DanG wrote:
I fight these issues every day. People want to beautify. They
dig along the foundation, put in pretty bushes and/or flower beds.
Add a decorative border of landscape timber, garden wall block, or
custom cast curb and fill up the area with wood chips. Add a
soaker hose or sprinkler head or, worst of all, heavily water the
wonderful new planting areas. It is often easier to do a raised
bed with the timbers that will raise the new surface above the
weep holes in the brick work.

Gee, I wonder why my basement leaks????

If your home is slab on grade you can get away with this as long
as the finish surface is below the weep holes in the brick work or
at least 6 inches below any siding or finish.

If your home is crawl space, you can try it but be very cautious
and monitor the situation. If you are flooding or raising the
humidity in the crawl, I would do away with the plantings.

If you have a full basement, I would avoid foundation plantings
like the plague. Modify the thought if basement has been water
PROOFED (not damp proofed) with drainage plane material and
appropriate subsurface drainage. If you have all this, you may be
hard pressed to give the bushes enough water as the water will go
subsurface rapidly.


It really is not the foundation plantings that are the problem, it is
the grading that people do that is the problem. Good grading with
appropriate foundation plantings should cause no problems. Of course if the
owner plants something that needs (or they feel it needs) swamp like
conditions, that would be a problem.


--
Joseph Meehan

Dia 's Muire duit