Colina Verde

This is a little hard. Get the back side in and use your thumbs to force the 4" into the hole. It fits just right so you may have to squeeze the little tabs. Click it in about two or three corrugations to make sure it's not comming out. I have really strong hands, and they were sore after this, so you may need a screwdriver or something to help pry them in.

You can see the holes don't need to be exact, that's why I wanted some wiggle room to fit them in. If your off a little it doesn't matter.

I left those green "T" posts to help keep the 6" in place and will pull them out just after. I cut that 6" ADS long because one end needs to come out of the ground inside the greenhouse. The same is true at the opposite end on second manifold. I used a 4-4/8" hole saw to cut all the holes at about every 18". I didn't measure, just eyeball the pipes below.

Now you can see the fill nicely compacted about up to the 18" mark. I stopped shy of 18" to have some wiggle room to work with those pipes. Now I removed the screws that held the pipes in place. I removed the wood and posts, we don't need any of that anymore the fill will keep the pipe in place. You can see the string behind the pipes, and everything is looking nice and level.

The first dump truck load I used the backhoe to sprinkle the fill over the center of the pipes covering all about 8 inches or so. You can see the tracks where I ran the excavator over it to compact the soil. In this picture I've dumped the second or third load and will spread it out using the excavator. Six or eight more loads to fill the area to the 18" level where the next layer of 4" will go.

This first layer of ADS needs to be 3'- 4" deep. That's 3'- 4" from the finished floor of the greenhouse. Each tube is about 18" apart. The next layer will be 18" above the first, and in-between also 18" apart. Now I'll start to backfill.

You can see I've brought a lot of fill in and the East, West, and South have all been built up to about 18" from the bottom of the hole. The North side will be ramped up as I fill so the truck can back up and dump there. On the East and West I've installed some posts and wooden horizontal members to hole the end of the 4" ADS in place while I backfill. It's about 18 inches from the outside of the greenhouse you'll see why later.

This area was tricky to build, and I spent a lot of time figuring out where this unit should be placed. The ledge was a problem, I wanted it to be more to the west, but because of the ledge, and the new slope I would be creating by bringing in fill I was forced to locate the greenhouse where you see it. I'll bring something like 130 to 150 yards of fill. My little dump truck only holds about 3.5 yards so this is very time consuming.

I built some boxes for footings on the corner posts to give them some weight while I worked and anchor them in. I believe each footing has three 80 pound bags of concrete. The pipes I used are 1-5/8" x 6' fence posts by Everbilt (the 1-3/8" x 10' top rail tube will slip right in and fit perfectly - more on that later). The tops of the pipes run a little wild because the ground isn't exactly level yet, so I'll cut them off later.