Incorporating a Marsh Into Your French Drain

We are putting in a french drain that’s going to need about 300 feet of pipe. We have another truckload of stone on the way. We like to work on plywood because it allows us to leave properties the way we found them. We do a lot of traveling back and forth transporting the dirt we take out of the trench as well as the stone we fill the trench with.

We have our mini excavator feeding our two Ditch Witch Operators and power cart. We ran two pipes parallel to each other. You can see we had to go 16 inches deep and the trenches are already filling with water. The subsoil is saturated. The trenches have already started doing their job, they are working great. They will be filled with the stone, pipe and, fabric later. Where do you take the water? Right here is a marshy area, I scouted through the whole area and shot some topols. The lowest point is this covert.

This is our reference point, we can’t go any lower than this. We’re going to clean it up and it will need to be maintained periodically. What we will do is set up our drain so it runs out to a hole full of coarse wash rock, the pipe will end in this basin. I drilled some half-inch holes in the basin, it will be buried in stone and wrapped in cloth. I want to keep any contaminants from this swap out of this drain system. We used the plywood to get in and out of the swamp as well. It made it much easier to get the equipment in and the dirt out.