Dave in Retirement

Finally, after eight weeks, the workers arrived to install a new septic field. That’s a pretty cool excavator and it just fits the paths in the garden.

This shows the first run. The pipes run through plastic sections that prevent the invasion of tree roots. At the right end is the new distribution box. Today they covered this trench leaving a pile of excess dirt and lots of rocks, large and small. They had to leave early so I spent the afternoon moving the dirt around the yard and piling the rocks for future use. Tomorrow they return to install two more runs, one short and one long.

They finished digging, installing, and covering the two additional septic runs. This is how they left the yard. All in all they did a good job of protecting the gardens. Not happy with the look of the D box and it doesn’t smell very nice. I’m going to install some sort of access box. There is a pile of excess dirt for me to deal with as well as many piles of rocks of various sizes.

These past few weeks I’ve been working hard in the front garden, removing the grass from the funny shaped areas shown in this photo taken from the roof. I defined these areas a couple of years ago and just let them go wild. My idea is to have meadow areas with perennial flowers and I was slowly adding plants. It became obvious that the grass was going to out-compete most other plants and so I decided to remove it before planting more seriously.

The house in Garden Bay has a septic system circa 1992. No plan of the drainage field was ever filed but I knew it was out front, and I knew the location of the septic tank and distribution box. A few days ago I noticed the soil around the D-box was very wet and decided to investigate. After removing the soil a puddle formed. Not good. So I called the pumper service and they concluded that two of the three drainage lines were blocked.

These past two days have been spent investigating and worrying about what to do. It will be an expensive repair and will be a major disruption to the front yard and garden. Today the owner of the septic company came to access the situation to then generate a quote. Fortunately he was sympathetic to my concerns and gave me a good feeling about the installation of a new leach field.

more to come as the project progresses …