There's a crawdad in the drain pipe...
Apr. 24th, 2006 01:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zolaSounds like it could be the title of a song a la "Does your chewing gum lose it's flavor on the bedpost overnight", doesn't it?
Busy, busy, busy!
Since the house was vacant for over a year, all the ditches were grown over. This has been quite an experience for me--on Cape Cod, all you have to do is wait for a while after it rains and all the water promptly goes bye-bye. Sandy soil and all that.
Here, we're on a mountain and thus get run-off, and the soil composition is very heavy in clay. I am finding that soil with clay in it is like a sponge. First, it sucks up water until it's completely saturated and then leaks it out again.
This is likely marvelous for the plants when it gets dry out, you can water and the water will be available for a while, but it also means attention needs to be paid to drainage.
So there are ditches all over the place. By the look of it, the natural path of the water is paid attention to whenever possible, just adjusted. And, as I mentioned, the ditches are mostly overgrown because when they aren't full of water, the grass finds that lovely moist soil a treat.
From almost our first week here, Ben and I have been tending to ditches. We have one of those small claw rakes, and I usually rake out any leaves and dead grass blades. We have a mini camp shovel as well, so I can do a minor bit of digging without hurting myself or wearing myself out--I usually use it for things like moving a couple of rocks or moving a bit of mud that's blocking the flow. Ben does the heavy stuff, the actual digging and edging and lifting.
We have a hill that's eroding, and the soil keeps on falling into the ditch, so we've been working on that a lot. It started out by me raking the bottom and laying down two pieces of plastic pipe. One of the pieces has a hole in it, and the end is broken on one, but that's okay in this case because basically all we're trying to do is keep the water flowing. It's my intent to slap a piece of packing tape over the hole because all it needs is to keep the dirt out, it's perfectly okay if it gets wet--this is a drain that isn't going to be completely covered thus it doesn't have to be perfectly sealed.
As I picked up some of the larger rocks, I pressed them into the hillside to help anchor the dirt, and as Ben has been digging out sods of grass, I've been taking them and putting them into the hillside, braced by the rocks.
This is working fine. We got poured upon at length a couple of days ago, and the sods didn't wash down at all. I would imagine in another week to ten days, those roots are going to start merging into the dirt on the hillside and then it will really be solid. As the erosion slows, the slope will stabilize and stop dumping dirt into the ditch. It's all good. I think I will start taking pictures of it to have the visual of how it's improving.
Fixing the ditches near the house hasn't been so simple. It's awfully swampy around it, and the back ditch didn't seem to be draining. Ben had found one end of the pipe and was pretty sure of where the other was, but there didn't seem to be any real water flow.
We got a new hoe a couple of days ago, it's more spade-shaped than the traditional hoe, but perfect for ditches, and yesterday I went out and started at the main ditch and just started scraping away at what looked to be a channel, a short length of about three feet. It's been wet enough that it's not too hard to do, the soil is very soft and scraped easily. Suddenly there was a burst of water. I had found the end of the pipe.
It was plugged with mud, so after I cleared the debris out of the channel, I cleaned the mud out with a stick and the water flowed nicely. But when I went behind the house, well, that seemed to be another story. The water in the ditch seemed to still be sitting there, draining into the pipe but very slowly.
So, being practical minded, I calleed to Ben in the house and he passed me a bottle of food coloring through the window. It was blue, and I squirted some into the channel. The water *was* flowing, just really slowly.
I went back to the end of the pipe. By now, the water was running clear. I waited... and waited... suddenly I saw a swirl of muddy water. I was hopeful that at last I was seeing the water from the ditch behind the house.
I saw what looked like a whisker in the pipe. It looked almost like a piece of pine needle. Then it moved backwards. Huh? What the....?
The second "whisker" made the telltale > that told me I was looking at a crawdad (crayfish). The neighbors had said there were lots of them around, and apparently, this one has taken up residence in my drain pipe!
I am actually debating laying a new pipe next to the old rather than just remove that one because they are really, really good to eat, they're basically a fresh-water lobster.
Ben and I are also talking about possibly taking advantage of the swampiness to dig a small pond. I would enjoy the chance to do some water gardening, and you can get mosquito fish hardy to -30. It's plenty far away enough from the house that it wouldn't be a problem, especially once the addition has been removed. We are going to be watching how much it dries out once the rainier season is over and decide then--if we dig it deep enough and a bit below the frost line (only 18" here), it should stay full no problem, and at 18" or so, we should be on pretty much solid clay at that point and thus it won't all leak away.
I'm really looking forward to having the major house problems fixed enough that we can start getting things for the yard!
Busy, busy, busy!
Since the house was vacant for over a year, all the ditches were grown over. This has been quite an experience for me--on Cape Cod, all you have to do is wait for a while after it rains and all the water promptly goes bye-bye. Sandy soil and all that.
Here, we're on a mountain and thus get run-off, and the soil composition is very heavy in clay. I am finding that soil with clay in it is like a sponge. First, it sucks up water until it's completely saturated and then leaks it out again.
This is likely marvelous for the plants when it gets dry out, you can water and the water will be available for a while, but it also means attention needs to be paid to drainage.
So there are ditches all over the place. By the look of it, the natural path of the water is paid attention to whenever possible, just adjusted. And, as I mentioned, the ditches are mostly overgrown because when they aren't full of water, the grass finds that lovely moist soil a treat.
From almost our first week here, Ben and I have been tending to ditches. We have one of those small claw rakes, and I usually rake out any leaves and dead grass blades. We have a mini camp shovel as well, so I can do a minor bit of digging without hurting myself or wearing myself out--I usually use it for things like moving a couple of rocks or moving a bit of mud that's blocking the flow. Ben does the heavy stuff, the actual digging and edging and lifting.
We have a hill that's eroding, and the soil keeps on falling into the ditch, so we've been working on that a lot. It started out by me raking the bottom and laying down two pieces of plastic pipe. One of the pieces has a hole in it, and the end is broken on one, but that's okay in this case because basically all we're trying to do is keep the water flowing. It's my intent to slap a piece of packing tape over the hole because all it needs is to keep the dirt out, it's perfectly okay if it gets wet--this is a drain that isn't going to be completely covered thus it doesn't have to be perfectly sealed.
As I picked up some of the larger rocks, I pressed them into the hillside to help anchor the dirt, and as Ben has been digging out sods of grass, I've been taking them and putting them into the hillside, braced by the rocks.
This is working fine. We got poured upon at length a couple of days ago, and the sods didn't wash down at all. I would imagine in another week to ten days, those roots are going to start merging into the dirt on the hillside and then it will really be solid. As the erosion slows, the slope will stabilize and stop dumping dirt into the ditch. It's all good. I think I will start taking pictures of it to have the visual of how it's improving.
Fixing the ditches near the house hasn't been so simple. It's awfully swampy around it, and the back ditch didn't seem to be draining. Ben had found one end of the pipe and was pretty sure of where the other was, but there didn't seem to be any real water flow.
We got a new hoe a couple of days ago, it's more spade-shaped than the traditional hoe, but perfect for ditches, and yesterday I went out and started at the main ditch and just started scraping away at what looked to be a channel, a short length of about three feet. It's been wet enough that it's not too hard to do, the soil is very soft and scraped easily. Suddenly there was a burst of water. I had found the end of the pipe.
It was plugged with mud, so after I cleared the debris out of the channel, I cleaned the mud out with a stick and the water flowed nicely. But when I went behind the house, well, that seemed to be another story. The water in the ditch seemed to still be sitting there, draining into the pipe but very slowly.
So, being practical minded, I calleed to Ben in the house and he passed me a bottle of food coloring through the window. It was blue, and I squirted some into the channel. The water *was* flowing, just really slowly.
I went back to the end of the pipe. By now, the water was running clear. I waited... and waited... suddenly I saw a swirl of muddy water. I was hopeful that at last I was seeing the water from the ditch behind the house.
I saw what looked like a whisker in the pipe. It looked almost like a piece of pine needle. Then it moved backwards. Huh? What the....?
The second "whisker" made the telltale > that told me I was looking at a crawdad (crayfish). The neighbors had said there were lots of them around, and apparently, this one has taken up residence in my drain pipe!
I am actually debating laying a new pipe next to the old rather than just remove that one because they are really, really good to eat, they're basically a fresh-water lobster.
Ben and I are also talking about possibly taking advantage of the swampiness to dig a small pond. I would enjoy the chance to do some water gardening, and you can get mosquito fish hardy to -30. It's plenty far away enough from the house that it wouldn't be a problem, especially once the addition has been removed. We are going to be watching how much it dries out once the rainier season is over and decide then--if we dig it deep enough and a bit below the frost line (only 18" here), it should stay full no problem, and at 18" or so, we should be on pretty much solid clay at that point and thus it won't all leak away.
I'm really looking forward to having the major house problems fixed enough that we can start getting things for the yard!
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-24 10:36 pm (UTC)We have a few crawdads in the creek around here. Unfortunately, I wouldn't dream of eating them...they are down stream from me and I know where my black and greywater goes.
Proper drainage on a hillside home is always important. A good thing to take care of. Over time you figure out exactly when the mountain will start "running" as Dan says. It's a little different for us as we don't get summer time rain.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-25 12:16 am (UTC)