Rainy season drainage: fixing a yard that floods every afternoon storm
Standing water 24 hours after rain isn't a lawn problem. It's a grade problem, and it's fixable.
From June through September, Tampa Bay gets more water in an hour than most of the country gets in a week. A yard that can't move it shows you immediately.
The first thing we check is grade. Soil should fall away from the foundation at roughly six inches over the first ten feet. Settled beds and years of added mulch quietly reverse that.
Second is compaction. Construction traffic and clay lenses under sandy topsoil create a pan that water sits on instead of soaking through.
Third is discharge. Every drainage fix has to end somewhere legal and lower — a swale, a street, a dry well. Water you collect and don't move is just a smaller puddle in a nicer pipe.
The usual toolkit: regrading, French drains wrapped in fabric, catch basins at low points, downspout extensions to pop-up emitters, and a dry well where there's nowhere to daylight.
Fix drainage before you spend money on sod, beds or hardscape. Every one of those installs fails faster sitting in water.
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