Well, as dry as we have been here in southern Oklahoma, it does seem odd. I've been watering the yard and garden heavily to keep the soil moist, and the soil still is bone dry 24 hours after I water.

To me, the bigger question about why your soil around the house is staying so moist is whether or not this is a relatively recent development. If it is a recent development, I'd be worried that a pipe is leaking underneath the house or near the exterior of the house, especially if you have heavily compacted clay that cracks and shifts in dry weather. It might not be the water pipe that brings water into the house---it could be a drain pipe somewhere inside or underneath the house, for example. You could test your theory about dew condensing and dropping off the roof by putting a few buckets or bowls right along the dripline from the roof and seeing what moisture, if any, they catch. I'd be surprised if it is enough to keep your soil perpetually moist around the house.

If you stand outside and look around, is there an area that is abnormally green compared to everywhere else? We have horrible red clay that shifts and cracks as it dries out and our first clue that a pipe had broken (which happened 3 times in the late summer of 2011 when we were about as dry through this point in time as we've been this year), was that one particular area started greening up all on its own with no irrigation and there wasn't any nice green grass anywhere else in the yard. We started digging and found a leak in a pipe. The pipe had broken as the ground shifted that summer.

Also, did you get the heavy June rainfall that fell a couple of weeks before the early July rainfall? We got 3.5" of rain over a 2-day period in June, and the ground did stay wet for quite a while from that....but it was dry again before the early July rain fell. We got at least 1.5" around early July and our soil around our house is bone dry---so much so that we've continued to water the soil in the foundation area with a soaker hose.....and it still is dry.

If you have sandy soil or sandy loam, maybe there is a high enough content of organic matter in the soil to retain moisture, but if that is true, it should be true of the yard as well---not just the area immediately around the house.

It seems odd that a spring might have developed near your home that wasn't there before, but it could happen. In some parts of southern OK there are a lot of springs and it isn't abnormal to have a couple on your property, but normally when a new one pops up, it is in a very wet year, not in the middle of a drought year. We have friends with a fairly new home on our road that had a spring kind of pop up out of nowhere in the middle of their gravel driveway back when their home was under construction or had just been completed. That was a rainier year than this one though.

If your house has a septic tank with leach lines, I'd be worried that something might be blocking a leach line and moisture is backing up near the house.

I don't know where you are in southern OK, but our year--to-date rainfall at my location is right around 12", and slightly more than half of that has fallen since June 1st. If your rainfall is a similar amount, I cannot imagine the moisture around your house is from natural rainfall. It has been so dry for so long that the moisture that has fallen evaporates pretty quickly. If you have had 15-20" this year or more, then maybe you just have soil that retains moisture extra well. If it was my place, though, I'd be checking around the drain pipes.

We have a detached 1200 square foot garage that is built to resemble a two-story barn with a big, sloping roof and lots of dew does collect on its roof and drip off early in the morning, but it is not enough to keep the ground moist. You'll see a little strip of moist soil right along the dripline very early in the day, but by noon or so, it is dry.

I hope you can figure this out. After living here in southcentral OK a little over 15 years, with many of them being dry years, I've never known anyone to have an issue with soil around the house being wetter than soil out in the yard farther away from the house unless there was a plumbing problem that was putting that moisture into the soil near the house.

Dawn

Years ago we had a problem with wet soil in the crawl space under the house. Lots of unlpeasant creatures are attracted to water like that. My husband crawled under the house and I ran water from every sink, flushed the toilets, nothing. One night while sitting on the patio he HEARD the water. I was washing clothes and the pipe the washer drained into would separate under pressure from the washer and dump all the water under the house. It was not a drain effected by any other system and you couldn't tell it would leak just by looking. If it is a new house you probably are on a slab foundation. I don't know how you would find a leak, but super dry or super wet can both cause a foundation to shift.

Septic is a aerobic with 3 sprinkler heads, and, not all the way around the house obviously.

I do have mulch up to the brick wall in half of the outside. Those beds do have drop watering, which I was running for 15 minutes every 3 days, a single emitter at each bush and my former tree which apparently drowned. Yes, one year old new construction, slab.

I certainly know it's not a incoming water leak. So, you mentioned a sewer leak. I suppose that could be possible, but, the water is pretty much evenly distributed all around the foundation, on all sides, pretty much equally. Which is how I came up with the dew theory. Might have to get up one morning and take a look. Today, it is drizzling so couldn't of course. Looks like rain much of the week, so, no idea what will this mean.

I did have some low spots in some house corners, which accumulated a little standing water in previous rain events. I added dirt to all those (these were just raw dirt, no garden beds). So, they shouldn't be below grade now. I suppose some extra water could have gotten to the foundation from those previously.

The foundation beds certainly have organic matter as I mixed it in. So, they do have the ability to retain moisture, and, they have a few inches of hardwood shredded mulch too.

Our total rainfall for June was around 2.5", mostly earlier in the month. I LIKE the idea of a bucket around the dripline, though, not this week! Do you also have mulch around the house? I might have to raise that area with some dirt, and, pull mulch away a few inches perhaps? I will be getting gutters later this summer, that should help keep water away.

I am near Colbert.

I have mulch in some places around the house but not in all of them. No matter where I put the mulch around the house, the free-range chickens rearrange it to suit themselves....and they don't leave it where we put it. We actually don't keep mulch in the beds around the house as much as we used to, having seen first-hand how well the rattlesnakes and copperheads blend in with the mulch. I need white mulch so the snakes are easier to see....we don't have white mulch, but the idea of white stone mulch is starting to appeal to me. My fenced garden area is very well-mulched, though, because I have some sort of control over that area since most all the animals are fenced out of it.

We are in a hilly area in the Red RIver Valley, between Marietta and Thackerville, and our acreage basically is a creek hollow, with the house on the highest point of ground. When it rains, everything runs downhill away from the house, and if it rains hard enough, all the mulch washes downhill away from the house and into the woodland. I constantly fight a losing battle to keep the mulch where it belongs.

When we built our house, we had the builder put in a pier and beam foundation because we didn't want to deal with a slab on our compacted, dense, red clay soil. It is not a decision we've ever regretted. It is so much easier to fix a plumbing leak via the crawl space under the house. Prior to moving here in 1999, we had a house on black clay soil in Fort Worth for 16 years, so we were well-versed in the problems you have with cracking clay soils causing foundation problems, plumbing problems, etc. and we've always exercised great care in keeping the soil around the foundation evenly moist to the extent we can during Extreme or Exceptional Drought in order to avoid those problems.

Because I know how hard it is to keep the soil in the foundation area moist, it does concern me that your soil around the house is staying so moist during such a dry year. Your mesonet station in Durant has recorded only slightly more rainfall this year than ours has, so our soils probably are about the same in terms of moisture levels.

Not too long after we moved here, friends of ours in Texas began having foundation-related issues with their new custom home less than a year after moving in. Apparently there was some sort of major water issue under their house. I don't remember the source of the water, but they were unaware that the water was there. It was eroding the soil beneath their house, causing their foundation to sort of shift and sink and crack. It was the biggest mess you've ever seen with the builder disavowing that he was responsible for the problem in any way, blah, blah, blah....you know how that sort of thing goes. I believe the builder, or his insurance company, eventually did cover all the costs of finding and fixing the leak, replacing the eroded soil, fixing the slab, pouring concrete piers to prevent the problem from recurring, and then fixing the cracks in the walls in the house, replacing ruined flooring that had cracked along with the slab, as well as replacing all the landscaping they had torn out in order to work on and beneath the slab. It was the biggest mess you can imagine. They literally had an underground river carrying away the soil under their house, but never saw moist soil at grade level that might have alerted them to the problem. Theirs is an extreme example, but it serves as an example why you shouldn't ignore soil that seems to be more moist than it should be. If your soil in your yard is parched, but the soil around the foundation is wet, something's not right. Mulch would help keep the soil moist, but in a year this dry, it likely wouldn't keep all the soil around the house constantly moist---not with only a little over a foot of rain all year.

Believe me, I am not taking it lightly, however, I do think there could be a simpler reason here. But, I need to find the answer of course.

I do not believe there is any leak. While possible under a slab, not likely, owned slab houses for 40 years without issue. This is measurable for the most part as well. Open septic, run water in house, water runs into septic. We use very little water, There is an aquifer in the area, not sure how deep. The neighbor has a well. However, it's pretty deep. I don't know that water might be coming up, only below my house, doubtful.

When I got up today, did not put bucket out since it was going to rain after all, of course, no rain (have rain gauge). I noticed that all inside wall corners (ground) were wet, more so than anywhere else. Can a roof really sweat that much? I could even see a line in the dirt. I've never owned a house that did this, but, I never owned a green home either.

More hints are that in the fall and early spring when we planted bushes around the house, it was bone dry. That kind of ruins the underground spring theory. It does not rule out the leak, but I've already shown that isn't likely at all (I say impossible). It does however support sweating since I did not notice the problem until early summer and still today. I did not have any mulch before planting either. The bucket test would give me the info I need. I could do that tonight as apparently rain is not expected until afternoon tomorrow.

So, my bucket around the house test shows that moisture is indeed coming from the roof. I get anywhere between 1/8" and 1/4" per day this way, when combined with mulch, even at 100 degrees, it's enough to keep wet if it was already wet. Once I get garden beds everywhere I want them, will be adding gutters anyway that drain outside of the beds, so, at that point, no more drip. I did not expect this result. Never seen this.

We've had a lot of humidity down here, and higher dewpoints than we normally get in the summer, even if this year's rainfall has been lower than average in general. I'm not sure if you'll see that much moisture coming off the roof in a year with more typical weather.....but you could. We get quite a bit of moisture off our sloping garage roof, but it still isn't enough to keep the soil near the detached garage from cracking every summer. We have wicked red clay, though, that is very compacted, and once it is bone dry it just won't absorb water well again for the longest time.

Soils across southern Oklahoma are incredibly variable. Even on our few acres I see wide differences in the soil in various spots. I read today that there are 64 different kinds of soil in Love County. That is pretty incredible when you think about it, but it wasn't a huge surprise to me. Everyone I know who gardens here has soil that is different from everyone else's to some degree. Mostly they have sandier soil than we have, but that comes with a lot of root knot nematode issues, and that fact gives me more appreciation for our clay.

Yes, I guess that's true, though, the more SE the more humid in Oklahoma. Not sure what is normal here. Anyway, let's round up to 1/4". Times 7 days, that's almost 2 inches per week. Before that , I was also drip watering, and, for those spots in mulch with a half day sun (E and W), I can see why it might always stay moist! The other spots that stay the wettest are in inside corners, where several roofs drain to them. Oh well, guttering will solve the inconsistent water issue.

I would make use of the moisture...plant water loving plants there. You might check out rain gardens.

I had Bill place the cold frame up against the house on the south side. Aphids and grasshoppers love it. It is offset from the siding about 3". Water pools between the cold frame and the foundation when watering. Except for onions, nothing really likes to grow except peas. And the bunnies are familiar with them being there. I can't win. I'll be using it for onion starts this winter and when complete, that bad boy is getting a new home.

On the north side of the house that gets shade a/c moisture run-off is keeping a leaf bed alive in a perfect amount of moisture. It's awesome. Based on that, I'm with those who suggest taking advantage of the water build-up.

Ya just never know!!

bon

I have been thinking that I should route the ac drain to the garden also. It would not take a lot of work to route the drain to 3 different places that could use the water.

Larry