Decompacting soil and Solving Drainage issues

As the title suggests, we’ve been incredibly busy recently on work slightly outside of our normal remit and not only decompacting soil around trees but we’ve been doing the same to the gardens of new build properties and solving drainage issues.

We’ve written about our terravent’s before.

If you’ve read any of ramblings or even ventured through the website, you’ll know what our terravents are and what they had originally been developed to do, so I won’t repeat it here. But we’ve been out and doing a job they were partially developed to do and have so far decompacted the soil in new build back gardens in at least five different counties this year.

This has helped solve the waterlogging issue in these heavily compacted clay soils and helped to restore the infiltration rate of water through the soil profile. Quite a few of these gardens while having standing water in places, have had dry, in comparison to the upper four inches of the soil profile, clay just beneath a heavily compacted pan of soil that’s been preventing the natural movement of both water and air.

On some of these sites the effect has been incredibly dramatic and rapid.

We’ve seen standing water, two to three inches deep in places, disappear within minutes and we’ve also seen water blown clean out of the previous probe holes and in one case, between the gaps of patio slabs.

Solving Drainage issues can also call on other methods.

So to help speed the process up we’ve started using soil flocculants to speed up the aeration process post fracturing and have so far found these a great addition to the process. These are organic treatments and over time will break down into beneficial nutrients within the soil helping feed the grass and plants without the need for soil biology wrecking chemical fertilisers or even worse, the dreaded Weed and Feed.