Gardening Tips and Tricks
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Nothing but Clay and how to drain water away on level land. |
Hey there,
Was reading your site and thought I’d share something with everyone. Here where I live it is nothing but clay. If you bring in dirt or compost all you wind up with is a muddy swimming pool cause the clay surrounding where you dug out your garden just fills up with water. If you just dump the dirt on top it either washes away or is scattered when tilling or if you contain it, it just fills with water
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Gardening Tips and Tricks
John ~ Leesville LA. Nothing but Clay and how to drain water away on level land. Hey there, Was reading your site and thought I’d share something with everyone. Here where I live it is nothing but clay. If you bring in dirt or compost all you wind up with is a muddy swimming pool cause the clay surrounding where you dug out your garden just fills up with water. I suppose you could put the dirt on top but we get real heavy rains here and I think it would just wash away. That is why I dug out about a foot of this clay and threw it to the outside and filled the dug out areas with good dirt I bought. I dug out about a 3 foot wide area by about 50 feet long and a foot deep. The clay I dug out I piled to the sides and packed with the business end of my shovel. So I guess I wound up with a hole 3 x 50 x 2 when I was done. I made eight of these in a couple years about 4 feet apart. Now my land is real level and these trenches would fill with water when it rained real hard and sometimes it would take so long for the water to settle out that some of my crops would die. I would have dug a ditch if there was some low spot to drain the water too but like I said my land is flat. So as a quick fix I got a sump pump and put it in a five gallon bucket I cut holes in round the bottom and then put it in an onion bag so as to screen out any large stuff. I dug holes at each end of the rows and after the heavy rain I’d use the sump pump to pump the water out. This worked but it took a lot of time to drain the water and well I knew I needed a better plan. So here’s what I did. I got some drainpipe, you know the ones that have the holes in them for septic drainfields. Anyway I put these in the bottom of my rows the full length. And covered them with some garden cloth so that the holes wouldn’t let the dirt in. Now the water had a place to go and when I pumped I didn’t have to wait for the water to leech out to the ends it would leech into the drain pipe and one pumping per row usually got enough of the water out, that I didn’t have any more plants die from soaking in the water for too long. I’m thinking now about digging deep holes at one end so the water can drain into them when it isn’t too hard a rain these might keep most of the water away so I don’t have to pump at all. And I’m going to dig a ditch tying all the rows together so that I can pump them all out from one spot so I don’t have to move the sump pump. Since I built up the sides with the clay I dug out of the rows, I’ve sloped this away from my rows and in between rows I’ve made a ditch to carry the water away. So now the only water I get in the row itself is just the rain that falls in it. If I had it to do over I would have placed the drainpipe in and covered it with drainrock then the weed cloth and then my dirt and tied all of the rows to one spot for the sump pump. Live and learn. I guess I’m lucky that I don’t have a high water table to fight as some relatives I have just south of me do. Thing is, I bought this land cause it was cheap, being just clay and quite a ways from town, but If I had known it would have been this much hassle getting a garden, I think I would have bought elsewhere and paid a bit more. Oh and just one more thing. I pour a lot of rock salt around the edges of my garden beds to keep the snails and slugs out. It washes away in time but it is really cheaper than store bought products made to kill snails and slugs. John (Personal information withheld by request.)
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