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OT - Advice on mud control.

S

Steve Suesens

Member
While building my pole barn I brought in a few truck loads of fill compliments of the local pool builder. Some of the dirt was of a very high clay content and holds moisture. The area in front of my people door remains muddy long after the rest of the perimeter is solid. This spot slopes away from the barn and I"ve got gutters around the edge. I"ve considered crushed granite but am looking for other options to help this area dry out faster. We had two inches of rain a week ago and the area is still soupy. Thanks for your replies!
 
Mix in sand with the clay. As a kid, we had a house built on an old river bed. Dad brought in load upon load of sand, and we tilled it in. We finally got the water to drain, but it took a LOT!
 
I believe I would remove the dirt fill at the door where you are having trouble and replace it with coarse limestone gravel. You probably also need to try to provide some drainage from the door area so water doesn't stand there.
 
Farm and ranch stores sell a product called Pen Pro made for that exact problem. Same product is marketed for baseball fields under the label Diamond Dry.
 
I would do as Stephen suggested and install a drain system to get all the water to drain away.
I have my gutters plumbed so almost all the water is drained to the street. Some of it drains down the driveway. The sump pump is also connected to the drain pipe to the street. I don't get any water in the basement unless we get 3 inches of rain at once and the ground is soaked. Hal
 
Clay is very bad about holding water so you have to make it let go of the water so you need to mix in sand or gravel or some other such thing that will in turn open it up to let the water out. Ya a drain system will help a little bit but you have to open up the pores of the clay to get most of it out so sand or gravel will work well if mixed in well
 

lime chips? Gypsum? sand is probably the cheapest.
part of the reason, it holds water is because it was saturated when it was dropped at you place, too wet to properly compact.
That being said, you'll have to let it dry out to compact it. Then, just the top (surface) will get nasty.
Now, being that it is in front of the door, you may someday want concrete there.... Some soil, mostly clays, expand where they get wet. This is a major cause of concrete cracking. If concrete is in your future, this condition will have to be corrected first, unless you like the "cracked" look.
sl
 
He gave it to you beacuse it was the "brown" dirt from down in those pool holes. What you wanted was the "black dirt" he scraped off the top and saved.
 
Steve.........do you know what you gitt when you mix sand into clay??? CEMENT & BRICKS.....don't do it!!!

Byte the bullet, and remove yer muddy soup. Install drain tiles (also known as septic drain pipe) Then cover with large chunks of gravel. NOT PEA-GRAVEL!!! now top with pea-gravel .......drained Dell
 
(quoted from post at 07:53:37 12/18/11) While building my pole barn I brought in a few truck loads of fill compliments of the local pool builder. Some of the dirt was of a very high clay content and holds moisture. The area in front of my people door remains muddy long after the rest of the perimeter is solid. This spot slopes away from the barn and I"ve got gutters around the edge. I"ve considered crushed granite but am looking for other options to help this area dry out faster. We had two inches of rain a week ago and the area is still soupy. Thanks for your replies!
Click to expand...

Build some forms, get 20 or 30 bags of quik-crete, and be done with the muddy mess.
 

I have worked on a few drainage projects and this sounds like one to me. Mixing sand in could take a whole lot of machine time as would mixing in chunks of gravel. You say that you have slope, so I would suggest a "french" drain. not necessarily real deep, but correct, On the construction projects that I worked on the ditch was dug, geotextile laid out, pipe laid, ten inches of 3/4 stone beside and over pipe, fabric folded over, then a foot or two of sand. hard for water to stay in a slope of stone and air and sand. As others have said, compacting clay fill will reduce it's ability to absorb water.
 
Get rid of the clay, put down a layer of 3" shot rock and drive it in with your vehicles and then top it off with 3/4"(-) crushed rock to bring it to grade.
 
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