Building Up the Back Yard

When one of my early slips drawn from the quarantine task jar compelled me to take on the drainage project along the rear north property line, along the HVAC units, I knew it was an unfinished challenge. I wrapped up the first efforts on that project with the drain line sitting a bit higher than the drainfield for the bulk of the back yard. The picture above tells the truth of it far better than my unending verbosity could.

We had a pretty good overnight rain system move through at the end of April, and it looked like I'd installed a koi pond back there. I mean: we were holding on to a lot of water!

The quick fix was to remove the endcap of the upper drain tray and make a small trench to release a good bit of it.

I was glad to get convincing evidence about the outlet for this drainage and confirmation of the reasonable effectiveness of my repairs last summer to that front wall drain on the north end (to be blogged about soon).

But that wasn't a solution, because over the last 10 or 11 years, the yard has washed and settled and that's why I've had intermittent issues with standing water back there with each good rain storm. It really needed to be built up.

Even though it wasn't a task drawn from the slip jar, the "koi pond" experience told me I'd better get busy on it.

But is it ever as easy as hauling a few wheelbarrow loads of soil from my reserves? Of course not. When I ran out of steam last summer, it was with a mostly-untouched truckload of topsoil sitting at the back of the lot. Around here, it takes very little time for roots to invade and infiltrate that fertile mass, so every wheelbarrow load had to be be screened by hand (which I've had to do many times now over the years).

There was load after load of roots and rock and mortar and sticks to discard, like that pictured above. In addition, I wanted to harvest some of the clay-and-rock discard in the southwest corner of the property, which was even more tedious and back-breaking. I didn't think about pictures from that part of this project, but I'll tell you that clay/rock/root/brick/mortar pile created from all the bad yard areas I've excavated is now up to about 8 feet high.

I took measurements and placed stakes in order to try to get a downward slope of about an inch roughly every seven feet. This was a multi-day project in early May and it kept me pretty busy...and wore me down! But I feel like it's a pretty good base layer, although I'll be anxious to get some good rainfalls to help settle it down more, knowing I'll be going back over it with more topsoil to even it out. Then I can think about seeding and such for fresh grass. This last photo below is from after 8 pm a few nights ago after I'd finished up, so it's sort of dark and less impressive than my sore back would like you to see.