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11/25/2010: "The End of the Ditch"

Once the pasture was reseeded, it was back to digging. The rest of the family was headed south two weeks ago for a long weekend with family at Disneyland(!), and I figured that this was as good a time as any to take a run at finishing the drainage project. So I loaded up the truck with sleeping bag and mattress, and headed down to the farm.

If you've been following the plot line, through the summer I got the drainage trenches dug, graded, filled with perforated pipe, and re-covered with dirt. That left the job of connecting them up into a master drain, and running that master drain out to the swale.

Friday morning I was down at the farm early, and hopped onto the backhoe seat. By the end of the day I had dug the transverse trench that started out at 32 inch depth and went south past the ends of all the other drainage pipes, reaching a final depth of about 45 inches. I was paying a lot of attention to depth, so it didn't need too much grading. I did have quite a bit of work to uncover the ends of the previously filled trench pipes; in one case I had to dig back 10 feet to expose the end of the loose pipe! Digging with the backhoe wasn't too hard, except that at the deepest depth the soil was essentially pancake batter because Lou had run a soaker hose too long over the path of the trench (to be fair, he was trying to help; earlier in the fall I had given up on digging even with the backhoe because the ground was so hard).

This muck proved to be an even greater problem when it came to hand grading the trench; I had to resort to extreme measures to deal with it. For one thing, I kept a bucket of water and a shop cloth handy; the mud was pervasive, it was on my clothes, it was in the walls of the trench. Just brushing the shovel handle against my muddy clothes would make the shovel so slippery as to be unusable. When this happened I would reach over to the rag, dip it in the bucket, and then wipe down the shovel handle. I also kept a trowel handy by the side of the trench; many times I would shovel up a full shovel of muck, fling it up on the pile, and then find that a third of it was still sticking to the shovel. I would then have to grab the trowel and scrape once across the shovel to empty it. All this made for slow going, to say the least.



I managed to get halfway to the barn before I realized I'd better quit with the backhoe and concentrate on grading and laying pipe.


I still had the problem of the gooey muck at the bottom of the trench: if I laid the pipe and then just dumped dirt on top it seemed likely that the weight of the dirt would push the pipe down in the goo until it reached the hard subsoil. This would likely result in a non-ideal profile for the grading of the pipe. I went home tired and dirty on Saturday night to ponder the problem under a hot shower.

Talking it over with my friend Jon, I hit on the solution: lay rock in the trench to stabilize the goo, then put pipe on top of that (this pipe was non-perforated, and normally I would not have put rock around it). This worked extremely well when I tried it the next day.



In times like these a tractor is darn handy; easier than a wheelbarrow when it comes to getting rock to the job site!



By late in the deepening twilight on Sunday I managed, with a bit of Lou's help, to the last bits of grading done and get the pipes connected.



I was only halfway to the barn, however. Driving home, I thought it over; this weekend about killed me, and I'm only halfway to the barn. The deepest part was still ahead, meaning that the progress would be even slower. I decided to get some estimates on outside excavation help.

Monday morning I was on the phone. I left a message for Stutzman Excavating, and they called me back the next day. "100 feet to go? Six feet deep? That'll take about three hours. 90 dollars an hour is what we charge. Yes, we can fit you in next Friday." Next Friday I was standing in the driveway at 10:45 when a big dump truck pulled up with an enormous excavator on the trailer.

Ron, the operator, was a joy to work with. He listened patiently while i explained what needed to be done. He agreed to dig an auxiliary trench that I thought of after the phone conversation; this trench would drain water from in front of the barn. Then he got to work. First he set up a laser level on a tripod; as he dug he would periodically get down off the cab to test the depth with a special stick that beeped when the laser hit a target.



Here's the auxiliary trench to drain in front of the barn.



I was thinking that today would be the one day that I wouldn't have to lift a shovel, but I was wrong. When I told Ron about how the trench would cross paths with the electrical and water service to the barn, he said that he would prefer it if I would uncover those by hand first. But first he asked me to get him some bare solid copper wire. Like house wiring, I said? Yes, that would be fine. So I went to work scrounging, and found some old wire in the junkyard bound pile. I stripped it and brought him back two 2 foot lengths. As he took them I said, this looks like something that I need to get my camera out for isn't it? He smiled and said, watch.

He bent the wires into two L-shaped pieces, and then began to pace over the yard. At certain points the rods would swing, and he had me mark the position with some fiberglass fence posts. Yes, he was divining! It was interesting; the rods seemed to confirm where I thought the electric service was buried, though it wasn't much more exact than my guessed position. I still had to dig nearly ten feet of trench two feet deep to uncover the water and electric. What was more interesting were the other places in the yard where he suspected that there were buried lines.

Overall, it took a bit longer than the three hours, mostly because of the extra barn trench. But in the end we got the pipe laid all the way out to the swale, and he filled in the dirt neat as can be. He even left little mounded piles running the length of the trench to compensate for settling. Gotta love big equipment and guys who know how to use them!

By the numbers:
- length of perforated pipe laid: 800 feet
- minimum depth: 2 feet
- length of drain pipe laid: 200 feet
- maximum depth of drain pipe: 7 feet
- amount of rock laid in trench: 10 cubic yards
- cost in materials: $900 (approximately)
- cost in labor: $250
- cost for contracting services: $600
- personal hours spent: 120 hours (estimate)

Whew! Glad that is done.