The paper is concerned with numerical methods for the two-dimensional (vertical direction) head-based formulation of Richards' equation for water movement in unsaturated soil. The radial basis function collocation method is combined with a finite difference method. Specifically, the nonlinear terms are approximated by the central difference, the implicit Euler time discretization is employed, and the approximate solution is represented by using a set of radial basis functions. The existence and uniqueness of the resulting discrete system are discussed, and several numerical experiments are given.