Saturday, May 9, 2015

What Are We Up To?

Not much! Norma has had Beau, her lawn boy, over a few times and is making some headway in cleaning up her flower beds after the neighbor's landslide took everything out over the winter. Her topsoil is gone, replaced by dried mud and rocks from the slope that fell so topsoil will have to be brought in. The lawn suffered a little damage from the trucks that had to cross it to clean up the mess. One large rut across the lawn will have to be filled and grass planted. The rear garden tool shed was taken off it's foundation and destroyed so there is another project. We have a meeting scheduled with the condo committee next door to determine their plans.

Beau and I stretched some deer fence temporarily across an open area to keep the deer out until we can get Brooks here to make an assessment on what can be done to make more permanent repairs, maybe using good sections of the old fence that are still intact or are at least repairable.

Beau dug out the plugged up drainage ditch on the other side of the house and the ankle-deep with water covered lawn slowly dried out. We drilled a few more holes in the drain pipe at the bottom of the ditch and I filled it back up with large rocks that I found in the landslide rubble. It is now working efficiently and should stay working better than it did with the gravel backfill which plugged up with silt every four or five years.

We have been slowly removing "stuff" from the motorhome but that is not a priority because it is parked right beside the house and Norma wants to clean all the cupboards in the house before they get filled.

Aside from that we have not been busting our butts looking for work around here. We are planning on a combined birthdays lawn party sometime this summer so that should be fun. Until then, we will just keep plugging away.

34 comments:

  1. Plenty of work coming home, but being away from cold winters sure makes it worth it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Always lots to do, keeps you out of trouble.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I live on a hill, lots of water coming down to my place from up hill. I went with pits about the size of a VW bug filled with fifty pound rocks to catch my runoff. I ran curtain drains across the grade to catch the water and ran the water into a series of 'french drains' , one above the other. The top pit must fill almost to the top before it lets water into the one below it and so on down the line. When I first installed the system twenty years ago, a good rain would blow the topsoil off the top of the first pit and I would have to repair the damage with a few scoops of dirt but that stopped 15 years ago. All my roof drains drain into the french drains as well, that helps keep the rain water away from the house and below grade. I hand dug my system but I was still in my 30s, I'd hire a mini track hoe if I were to install one now.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My French Drain at the bottom of the slope has drain pipe at the bottom as well but instead of rock pits, mine goes into a pipe that takes it down to the ocean about 150 feet away. The problem is there is so much silt in the water coming off the bank, it plugs up the holes in the drain tile. In Canada they install the drain pipe with the holes down on a bed of gravel and I believe in the US, the standard is holes up. The gravel below the pipe completely plugged up with silt so the holes no longer work. I drilled a series of holes in the top of the pipe and backfilled with larger (fist size or better) rocks. Fingers crossed!

      Delete
    2. The leach pipe has holes all the way around and if the soil has fine sand or silt, we put a cloth cover over the pipe. To gather water, we use two pipes next to each other, one with holes and one solid and the perforated pipe is 'y' jointed into the solid pipe about ever twenty foot or so to send that silt on its way vivia the extra water that gets sent to the solid pipe.

      Delete
  4. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  7. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  8. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  9. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  10. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  11. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  12. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  13. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  14. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  15. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  16. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  17. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  18. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  19. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  20. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  21. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  22. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  23. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  24. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  25. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  26. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  27. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  28. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  29. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  30. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  31. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  32. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete