Dan Jackson: That sinking feeling

MY lawn is so wet, it's ridiculous.

I live on top of a hill with a gully behind and a sloping section.

You'd expect the water to run off, but no. No, no, no.

I was amazed to find, about three months after I'd purchased the place and winter had set in, that the underlying soil type at my house is a certain kind of clay that holds water.

Actually, it more than holds water - it "bonds to water at a molecular level". That's right, you could dig a metre-deep drain right beside my lawn and it wouldn't do a dang thing. It'd still be a swamp.

It gets so bad that you can't even attempt to park a non-four-wheel-drive on the grass. Any vehicle left in one spot out there too long actually begins to sink.

One particularly wet winter rolled round to spring a few years back, and I was stunned to hear frogs croaking away on my lawn.

Also, one year we had a small family of ducks move in to the puddle on the lawn - probably eating the tadpoles. It's just not practical to have four kids, a cat and dog on a property where you can't walk on the lawn for five months of the year - so I had to do something about it.

I put Novaflo piping all around the back lawn in an effort to get rid of the water, but all that did was make thin strips of dry ground above the pipes.

I bought trailer load after trailer load of pea metal and dumped it in all the hollows around the place before putting top soil over it and sowing grass seed. Those spots are now crunchy to walk on - and still wet.

The best thing I did, in the end, was get a three-tonne digger in and scrape off huge sections of top soil before back-filling with sand and then replacing the top soil. That actually worked. The problem was I couldn't do all of it at the same time and some patches of lawn got fixed and some didn't.

Now we have this particularly strange situation where someone can be tromping across the lawn and go from wet grass to dry grass to wet again in three paces.

I've gotten so grumpy with the lawn up here that I have plans for huge amounts of concrete - think patios, footpaths and driveways. It'll be a concrete jungle with bits of decorative grass if I have my way ... Take that, soggy lawn!

However, as with all grand designs, that'll cost megabucks.

So, for now, the swing set and push bikes sit forlorn on the soggy lawn while the kids clamber around on the not-quite-large-enough deck ... and the sound of frogs and ducks fills the air.

■Dan Jackson is a Whanganui journalist and part-time scrap metal dealer