Drainingage

[soup]

I have an area of the garden that is prone to standing water, the soil is "clay" so drainage is poor at the best of times. Was thinking of digging a hole and placing pipe with holes in it (what's the proper name for that?[weep pipe?]), covering it in pea gravel, then replacing soil on top (discarding any soil that doesn't fit back down the hole due to the pipe and the gravel). This hole/pipe will run from the "bloody" bit the entire length of the garden. Can anyone foresee any obvious gotchas or have alternate ways of doing things?

[soup]

That should of course be " 'F'loody" (I don't hate the garden that much).

[AJH]

Land drain? The pvc pipe we used was wavinflow

There are things called fin drains which look like a pipe with a vertical fin, the fin is covered in geotextile to filter any soil out.

Apart from that what you describe is much what land drains were but nowadays geotextile is used to stop the shingle and pipe silting up, effectiveness depends on the soil type as fine silt will soon clog land drains and clay soils don't connect well to them (in agriculture a mole plough will be used to form runs into the gravel above the pipe).

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think if there is enough shingle below the pipe, that will silt up before the pipe does.

You may find that actually a bloody great hole backfilled with porous rubble and suchlike, going deep enough may take you below clay level anyway: when I was digging post holes here, I was intrigued to find the sopping wet soil gave out about 3 foot down, below that I was running into chalk and so on, and the subsoil was much drier. Our pond, which is unlined, never fills up to the brim, no matter how much water goes in it..

In fact, we have solved a muddy bit of garden by the simple expedient of slapping down a load of MOT and gravel, and heaping topsoil on it. It raises the walkable grassy bit just enough so that the normal sheet of water running over that part of the garden runs underneath it!

So waht iam sayingis that although a perforated pipe in a french drain is really good at draining a specific small area, if there is somewhere the water can run to, for a larger area, maybe all you want to do is simply raise the level abut 4-6" with MOT type 1, of the chalky sort, followed by gravel or sand, and push the topsoil back over it all.

[Martin Bonner]

For this /particular/ application (curing a boggy lawn) MOT type 1 is probably excessive. Also, provided the sand is a bit dirty grass will grow pretty happily on it (no need for expensive top soil).