Drainage for wet area near the river

   / Drainage for wet area near the river #11  
bigtiller said:
For every foot deep field tile is laid, it will drain 10 foot left and right of it.
so if you placed the tile 4 foot deep, you would need a line every 80 feet for good coverage.

Or you could trench a line on both sides of every problem area and hope for the best.
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Does tile work OK in a muck type soil?
 
   / Drainage for wet area near the river #13  
This sounds like a natural spring that surfaces where there's no slope in land for drainage. Is there possibly a berm,dam or hill that can be cut?
 
   / Drainage for wet area near the river #14  
jaxs said:
This sounds like a natural spring that surfaces where there's no slope in land for drainage. Is there possibly a berm,dam or hill that can be cut?
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My assumption was that it's a flood plain area, that has a lot of organics, and traps water for an extended period after flood stage, saturating the ground. you can't really do anything about the flood stage, really, but you can try to get the water off of it as quickly post flood as possible.

Around here, tile is only used for farm fields, and ditches/channels/swales are used for general drainage.

One thing the OP can do that will tell him/us a lot: take some post hole diggers down there and dig some test holes, maybe 3 ft down in the area, and see what the water table is. if the water table in the area is higher than the river, you can do something; if it's about the same, ditches aren't going to do anything but make a mess
 
   / Drainage for wet area near the river #15  
I should add, not that you asked (sorry); you mention the tree stumps/brush; being next to the river, this is what keeps that area from eroding (depending on shape/speed/volume of the river). You might need to keep some deeply rooted (or more likely, widely rooted) rougher veg in the area to prevent some pretty major erosion in floods.
 
   / Drainage for wet area near the river #16  
I would cut trenches and if you want to put drain tile into them that's fine...but leave them open until you get an idea of how they work. At least that is what I did. I got an area drained after several different ideas and tries, but in the process made every mistake possible.

After covering them, I have had a lot of problems with roots clogging mine. Mostly willow roots. Going to have to dig them up again. My advice is to make an access point every 75 feet for rooting them out.
Start now & budget for a roto rooter. We bought one... should have used heavier tile and bought a heavier rooter too. Like I said, every mistake.... we have about a quarter mile of creek frontage, so in that way the projects are similar.

Surprising how little slope is required on the drains. Get a slope gauge, a 2% slope is plenty. The trick is to make the slope so that the water can push any dirt through without leaving mud build up in the drain tile. Too much slope and the water outruns the dirt.

rScotty
 
   / Drainage for wet area near the river #17  
Field tile doesn't need a lot of fall. The crew I worked on set some of it 0.1 percent grade on flat ground. That is equal to 1 foot of fall per 1,000 feet, but that takes a pretty good laser or gps.
 
   / Drainage for wet area near the river #18  
In theory, there shouldn't be any sediment in the tile, unless something was gone wrong.
 
   / Drainage for wet area near the river #19  
paulsharvey said:
In theory, there shouldn't be any sediment in the tile, unless something was gone wrong.
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Right. And what keeps ithe pipe clean is getting the slope right. I like to start with a drop of about one percent. That's one foot of drop in 100 feet of run....which is sort of hard to measure, but turns out to be about 1/8" drop per foot - but I found that also hard to measure.

Watching the water run as I ws digging the ditch with the backhoe got the slope close to right. What I did to get the pipe sloped right was to buy a four foot slope level. From Kapro on Amazon. About $50. It has a series of vials set along the top and each one is a different percent of slope. That level made sloping the pipe easy.

Kapro - 105 Topgrade Gradient Box Level - with Slope Measurements​

 
   / Drainage for wet area near the river #20  
Extreme accuracy isn't required.

A 48 inch level with a 1/2 inch spacer glued/taped to one end is close to 1%.

For a longer level, find a straight 1x2 75 inches long, on edge, with a 3/4 inch spacer on the end, and a short level taped to the center. Or 8ft with 1in spacer.

Bruce
 
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