My mom's septic field busted and so I've been learning about them to try and find the cheapest/funnest (and you know, totally to code) way to fix it. What I have so far is that its mainly about holding the wastewater over a large area so it can drain into the soil. The problem where I live is I think there is a lot of clay in the soil, preventing drainage.
Between my mind's tendency to go weird with projects (what if I rammed sticks along the bottom of the ditches, would that create little drainage tendrils as they converted to soil?) and also thinking about what I'd want to do with any leftover dug up dirt (there's an old pile of branches in her yard that stuff has started growing out of, could try to turn it into a little hill) I had a sudden realization:
"Wait, clay is stuff!"
So I did some quick research and yup, it looked like it might be possible for me to extract clay from my soil. This opens a ton of possibilities for my nieces and me to have some fun.
My process was probably horrible but first I put some dirt clumps (taken from somewhere than the busted drainage field), put them in a glass jar and added water.
Once they were pretty saturated I crushed it all up and stirred.
The general idea as I'm understanding it is that other components of dirt- sand and silt will quickly settle from the water within a minute or two while they clay will remain suspended (and the organics will float to the top, I should strain these but for my first experiment I just sort of hand pulled what I could).
Once the settling occured I poured the clay water into a new jar. The sand/silt in the old jar still felt very clayish, so I think my extraction was pretty poor. But it still seemed like it was working, so I kept going.
The next step was to hang it in fabric and let it hang for half a day to a day. I grabbed a little piece from my niece's scrap/toy fabric. It was very loose fabric, so the water dripping out was brown (my clay!) when it should be clear. More clay lost, but onward!
Next morning I took down and opened up my present.
Look there! A little piece of mold-able clay!
The next steps are:
- Try again with a 5 gallon bucket (well, I already have. I'll write it up soon)
- Get some more buckets, figure out a good fabric and scale up my clay production.
- Figure out a wood kiln design and start making some pottery (an experiment with general non-purified dirt I think I can hit the requisite temperatures pretty easy in a burn barrel in the mean time)
Here's to more experimenting!
P.S. I know my photos don't do a great job of showing the process. I wasn't thinking about making a post when I did it. But then tonight I thought, "Hey, make some people on Hive have access to dirt" so I went ahead and wrote it up in case any of you want to try it, and especially if any of you tell me I'm doing it all wrong and there's a more efficient way.