The Plan

As I mentioned before we have a huge (roughly 25′ x 32′) catch basin dug out in our yard under the new swing set. What was meant to simply hold mulch is also retaining water. Lots of water.

We dug in some quick drains, but they’re a little inadequate and digger them longer isn’t really an option due to the over abundance of tree roots directly behind and down slope from the play set.

Here’s a diagram.

click to make bigger

Starting from the bottom of the diagram there’s the brown circle representing the dug out hole for the swing set area. The blue arrow indicates the slope and flow of water through our yard. The brown square in the middle of the large brown area is the swing set base. The black lines inside the brown circle are the drain pipes were installing to catch and drain water from the mulch. The long pipe following the back outline of the circle is attached to the black lines (pipes) at the back leading away from the play area. The red circles indicate the areas of roots and the invisible dog fence. The green represents the pine trees.

Without the roots and trees I would have just tried to dig the back drain trenches longer and daylight them down slope. Unfortunately our yard doesn’t extend that far and the slope isn’t that significant. So with the drain trenches as they are only a portion of the water actually drained from the play set basin.

What to do?

After piddling around in the mud for a while before work yesterday, I figured it out.

Taking from the gutter drain design my Dad installed at our house growing up, I decided to use a post hole digger and create inline “wells” in our drain trenches.

click to make bigger

In the diagram above you can see the brown lines representing the back of the swing set. The horizontal black line represents one of the drain trenches we currently have dug terminating when the roots get too thick. If we can’t go out, then we’ll go down. Two of the current trenches are long enough to get at least 3 wells dug. Some of the shorter trenches (we have 5 trenches total I think) may have only 1, but that’s all good. The terminal well will have a grated top, so water can overflow if it gets that bad. At each well point, I’ll T the drain pipe and drop a perforated pipe into the well to allow the water to drain into, fill and eventually dissipate. As the water volume in the system increases, it will fill the wells before flowing down the line to the next well.

Sure it’s possible some of the wells will never get used, but it’s also possible there won’t be enough. Either way as long as we make an effort to get as much water out of the mulch area as we can, we can hopefully rest comfortably and forget about this project.

I dug two wells last night. Took about 20 – 30 minutes per well. As I see it, I think we’ll have 10 wells. That’s a little over 3 hours of well digging. That’s considerably less time than it took to dig anything else for this. And yes, the second well I dug hit water at the bottom. This morning when I checked it there was about a foot of water in it. Which is fine. It’s just part of the ebb and flow of water through the ground or so I hope.

– b