Draining the Colour Wheel

The minidigger arrived yesterday afternoon, and as the evenings are lighter now, we managed to make a start. We discovered that we'd made the path down the drive wide enough, which was good, and got the digger down the ramp, turned (first bit of lawn chewed up!), and over into the corner of the new flower garden. I started by digging up the topsoil and turf, depositing it in the newly marked beds, which revealed the expected clay subsoil. I then moved the heaps of hardcore/rubble, which had been sitting in the beds, back into the corner. We wound up doing a lot of this by hand, as the digger—in my inexperienced hands—was picking up a lot of soil as well as stones.

Once we'd got the stones into the corner, I took the digger to the back of the furthest bed, having dug up the soil in the other sections, to level out and dig over. It sounds quick, now, and in many ways it was fast to do, too: the topsoil there isn't very stony, and the digger made quick work of it.

However, the messy work was only just starting, and unfortunately, so was drizzle. The rest of the day has been tiring, wet, muddy work, digging three trenches across the garden and laying land drain (in geotextile sock, as before), to improve the drainage. This corner of the garden's always been really wet, with standing water and waterlogged soil through the winter, which has always limited its usefulness. The landdrains are the first part of trying to fix this. There's an old clay pipe land drain, which is broken off at the top end (we think, at the site of an old milking parlour), but does drain away into the lower parts of the garden. It goes into the copse, which, if anything, is drier than needed, so diverting water to here is no bad thing.

We managed, before collapsing inside, to get an L-shaped pipe along the top of the beds, and down into the old pipe; one across the garden just under the bottom edge of the patio, and one two-thirds of the way down the garden. Between them, they should sort out the drainage, but we'll also be raising the ground level with the spoil from the pond, which we anticipate being gravelly (that is, better draining) soil.