October 22
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After a heavy rain, we arrived to find that the drive was impounding the rainwater around out containers as expected. We dug a small ditch with the tractor loader to allow the worst to drain. A week later, we returned to install a culvert under the drive so it would not happen again. We were originally planning on using two 6 inch pipe, but decided on a 15 inch culvert because we were afraid the pipe would clog from all the material from the pine trees. What follows is a step by step guide to installing our culvert.

First we dug a trench across the driveway.
Here is Cindy using her trusty Georgia Drag Line to dig the trench.
With the bottom slightly sloping in the direction that the water needs to flow, we laid in the culvert. We checked it carefully for height and slope. We needed to make sure that it was down far enough to have sufficient cover to support the weight of traffic over the drive.
We slowly backfilled with shell sand to bed in the culvert. It's is very important that the sand is worked under the culvert to provide support.
After about four loads of sand, it is ready to be washed in.
We used a hose on our water trailer to wash the sand under the pipe to ensure that it was full.
Gary used the tractor to back-fill using the dirt that we originally removed from the trench.
After back-dragging and compressing the soil by running over it with the tractor, the drive is back to near it's original condition.
The culvert is now ready to handle future rain storms.
Cindy then worked on digging a ditch from the outflow of the culvert to our drainage ditch.
At the end of the day, there was still some digging to do but the ditch was well on it's way to completion.