Here's a short story of a related problem which we used to have -- along with what we did to fix it.

Back in the old days, a hard rain (defined as pouring for one hour) would cause considerable backyard problems as evidenced above.

The problem wasn't so much with our yard, but with our elevation relative to two of our neighbors. After that one hour limit, their run-off would creep over the garden in the back and create the tiny pond above.

The shot to the right was taken during an intense down-pour with my digital camera in a sandwich bag. This is on the neighbor's side of the fence showing their water coming over for a visit.

Our first step was to get one of the neighbords to aim his downspouts away from us. Being a darn nice neighbor, he did that for us. The other issue was the grading of the driveway behind us. That one wasn't going to be as quick a fix.

So, what the heck. Let's gut the yard and build our own drainage system.

This is one of those projects you do yourself, only once. Unless you really enjoy shoveling heavy dirt, I highly recommend farming this out to professional pipe layers.

We called in the Diggit Guys to rip a big L shape divot in our lawn. They did a great job of completely messing up my driveway with large piles of dirt. Their portion took only about 30 minutes. My portion lasted months.

The went from the center of the pond all the way out to the front of the property line. The idea was to route the water out away from the house and let it drain peacefully in a bed of crushed rock.

The back yard is mostly hard clay, which is pretty uncooperative stuff when it comes to soaking up rain water.

Next, we had a few large piles of small stones delivered. The mission was to move the rocks, shovel-by-shovel from the driveway, into the waiting wheelbarrow.

After 32 shovelfuls (that's how many a wheelbarrow holds... I'll never forget that) the 300lb load is heaved into the waiting trench.

Here Karen demonstrates egonomically correct heaving form.

Once the six inch bed of tiny stones were in place, 4" PVC pipe was installed on top. The pipe was still about 8" under the surface which would subsquently be buried under another 4" of stone.

A small drain collector was placed at the epi-center of the pond.

The solid 4" PVC pipe was installed so the drain is slighly higher than the point where it takes the 90 degree turn shown here.

From the point out (not shown) a flexible perforated was attached to allow the water to drain as it makes its way to the front of the property.

This perforated pipe was wrapped with a fabric to keep the stones from plugging the holes. The dirt was applied after the entire length was covered with the drainage stones.

The result -- regardless of how hard it rains, the backyard has never again had any standing water. When it does come down like cats and dogs for more than the one hour limit, the water streams down the hole and heads east.

Now the back yard always looks like this.

The only time we have had problems since then is if the downspouts are clogged and it rains super hard. So the rule here --- keep the gutters clean and 100% can be achieved.