close to death, except for 2 weeks in the Spring. He was constantly coming
over and asking me what secret stuff I was using. He refused to believe that
the answer was "nothing". This went on for 10 years. The dummy never

When we bought the house we're in now, it had serious drainage problems
in the back yard. Any heavy rain would result in a sheet of water
sweeping across the yard and down toward the house (yes, it's Florida,
but it has some slope nonetheless), with often a large pool between our
house and the next door neighbor. Oh, and sometimes it hit the crawl
space access door and ran under the house.

Doesn't happen any more.

Oh, at first we built a bit of a berm to divert the flow away from the
house. And we had gutters put on the house and piped the water to the
ditch, which helped some with the pools.

But mostly what I did was the same as you: nothing. Didn't hire a yard
man to come in with his boom-boom tractor mower every week and scalp
the yard to within an inch of its life (like the previous owner and
probably the one before her). Didn't go woosh woosh with a leaf blower
and take away the dead leaves and cut grass and other organic material.
Let the weeds grow where the ground had been made bare by mowing where
no grass grew anyway. And lo and behold, after a year or so, the rain
no longer ran off. Am I not a genius? That or lazy.

Oh, I want to get rid of the grass. I'm trying to kill it. I have too
much shade for a good lawn. I'd rather have flower beds and bushes and
use some liriope where I need ground cover. But the principle is the
same.

Edward