I had a dirt trail cut out of a hillside on my property expanded into a gravel road last summer. The general soil the hill is made from is clay. The builders did crown the road and put in a small ditch on the hill-side of the road. The problem I have is that small amounts of dirt will always fall or wash down into the ditch and block it.
I’m afraid that come spring that will cause the run-off to be forced across the actual road and wash parts of it out. We don’t get much rain or snow here, but it tends to come fast in short downpours and I don’t think it will take much to cause me problems due to the slope of the road.
I don’t have any excavating equipment to keep the ditch clear, and when the dirt will fall in is unpredictable anyways. I only come by periodically, so I need a way to keep an open channel for run-off.
Some pictures (sorry about the snow covering some details up):
The ditch is a couple feet wide and maybe 8-10" deep (when cleared). Would laying a perforated pipe down the length of the ditch allow most of the uphill water to get past these little slides, or is there a smarter way to avoid pooling? The portion of road in question is about 1/8 mile long. Thanks .
I’d suggest 4" perforated drainage pipe, but if you want it to last you’ll have to use some course rock/gravel around the pipe. Lay down several inches of rock, then the pipe, then cover it with rock. You might even consider a layer of that porous garden cloth over the pipe, before the top layer of rock, to help preventing it from silting up. Put the perforation down for the same reason. You could use plastic pipe, like they use for drainage fields, as long as it isn’t going to be driven over.
A.R. Cane’s idea is a good one. Plastic pipe is fine, even if driven on, if you have at least one foot of soil on top of the pipe.
Your bigger problem is that cut in the hillside. Without a retaining wall, that hill will never stay in place. Also, looking at the photos you supplied, the exposed section of the hill looks more like sand, gravel, and silt to me.
Robby makes a good point, as you show in your second pic., that cut is going to continue to erode. The solution I suggested is going to be fairly expensive, probably at least a couple grand, but trying to stop erosion from that cut is probably a whole lot more and if you fix the drainage in the ditch, it’s just going to get covered up by the erosion. If you had access to a tractor w/ a blade, you could leave it as it is and just rescrape it once or twice a year. It’d probably be cheaper to buy a used tractor, or rent one, to keep it clear, than it would be to fix the landscaping.
Talk to your local Ag extension office. They might know of plants that’ll colonize and stabilize your slope. Judging from just the photos though, that subsoil doesn’t look real promising.
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