It’s a post about dirty dirt! Sorry. But this sort of work lays the foundation for prettier projects, so it has to be done.
Last weekend my dad created a new drainage system from this downspout on the side of our house to direct the water away from the foundation and toward the back yard. We had a little bit of seepage into the basement in this general location and on the outside the ground had eroded away.
The former drainage system (if you could call it that) was here when we bought the house: a big piece of black corrugated pipe. With holes in it. So the water would flow out of the downspout, into the pipe and then flow out the holes and into the ground next to the foundation. Stupid.
I don’t have a good before photo or lot of progress photos. I don’t think my dad likes me taking photos of him while he’s working. And I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m nuts for taking photos of holes in the ground or such things.
And I don’t have a lot of details, but he dug a trench in the shape of a J and buried a similarly shaped PVC pipe maybe a foot below the surface.
The water now empties into an area I call the mud pit. Or the ugly corner. Or just the back corner. It goes by many not-nice names.
Now that the drainage pipe has gone underground and the surface has been re-leveled, it’s looking much more put together. That black corrugated plastic pipe was ruining everything! Good riddance. This gives me some incentive to continue improving this area.
The hostas are just starting to come up here, and I have a plan to divide the larger ones and send them down the line to the blank spots toward the back. (I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now to generate enough plants to fill the space, and this might be the last time I have to do that.)
This area is on the side of the house that I don’t see everyday. It’s kind of out-of-sight/out-of-mind and gets horribly weedy. The loose plan is to lay down some landscaping fabric to stop the weeds and then add some rock to finish things off.
And then there’s my mud pit where the water is going to drain now. It’s pretty much wasted space. Nothing grows here, so my plan is to lay some rock and brick I’ve salvaged from around our property to hold the soil and make the area walkable in the muddy seasons.
p.s. No digging activity at our house would be complete without uncovering buried treasure. See what we found!
