Would a vernal pond (as either a retention basin or a infiltration basin) be a viable solution for this drainage issue?

Question

So my backyard is showing some heavy pooling issues. I am in Southern Maine, USA

The lowest point (picture 1) is, unfortunately pretty close to the garage pier foundation, and when the water pools it includes two of the pillars.

My thought is to dig out an area where Picture 3 shows the center of the swale and digging out to the left to move the water away from the building and provide an additional feature to the landscape. This would also involve backfilling some of the area nearest the building to ensure the water is moving away.

1) Would a solution be to dig out an area to be a pond (either a retention basin or a infiltration basin - Link: Nomenclature reference ), and put in a small channel system to move all the water from the other pictures spot into it?

2) The lowest point is also near an out-of-use dug well. Would this cause any additional obstacle? Can you incorporate a dug well into a pond?

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Some comments asked about the well. The dug well is the brick structure in picture 1 and is out of use. My neighbors and I all used deep drilled wells to pull from the lower aquifer for our water supply. We also all have personal septic tanks and leach fields.

The land behind the house is a four acre field, but due to the mound for the septic leaching, the slop declines towards the yard, causing the natural swales to form.

I hope to refine the question, perhaps with a little feed back because I am out of my milieu.

Answer 1

I don't think that digging a pond will help

The water is where it's at and the soil is saturated like a wet sponge, removing dirt for clear open water, aka a pond, is just removing the dirt in the pond, it won't change the water level.

These days the construction of houses take lot drainage into consideration but that was not the case for your older house. It looks like the surrounding area tends to slope right to your house and the low spot is at the deepest water.

Other Ways to Deal With The Water

In the picture it looks like your yard slopes down hill to a forest. You need to get water to a place lower than where it is currently, and the forest, if lower than your lowest spot near the house, is a great place for it. You would need to slope downhill to it at least 1/4" per foot of length

1. Dig a channel and leave it open, maybe gently slope the sides to make it look good like a old small valley or depression
2. Dig a ditch and put in a drainage pipe and cover it up. Place a catch basin attached to the pipe low spot near the house
3. To deal with it one-off style each season, rent or buy a pump and collapsible hose and pump the water over to the forest

Answer 2

I am going to skip the pond talk and all that because that diverts us from the real problem.

You must change the grading by the house. You should not have dips that start at the foundation blocks. You haven't shown us other pictures but for this particular area I would fill it with a ton of dirt and grade it out slowly to the yard - could probably stop it at the firepit or whatever that big circular thing is.

This is easy and cheap and often you can find someone looking to unload dirt. I think creating draining (french drains, pond system, whatever) is just asking for a lot of maintenance. You have a lot of land, there is no reason you should have to worry about stuff like that. You grade correctly by your house once and enjoy.

Answer 3

It's hard to tell without topography indicated on a plat, but I'd probably settle for a combination of a corrugated drainage pipe and/or digging a artificial, directed swale down the obvious slope in your backyard. A swale needn't be deep like a ditch as long as you follow the contours of the turf, you can even mow it with relative ease and it will blend in. You'd only need to use a drainage box and a run of pipe starting with a packed in 3/4" and landscaping fabric if you had to take the water through a high point reducing the amount of pipe needed. They even have a prefab french drain tube. It looks like from the picture, however, that the natural swale you already have might not be that much lower than earth trapping it up hill avoiding the need for pipe at all.