For many years now I have tended a garden out my back door, for various reasons, of which I’m sure you can ponder a few.  Anticipation of an inflationary trend, learning self-sufficiency, and concerns about the safety of our food supply, never mind the actual nutritional value, has made the “garden fresh” taste a mere bonus to accompany the hard work needed to make it happen,  It’s a labour of love.

Regardless, a long awaited project of mine has been to make use of the space upon which my greenhouse has sat since I bought this place in ’99.  All told, the footprint of that building, including the sidewalk tiles, was 20′ x 14′.  I wanted to grow food with the 280 feet of space rather than store a bunch of stuff I rarely used.  I would eventually build a proper shed alongside the house for this purpose, but this, and other ideas had always been thwarted by either sheer laziness, time issues, a lack of funds, poor planning, or a potpourri of the same reasons.

Well, this year, after the repeated flooding brought on by seasonal rains, the scales finally tipped in the proper direction to make it happen.  In the image above (right of the fire pit) you can see the small grey circular tile I made as a cover for a five gallon bucket dug into the ground in the spring of 2020.  This was done to act as a sump for that patch of grass, which gathers all the rains from both adjacent properties, and quickly turns into a little swimming pool.  What you see below gathered in about an hour, and with no place to go but down toward my weeping tile, I could either watch with disdain, or go out there with a scoop shovel and try to do something – anything – about it.

So, in conjunction with the bucket sump, my temporary solution was to gut the pump from a free washing machine on Kijiji.  With some 30 feet of sump hose attached, and my cordless drill to drive it, I would plunge the pump into the bucket (tile removed), and pump the water out to alley.

This worked fine enough, yet it still required me being out in the rain to solve the problem.  While it’s nice to have a solution, it’s far better to have one that doesn’t %$!* suck, so that quickly lost it’s luster.  Thinking…. thinking… I pulled out the famous last words…

While I’m at it…   “Yes, while I’m at it, I will run a drain out to the alley… next spring… when I finally move the greenhouse.  I hope.”

I’d had the whole winter to think about it, so by the time spring was starting to show itself I had a plan and a flow chart in mind.  The first thing was to move the greenhouse, which was easy enough.  I removed all the items, added a few braces, and with the help of a few good friends and a sawzall, we marched it onto the patio between the house and garage.

This served a double purpose.  First, it provided a ready made solution to re-storing everything I had just removed, and second, I finally had a screen to block the view from my neighbors yard, who had chosen to point cameras at my property because he feels I’ll do something to his annoying little rat-dog he refuses to train not to bark.  It’s not the dogs fault.

Aaaanyways, with that in out of the way, all the gravel had to be removed, which seemed easy at first…

I  quickly found that only the top few inches were loose, and the rest were a stubborn mixture of gravel and mud gathered over the years.

Truly exhausting work, I was glad to have started as early in the year as I did, and the evidence is in the color difference between the layers of gravel.

Removing the sidewalk stones uncovered a gravel pathway that had been tried before.  This was gravel and slate, since covered over with dirt to level, and more sidewalk stones.  Removing the gravel from this without taking the layer of mud on top was fun.  Oh yeah. 

From there, I ran a rototiller over the whole yard a number of times, and the process of leveling in began.

There was a LOT of work to fill in the hole where the greenhouse had been, starting with old boards along the fence to set a grade.  The end result I wanted was to slope inward from either side, and a gentle slope toward the rear.

Pulling dirt from the back, leveling it in, running the tiller again, and adjusting again and again… was all done with grunts and moans, but I got there eventually.

Then I dug a ditch down the middle at a grade below the bottom of the bucket in the lawn.  I had a builders level I used for this, which came in awful handy getting the grade right on the plumbing.  By now the neighbors are thinking I’m nuts, so why stop?

Plumbing was run from the bucket right out to the back alley.  I added a line at the water box to take care of the overflow during spring as well as possibly put a sink in sometime in the future.  Having a basin for washing up carrots and the like is really nice to have on hand, but as yet unplanned.

I then buried it all again, tamped it down and watered it in really well.  Here, I was amazed at how well the sod fit back into the lawn once I was finished.  I sprinkled a little fertilizer underneath it for good luck, and then watered the hell out of it.

The next step was to setup string lines, and cover it with sidewalk blocks.

The overflow system here was a bit of a head-scratcher until I pictured a p-trap and started building one upside down.  I added a valve to fill a sink or buckets, or whatever.  This is a whole lot more impressive once installed, and the headaches that overflow circuit takes care of cannot be understated.  I have mistakenly emptied the entire box a number of times in past years trying to preemptively drain off a few inches during rains, with the key words being ‘during rains’.

The box needs some love, but all in good time.  You have to remember, I was unemployed, with the plandemic in full swing.  Paint and a new roof will come in the next year.

The overflow is a seasonal attachment only slip-fit into place, removes with two screws, and has since been painted to protect the PVC from sunlight.

At the back of the lot, along with a ridiculously small spot for raspberries, I drilled a hole deal for surface overflow.

From there, planting the next garden began, and what was left to discover was what had been overlooked, and what could be improved upon.

With potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, onion and beans in the ground, beets, celery, lettuce, and spices yet to be planted, and bird cage for the peas yet to be built, it was already a raving success.

The icing on the cake, of course, is the view from the kitchen window which now excludes the neighbors’ weed infested yard.