On 12/05/2019 14:27, Chris Hogg wrote:
On Sun, 12 May 2019 04:18:53 -0700 (PDT), George Miles
wrote:

Our 7 houses need a new rainwater drain so the roof water doesnt flood the septic tank.

At first I though having a soakaway near my raspberries would add more water to the plants.

But maybe digging the hole,
(and the resulting water making new underground drainage)
would mean that in drought conditions the garden would get drier than if i didnt have this hole.

Should the soakaway be near the fruit plants or as far away as is possible?

George

You have seven houses all draining their roof water into the septic
tank? There's bad design for you!

I think you're over-analysing the situation. I doubt very much if it
would make a lot of difference to the remainder of the garden where
you put the hole. You've got to have the hole somewhere, so put it
where the water might do some good, near the raspberries if that's
your preference. The rest of the garden won't suffer.

Or even connect it to the pipe coming from the septic tank to the
existing drainage field, which is where the water always went, but
this time after the septic tank not before it, so that it doesn't
flood the tank.

This situation sounds awfully familiar to me after having once lived for
many years in a 200-yesr-old house in the Fens. I suspect each house has
its own septic tank rather than a communal one but the high water table
on such low lying land as we had and the requirement not to pollute the
nearby waterways with effluent made it a bugger of a problem to sort
out. Erme -you're not in my old house on the Norfolk Cambridge borders,
by any chance?

I think the question might be more for Gardeners' Question Time than
uk.d-i-y but whoever answers it will probably need to know more about
the type of soil and the height of the water table before they can help.

Nick