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French Drains Can Be So Useful
To help manage the water that drains onto your property and to utilize it so that you can sustain your gardens during dry or full drought periods, the things available to you to try are endless. And doing some self-experimentation is just so much fun. Kind of like doing your own lil’ Roman Aqueduct.
Because we are having one water crisis after another and water is now missing from our aquifers, reservoirs, lakes, and streams, we are going to need to self-supply for at least our gardening needs, at some point, if at all possible.
French Drains are so fun to make and they can be shallow or deep, and lead to a cistern, basin or pond for water retention. In the photos on this page (the one with pea gravel) we dug it to about 10” deep and 6” wide. This was to handle rainwater that comes rushing to my property, as I am at the bottom of a hill and the road directs it all onto my property. It was causing ponding, compaction of my gardens and cropping areas, and erosion in other sections. The bottom of this drain was filled with rough volcanic stone because it is so porous and will not compact, and then on the top of that is the pea gravel. All of this keeps everything from being washed out of the drain.
The other French Drains I do and have done is to create these ‘V-shaped small trenches around the edges of your flower beds and veg gardens. This also helps withhold some of the water here for deeper watering if you plug one end of the ‘V’. There are all sorts of ways to manage this and it really is a lot of fun to experiment with this and improve your property, gardens, and water retention or drainage as needed.
I use this ‘V-shaped digit at the edge of some of my flower beds and the veggie gardens, as it ends up having to edge the gardens weekly, redirects runoff to improve moisture to my gardens and keep the areas clean and neat. You only have to spruce it up in the spring.