Last spring I purchased a house through a foreclosure sale, because of this I can't ask the previous owners the many questions I have. The property was all words when they bought it and they clear cut 8 acres for pasture and another 1.5 acres was thinned out for the home site. The pasture is divided in two and the lower side is always wet. My driveway is approximately 1/4 mile long and they never installed proper drainage to allow water to move from the high side to te low side of the driveway, thus the driveway act as a dam. There is a small watering hole they dug out its about 6 feet deep when full and dropped approximately 2 feet at the lowest point during an extremely dry summer. The earth around this hole is banked up as if to keep runoff out of it. Among the paperwork for the house was a hand drawn plan showing the house garage barn and had the watering hole listed as "potential water source".
My plan is to remove the fencing for the lower half of the pasture put in approximately a 1 acre pond and use the material removed to grade along the driveway and fill in low spots in the pasture. Currently the pasture is always wet, I dude test holes 4 feet deep and watched them all summer the water never went more than 1 foot below the surface of the ground. When it rains the entire lower pasture floods and the watering hole exits through a culvert that is at the same level as the driveway. Where it crosses it creates a seasonal stream that is dry most of the time. I took some elevations and found that I have about 6 foot elevation drop from the high side of the pasture to the low side, There is 14 ft of drop from my home site to the low side of the pasture.
If it were you where would you start? I need to get the standing water taken care of because the trees it is backing up into have started to die, the situation has been going on since 2012 when the driveway was installed. Thanks for any help!
I was only able to upload one picture, my other ones are too large.
