Draining A Field

It's been a busy few weeks, with no real sign of it letting up just yet. One of the big jobs we've done is to drain the field next to the house. 

Although it's on a slope this field always lies wet and makes it a nightmare to move vehicles around, so whilst we were putting in new drains for the extension and had the machinery there we decided to go for it and put land drains in the whole field. 

 This involved using the Robocut with trencher to dig the trenches, lots of digging on the junctions by hand and cleaning out the bottom of the trenches with a home made tool (which I'm going to post about later).

We then shovelled drainage gravel into the bottom of the trench, added perforated drainage pipe, jointed all the junctions and then added more drainage gravel on top before backfilling with soil. 

It was a massive job but one that should make the land much better for years to come. 

To me adding this kind of infrastructure is key to improving this place to make it somewhere that we're going to stay for a long long time. I'm just lucky with my family that between us we have the knowledge, skills and tools to the job for the lowest cost possible and it's always enjoyable working with them. 

Four Long Days

We've been working hard to get things ready fro the extension here on the homestead.

We've been putting in soak aways for drainage, digging footings for the patio and adding land drains to the field by the house which is always wet. We've got an incredible amount done.

I'll do a proper post on it all later in the week, at the moment I'm very stiff and sore and ache all over, as only four days on a shovel can so to you.

Unfortunately we ended tonight with the picture above - the track coming off the big digger! Could be worse I suppose, but it's something we could have done without,,,