The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Land Management => Topic started by: spandit on December 22, 2013, 05:23:35 pm
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My land is very boggy. With all this rain I had water pouring out of mole tunnels and although the ditches aren't up to capacity, where the drains meet the road it flows into a ditch which always blocks further down. I unblocked it once and my neighbour over the road complained as his land had flooded as a result.
I'm loath to fork out for proper drainage because if the existing drainage network doesn't work in heavy rain, letting a load more water into it from my land is not going to help matters.
Found a load of drainage pipes I didn't know existed on my property anyway whilst trying to remedy the situation yesterday. Wish there was a proper record/map of them. Think I'll get some dye in the new year and see if I can trace some of them...
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I don't know why this is not required in the house buyers report pr surveyors report. When i sold my croft in Aberdeenshire I handed over a chart that i had made on Excel when John put new drainage pipes and wiring in, and when i built the new house afterwards i did the same thing when I moved down here. It's not difficult at all - if a 60 + year old woman accountant can do it surely anybody can :innocent:
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our drainage is buggered too, the clay pipes are ancient and have either broken or moved. its quite expensive to get it all fixed, unless you have a digger.
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our drainage is buggered too, the clay pipes are ancient and have either broken or moved. its quite expensive to get it all fixed, unless you have a digger.
Thinking of buying a digger but might just hire one to see how much I need
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I sympathise. We have a drainage ditch on the other side of our boundary fence, so the ditch is on the neighbouring estate but they don't do any maintenance with it - our other neighbor reckons it's never been cleared out. It's half full of reeds, grasses, and in some places just plain old mud from the banks where the rabbits have burrowed.
Our field slopes down to the ditch but is slightly lower than the current water level just before it gets to the fence so it's not draining away. That part of the field is a bit of a frost pocket and having that much moisture down there really doesn't help. Actually, I need to ask a question about this in a separate post, but in the meantime I'll keep an eye on this in case there's more good advice on dealing with it.
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We could have done with plans of pipes that take our grey water to a soakaway and our soil to a septi tank. Life has been a bit like Time Team hallenge with me digging slip trenches in an attempt to find pipes. I have found them all, emptied the septi tanks and dug 3 new very deep soakaways. Problem is we have no drainage and heavy rain floods the soakaways. It is sucj a problem when the rain is saturated that we do not even empty waste water down the kithen sink. Impossible to rectify as we have no mains waste water and geography is against us.
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It might be useful to look at google earth for the property, most images were made in the height of summer and for example my neighbour farmers very good field drains all show perfectly (we are the tufts damp land so not quite so many on ours....:-)))
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It might be useful to look at google earth for the property, most images were made in the height of summer and for example my neighbour farmers very good field drains all show perfectly (we are the tufts damp land so not quite so many on ours....:-)))
Excellent suggestion. I'm using satellite images to plan our planting, but we can see some field drains and the ground source heat pump lines.