Pig farming is just one of the many reasons to have a muck pit.
Muck pits seem like exactly the kind of thing you'd never want to appear on your property. They're filthy, wet, dangerous and can damage property and gardens. However, these outdoor landscape features have a multitude of uses to different people. A muck pit can be used for composting, dirt biking, off-roading with trucks, a cool shelter for certain farm animals and other reasons. The seemingly ugly and useless muck pit can be a surprisingly useful landscape feature. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
1. Mark out a piece of terrain that isn't anywhere close to property or objects you want to keep clean. Regardless what you use your muck pit for, it's going to be a dirty place and muck might start spraying onto anything nearby. If you're using the muck pit as part of a dirt-biking or off-roading site, you'll especially want it to be in the middle of an area with lots of clearance.
2. Excavate the ground on the side of your muck pit. If you're going to use the pit as a compost and manure storage pit, you'll want it to be deep with sharply inclined sides. For any other reasons you'll probably want something of moderate to shallow depth with gently sloping sides. For smaller pits, you can probably get away with using a shovel, but for anything larger you'll have to rent a small excavator. If using a shovel, bear in mind that even a single cubic yard of soil is going to weight a minimum of 2,300 pounds.
3. Line the excavation with a thick plastic sheeting. An ideal material would be the black rubber sheet used to line ponds. The sheet doesn't have to cover straight to the top edge of the pit, as it will still dramatically slow down moisture drainage if it covers even the bottom half of the pit's depth.
4. Refill your pit with the desired material. For a composting muck pit, just dump different organic materials in and cover them with a layer of manure for every two feet of depth while frequently soaking the whole mess with water. Mud muck pits, such as off-roading pits or farm animal pits, should just be refilled with the soil that was taken out of them (as long as it wasn't too sandy or clay rich). While refilling in the soil, saturate it with water for every foot of depth until the mud has the desired consistency.
Tags: muck going, other reasons, using shovel, with water, your muck, your muck going