There is some erosion. It isn't really wet, but the water when it does flow, flows under the fence and into my neighbors yard. We can work with them to fix that. The previous owners of that house had a dog so that's why the fence went to the ground. Now my neighbors want the fence to keep in little kids, as there is a creek and busy road on either side of the house.

So I'm kind of thinking, given that our soil is sandy fill, that if I just plant things that can stand being occasionally wet, and figure out how to "flume" plume, whatever, the water, then I won't need to amend or dig a rain garden? The problem is, i don't really have space to properly flume it, that's going to make it spread out just about at fence line. I mean right now the neighbors aren't complaining, even though our runoff has clearly caused their fence to rot. However, we might not always be that lucky.

I am going to keep the rocks by the house. No need to go through the trouble of moving and I don't want plants up against the house anyway. The only reason I was considering putting more gravel there is because I have it from other places to get rid of. Initially I had envisioned the rocks maybe 3 ft. along the house and then cedar bark mulch on the other side with pavers embedded. We use that walkway a lot since it is right off the garage and the closest path to the back yard.

Glad you concur YV that we don't need a french drain. There's no ponding but it is pretty much continuously damp, probably due to the heavy shade. That might change a little once the pear is gone although there is a large oak on the other end which I didn't photograph and the neighbors have a large maple on their side and also their house blocks low sun from the west..

Dang, I thought I had found a place for my rocks! However, I know they are less than ideal to plant around . . . to say the least! I have them everywhere, such trouble to remove! I was looking for our septic pump-out lid yesterday and pulled up some landscape cloth which had probably 5-6 inches of rocks above it!

It looks like you have a 2' wide drainage path there already ... a mini swale. A flume is nothing more than a paved swale. It could be solid concrete, like engineers might spec along the highway, or it could be lined with flagstone like someone might do at home. A flume protects the drainage path from erosion, if necessary. An unpaved drainage path needs to be wider so the water can move slower. A flume can be more trough-like (deeper and narrower .. like the gutters on your roof) to move the same amount of water at a faster clip.

That water flows under the fence is a factor of grade. Plants are not going to help this. They might do the opposite on account of slower the water down.

Yes but the mini swale is right where my neighbors fence comes into contact with the ground. Yes the water drains away from the house. Not causing a problem for me but my neighbors.

I have a giant plume/flume at work that I manage - drains a whole service road so I'm familiar with them I'm just trying to sort out the best way to incorporate it into this narrow spot so close to the lot line. On the other side of the house we have all kinds of room and no problems.

We can only see that the swale is to the right of the fence, stopping at the fence. That the fence comes into contact with the ground is fault of the fence. (In spite of there being reasons for it, it's not good design. Some metal extension should be in place at the bottom of the fence.) All I'm saying about a flume is that it can carry more water away, faster, in a tight space. In a heavy rain, though, a small flume would be likely to overflow as surely, water from your neighbor's yard is also flowing into the swale at the property line.

My camera was acting up so I didn't take a lot of photos, but really IMHO this is a true landscaping issue because it involves the whole landscape. My house and my neighbors house were built very close together, with not very good restrictions or planning for runoff all around the house. I'm lucky, but it is no wonder that my neighbors have issues with water in their crawlspace. The swale that is supposed to carry the runoff is on the property line and the fence is kinda in the middle of it. It basically runs along their fence line. Then there was an irrigation line laid there, with "backsplash" from the spray heads hitting the fence. We closed off most of those, since they were part of the moisture along the fenceline problem. The fence gets every imaginable bit of debris piled up against it, carried by gravity and water since it is the low spot. BUT, the back side of my house is also often a mud pit due to all the water draining off the roof there.

You can see from the many pictures, that the THREE major drains/downspouts coming off the house are landscape challenges. The first one emptied into a drain carrying the water under the walkway, and it had totally clogged, in fact the drainpipe was 2/3 packed with silt. Water was running down the side of the garage wall. We unglogged and re-installed the drain, but I can't help but imagine it will clog again eventually, since it basically runs into the swale underground. There's no where for the large amount of water to spread out at the end. But we'll see. We installed a rain barrel but don't have the money to invest in a large storage tank system and still no way we could capture it all. We are OK just managing the muddy weedy swale between our homes for now. Eventually we want to remove the ugly plastic shed and dying spruce and plant a small fenced vegetable garden there, as it would be the only sunny spot on our lot, the south facing front is devoted to the septic mound.

So that takes the landscape along the garage, an important walkway for us carrying tools, etc. to the back yard, to the back of the house where the real landscaping work begins. If we re-route the one roof downspout to that area, it joins another downspout to create the nasty little area in front of our porch. We want that area open so we can view the forested backyard and riverbank. Not sure what to do there after the pear is gone. We use that area for our fire pit and long term would like to tear off the hated red deck and put in a long patio. But that might not happen. I am struggling to figure out what to put there that I won't regret long term. One idea would be to reuse the stones we're removing from all the beds, but if we ever want to change anything up, we might regret it. I'd hate to move all those rocks just to move them again. Ultimately we'd like to expand the planted beds in front of the porch and deck to include the fire pit area. But rock mulch and purple plums have to be ripped out then too.

I welcome anyone's ideas on the landscaping issues involved. We can only afford to do this one bit at a time.

Shot of swale down to the river

If we think about general grading of densely populated residential yards, it would make sense that swales occur along the side property lines, and the homes are slightly raised relative to the swales, thus solving the first problem of drainage: getting the water to run away from the structures. It looks like there is a mini-swale in your yard, IPM, and you're telling us by the third-to-last picture that there is a swale in the neighbors yard. It would make sense for them to be merged as a single swale, but we can't tell if that's the case. Had they been merged, they could have been more subtle in cross slope (nearly imperceptible) than could two parallel, mini-swales, and have been able to carry more water. (I'm illustrating what could be, not what necessarily is. The photos are not great at clarifying 'what is'.) Naturally, it would make sense to run a fence at the property line and it would tolerate the occasional wetness, so long as the pickets aren't set too low. If they are set too low, it is an example of someone trying to solve a problem in a wrong way, that will naturally have negative consequences. Nothing can change this but resetting the wood fence at a proper level and solving whatever problem it creates in some different manner.

As far as dealing with wetness on your side of the line, you'll have to make sure there is no ponding on the path that water uses to escape your side yard on its way to the river. If there is any ponding, it has to be fixed by changing the grade surface to remove any "dams" in the way of water's escape. Once that's accomplished and the remaining problem is that the soil is too wet to walk on, that suggests a hard surface walk, such as concrete, is needed. The surface of such a walk could also be used, as a flume, to aid water in moving out of the area. It is not uncommon to see such walks in yards, with slight "shoulders" to help guide water along its path, set inlaid at the ground surface. It may be what you need here.

I think I am going to wait until the bradford pear tree is out and then make it up as the land shows me. Obviously water flows downhill and slows down and becomes less erosive as it fans out, but the space there between the two houses is very tight and it kind of naturally is going to go into my neighbors yard unless I beef up the swale on my side of the fence but that would make the water do a 90 degree turn to drain along the fence to the river and I don't know if that is legal. I still think there is a possibility of doing a rain garden between the house and the oak tree in the back.

I'm also thinking I might have my husband build a small floating deck for us to sit on around the fire pit, it's just compacted wet clay there anyway, and then I can landscape around it with some plants that can take an occasional blast of water from the downspout at the back which I can relandscape around to fan out more as it gets away from the house. That way if we ever tear off the raised red deck and redo the whole back, the floating deck won't be too difficult to remove.

We've got a sprinkler system with heads in some bad spots there too, but that's a whole other Pandora's box I am dreading opening. One big problem at a time and we have many . . .