A little more progress on the drainage trenches. I’m managing about an hour in the evenings after work, although the nights are drawing in, so I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to keep that up.
The existing pipe is about 70cm deep where it leaves our garden and heads towards the neighbours. We need to widen the trenches to roughly 40cm for our planned pipework, which will sit on a 10cm bed of pea gravel, with more gravel around the lower half of the pipe before backfilling.
Much of the soil we’re digging out will go back into the trenches once the pipes are laid, so I’m trying to keep it close to where we’re working.
The top 20cm or so is a mixture of sand, hardcore, bricks and stones. Below that, it’s clay. At the moment, the clay is moist enough to come out in big chunks, which makes digging easier and quicker—but it’s still hard work doing it all by hand!