a ship. I raked these loose windrows of soil atop each bed, made another pass down the gutter with the winged tiller, raked a second time, and — just like that — I had eight long, 4-foot-wide beds with intervening ditches to carry surface water off, to the garden's sides. To put this re-formed plot to bed for winter, I spread manure on the rows and planted a rye cover crop.
