French Drain

Last year in the spring, we noticed in my art room in the basement there was some moisture coming in after a big rain storm. After it happened a few more times we knew we needed to remedy the problem. Thankfully there is no sign of mold and we didn't want anything to start! After lots of research it looked like a french drain would do the trick. They can be as uncomplicated as just gravel to pull water away or just a pipe. We did a combination.

Digging down hill

The arrow is pointing to where all the damage is and the highest point of the drain. 

The builders of this house did a poor job grading the yard and one of the low points is that corner of the house. So after digging it out, we found the seam of the footer outside had a portion of the concrete chipped away from years of water damage. 

Can you see it on the right of this picture?

We filled it all in with a foundation repair concrete patch. It's still wet in this photo.

 

 The trench ends behind the retaining wall. We laid a small layer of gravel first, then a socked perforated pipe, then covered it all with more gravel.

Once our recent snow melts and the ground thaws we will finish grading the soil so it drains away from the foundation.

The digging was pretty much the only hard part. It was just time consuming. We probably could have gone a little deeper with the trench where the grass is because we didn't have much room for the sod after we filled it all in. Whoops! I'm hoping the grass will still grow over it :)

 

 

Sod back in place.

Soil blocker = the bomb!

When you get excited about a soil blocker, you know you are a gardening geek. I have no shame about that :) I thought I posted about my new tool last year but when I looked through my archives I realized I didn't.

The benefit of the soil blocker is little to no transplant shock since it you don't put it in a container. I love this thing. It takes some technique to get it right. I will share the big secret to getting the blocks to stay together... lots of water! You have to make sure the soil is really pretty wet and of course packed in there. There are many tutorials on you tube about how to use it.

Here the blocks are all formed. They don't have to be perfect (as you can see mine aren't!). I put in 4 broccoli seeds and the rest spinach. When I direct seed spinach in the garden it never works that great for me. So hopefully this will be better.

 After putting in the seeds, I covered the dimples? or holes or whatever you call them with vermiculite. Then watered it just a tiny bit where the vermiculite is.

Homemade seed mix

At the beginning of February, I did some research and decided to make my own seed mix this year. I normally use a soil blocker. The soil blocker takes a ton of soil since it compacts it into squares. I plan on making some this week since I need to start my broccoli and spinach seeds. So having my own mix will save lots of money.

However, for the onion seeds, I didn't bother with the soil blocker and put them into a tray. The soil will be dumped later on and they will be individually planted so no need to mess with the blocker for them. The onions were a good test to see if the mix worked.

I stayed with a sterile mixture, no compost or soil.
3 gallons peat moss (bought in a big square at lowes)
about a half gallon of vermiculite
2 Tablespoons limestone

So far so good!

I think I may need to add some kind of fertilizer once they get bigger.