Trenches

After coming back from my tour in Iraq I was lucky enough to have about two months of leave, which was great.  I spent some of it getting fit, whilst at the same time eating lots of leftover wedding cake.  It was around mid Feb when I returned and I was given the project of installing drainage in our garden.  An had completely redesigned the garden and part of this involved the removal of the old square lawn and its replacement with a new round lawn.  I am not a gardener and although I like things to look nice, I have no clue about plants and colours and stuff.  I do, however, know about money and how much things cost and my Northern background makes me acutely aware of how expensive things are and I am forever questioning why we need to change things.  Needless to say I lost the argument, partly as I was not there to argue in the first place, I was being rocketed in Iraq!

As part of the project we had a problem with out garden, it was wet, very wet.  In fact it would flood quite regularly but not to the point where damage was caused.  I turned to the trusty internet and sought out some solutions to our problem.  I am not particularly good at DIY but I will have a go and some things I find easier than others.  There were two solutions that presented themselves, one was to dig a sink hole where the water could collect and drain away and the other was to dig a series or trenches and construct drainage.  The first solution was no good as we were on a flat piece of land and as far as I could tell water does not generally flow uphill.  Our solution would have to involve something rather more technical.

I researched the net and discovered that a recommended way to install drainage was to dig trenches about 800mm deep in a so called fishbone arrangement.  The construction involved digging out the trench, laying some base gravel, laying a coconut covered plastic pipe and then covering that with more gravel.  The whole lot was wrapped in anti-weed matting and it was meant to gradually slope down to the direction where you wanted the water to accumulate.  Each section of trench would drain 2.5m either side and in our case we had one main diagonal trench going across the garden and then subsidiary trenches to cover the 2.5m  areas missed by the main.  In all I dug around 40m of trenches in four sections.

The first stage was to remove the old grass, this was done in shovel sized sections and then plonked onto a wheelbarrow and shipped to the front of the house through the garage.  They were then neatly and I really mean neatly packed into a large container.  The container man was quite surprised at how well packed our container was when he came to collect it.  We also threw bricks and a number of other bits in there that we unearthed.  I say we, it was only me doing the digging!  It was back breaking work and I am not used to labour, I work in an office, in the comfort and the dry of a heated building.

Our soil is basically clay and it rained.  I had some idea of how the soldiers in the trenches must have felt as I toiled in sodden conditions where it felt at times that I was just moving the clay around and not getting very far.  I quickly gave up on the idea that the trench should slope gradually, I am not an engineer and I had more chance of nailing jelly to the ceiling than I had of getting a decent slope sorted out.  I have no idea what the previous owners did but I found a rather amazing amount of rubble and crap buried in the garden.  I jarred my shoulder and legs countless times on rocks and slabs of concrete as I battered away.  I had to remove the footpath as well, these were slabs of paving which I introduced to my friend Mr Sledge the hammer.

Once I had the trenches dug I had to get the gravel, which was delivered in batches.  We worked out, I think, it was 4 tonnes of gravel were needed to fill the trenches, all of this had to be hand carted through the garage in a wheel barrow and then deposited into the trench.  An managed to over order the gravel and we were left with about a ton at the front of the house.  If this would have been the North East of England you would be beating people off with broken beer bottles but no, no one was interested in helping themselves.  We ended up getting a friend to collect it for free, he was happy to help us out.

I lined the trenches with anti-weed matting and then laid a base of gravel and then the coconut covered piping.  After that I topped up the gravel and then finished by wrapping the weed matting over the top and then putting some soil on top.  I did not do any clever linking of pipes, measuring of slopes and other such crap.  Water is amazing stuff which cannot escape the effects of gravity and just collects at the lowest point.  Now the tricky bit was how do I get the water out of the trenches once it has collected there?  Well I dug a hole big enough to put a rain vat inside.  This is easier said than done.  I felt like a Viet Cong starting out on my tunnels as I slopped around in the clay mud trying to scoop out the hole, which of course was filing with water.  I drilled out some large holes in the rain vat and then covered them with weed matting, the idea being to stop the mud from getting in.  It later transpired that I needed a lot more holes as the damn thing would end up floating out of the hole and need resetting several times.

We now had a series of trenches and pipes which led to a rain vat that was sunk into the ground, the next challenge was to get the water out and dispose of it.  Luckily on the other side of our fence is a main drain and in fact this is where all of the excess run off goes for the whole street.  I rigged up an automatic float pump to activate and pump out the rain vat into the main drain.  It is one of the more satisfying projects as the drainage is extremely effective and our garden is so much better for it.

I have to say once I had completed the task and the new circular lawn was laid, An's next question was 'can we move the gate half a metre to the left?'  I responded with disbelief that the work involved to do this would probably mean removing the fence at the back and that was no easy task.  To date we have not changed this, I think it is a case of An biding her time before she asks that one again!

The lawn was laid down by some professionals who also shipped in a load of topsoil as well.  Despite my protests at costs and inconvenience I do think An has done an amazing job and our garden is full of a variety of plants and more importantly birds too.  I like to watch them as I have my breakfast and I do take charge of making sure they are fed.  An does not do birds, the feeding bit anyway.  We have had them nesting in boxes that we fitted and now we have them in the hedge too.  I never thought I would be so fascinated by watching them interact.  Small pleasures.