Garden makeover advice, low maintenance

Have you spoken to your neighbours Sharon to see if they can shed any light on what's been done, or may be what they have done to their own properties, no doubt they're in a similar situation to you with the water.

 

Is there a ditch in the farmer's field behind you?

If the farmer hasn't keep the maintenance up and kept the ditch cleared this could be increasing the problems.

My parents had this out in the village, when they moved in the field ditch was well maintained and cleared out once a year by the farmer, but sadly this part of the farm with a farmhouse was sold as a small holding. New owners had horses, they never done anything with the field nor did they clear the ditches, after 5 years my parents and their neighbours garden used to flood, dad did what he could to redirect the water around the house into the front garden. But in the end it ended up with the council getting involved and they finally did an enforcement order. Which is fine did solve the problem for a couple of years, but it all ends back to square one though.

 

Hi Sheal, only the ones either side of me really and yes, its pretty much the same for them. Although they both have garages so their water doesn't run down the drive onto the main road, I think they have additional drains sited at the back of their garages so that may help them a little. Plus one has installed those grated gullys on the ground level so he's tried similar things I'm considering

 

Cheers Ellie, I hadn't thought of that I've only been here about 6 years and just thought it was one of the prices to pay for living at the bottom of a hill

 

Well, we're a bit further along at least we got membrane laid and 4 tonne of gravel raked over the front garden yesterday so that's one big patch sorted

Onto the back next week we've settled so far on installing some new french drains so we've got "all the gear & You Tube idea"

 

You want a French Drain across the slope, at the top of your garden. From the photos you may already have a culvert, and that flexible black pipe in the photo with the dumper truck looks like it might be designed to do that job too ... so they might just need reviving

The principle of a French drain is that you dig a trench, put a perforated drainage pipe in the bottom (it comes on a roll), wrap it in porous membrane if you like (keeps the dirt and tree roots out), cover it with gravel, and then backfill with soil. The pipe just provides a wide open air gap for the water to move along, so it runs more quickly than if it has to find its way through just-gravel.

In your situation I would fill the trench to the surface with rough stone, rather than just covering the pipe. Thus any water running down the hill would go into the drain at the surface, otherwise the drain will only deal with ground water.

Then at either side of your plot, or just one side perhaps, you need to release the water that is collected in the perforated drainage pipe. You could pipe it (using rigid pipe, or more perforated drainage pipe) downhill to the front of the property, or a storm drain, or you could have an open ditch as a water feature (although if the water is intermittent, and sometimes a raging torrent, I'm not sure how well that would work)

http://www.pavingexpert.com/drain16.htm

 

Thanks Kristen really appreciate your reply

We checked out the access to the old culvert yesterday and it seems like we can still access that so we plan to head some of our new french drains in that direction.

We've bought a 25 metre length of perforated pipe and plan to wrap them in membrane and cover with 20mm chippings before topping with 20mm pea gravel as the whole area is being gravelled so that should help.

We've also bought a new grid and solid pipe so Jim plans to install this new grid at the bottom of the steps and run it to a storm drain we've located at the top of the drive, which isn't very far.

Plenty of work to keep us occupied next week

 

It sounds like things are progressing well Sharon. You realise once you've got all this drainage in it won't rain!

 

LOL not according to my fella Sheal, I'm sure he has that SAD syndrome, he never stops moaning that it rains all the time as far as he's concerned! And I'm with Billy Connolly on that subject:

"There's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes"