swamp

yankinlk

any cures for this? my back garden just fills with water. I live in an estate (2 years old). I tried using a pitchfork to create holes and then filled them with sand, but it made no difference.

shabbyroad

Had the same problem. This is caused by a combination of lots of builders rubbish buried a few feet under ground as wel as generally poor soil drainage.
Putting sand in the soil probably didn't help much.

One way to fix it is to dig a T shaped trench about 1 meter deep and half-meter wide (depending upon the size of your garden of course) - keep the top few inches of turf so you can re-lay it.
Put gravel in there - not fine sandlike gravel but nice pebble sized gravel. Then top with a layer of good topsoil and re-lay the turf you kept from earlier.

We moved into our place about 2.5 years ago and had a lot of additional building work done so the back garden was like the surface of the moon. After the lawn had been laid we had to get the trench and drainage done. Took about a year for the lawn to knit together again but with the endless rain we've had these past two years it hasn't had a chance to drain properly - right pain in the arse.

Hope that helps.