Ditch Witch

Be careful when you start a project 

that you know what you are getting yourself in for!

I noticed some areas of rain water pooling near the walkways to the house and started investigating.  Could I create a channel to drain the puddle?

One of my favorite activities as a kid was rerouting water from puddles, creating canals and mini-ponds.  As a preschool teacher, we all loved the rainy days by the sandbox, getting messy playing with water flow while wearing our rain boots!

Here, my simple plan has quickly snowballed into a higher-level engineering project with several Home Depot trips, perforated conduits and gravel sublayers.  

Now I’m committed to dig this trench shovel-deep at a consistent sloping gradient…

 

Luckily, the hill slopes away after about thirty feet, 

so my ditch-digging days are finite (fingers crossed!)