Question
My wife and I recently purchased a home and we have found that there is one area about 10 feet from the pool that when it rains it stays wet for atleast a week after the rest of the yard is dry, We do have a slight slope from the front of the house down to the back of the house where the pool is and we have a fence so the yard raises up about 12 inches along the back of the yard at the fence line. Do you know what might be going on and how i can fix it?

Answer
Hello Reginald,

There is only one reason that the area would remain wet and that is that it must be a low spot.

Without visiting your site, from your comments alone, I suspect that the raised area at the fence might be causing a back up.

What ever the reason, if you can not eliminate the raised area and ensure a continuos fall in elevation to points off the property then you will have to install a landscape area drain or re-grade the trouble area. An area drain is a plastic drain box that connects to a drain pipe. You can find these types of products on the web site www.ndspro.com  they come in many sizes and black and green colors. Most of the time a 12 or 18" box is all you will need.

You would set the drain in the lowest spot of your yard where the water is setting and then run the buried drain line to a lower area.

However, if you don't have an area low enough to drain the pipe to then you may be forced to re-grade your yard by working the existing soil to a uniform slope with no low areas. You may have to add or subtract a small amount of soil to do this right.

One last option would be a french drain. You could dig a trench from a lower area of the yard to the center of the troubled area. Then lay filter fabric in the trench with excess laying to either side and finally fill it with gravel. Lay the excess filter fabric over the top of the gravel and cover it with a few inches of soil. This trench will now act as a conduit for the water, directing it out of the low area. The trench need only be about 12" deep and 6 to 8" wide to function for this purpose.

Also check other recent postings on drainage concerns(on this web site) for more ideas and Google "french drains".
Good Luck
Sean J Murphy, LA,ISA, LEED AP
Please check out my blogs and articles on landscape topics like this on my websites.
http://www.seanjmurphy.com
http://amenityarchitects.com