It is true! The grass is always greener… over the septic tank! One of the things that is always a concern when you buy a house in the country is whether or not there is a good, functional septic system. There was a new, accessible system in the farm house so we are pretty sure that one will work, but we couldn’t find the tank for the main house. The drainage worked fine when we hooked up the plumbing so we were hopeful that everything would be OK but you don’t know for sure until you clean out the tank.

In the Fall we noticed that there was a small circle of greener grass in the front yard. The warmth of the septic tank seeped through the lid and kept the ground warmer so… you can now confidently tell all your friends where the grass is greener!

When we bought the farm we knew we would have surprises, but, one of the surprises that you don’t want is septic problems in the winter if you have a buried tank! When the ground is frozen you can’t dig a hole… so I dug a hole in the fall just in case and we didn’t get around to having the tank pumped until the Spring.

Sure enough I found the septic tank lid about two and a half feet down

And sure enough, we didn’t get around to pumping the tank until the Spring… Now, we do a lot of the work around here, or maybe I should say Jeanie does a lot of the work around here, but this was one job that we were not interested in doing! The guy came with a big truck and a long vacuum hose and sucked everything out of the tank. It looked to me like a pretty s…..y job…

This is about as close as I wanted to get!
This is a root that had grown down inside the lid…
It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it!
luckily when it was all emptied out the tank looked great!

Luckily it was in great shape because septic tank problems can be 30 to 40 thousand dollars…

The hole was full of rocks which made the digging quite difficult… so I took a piece of an old fence that we found in the meadow and sifted the dirt back into the hole. I got four five-gallon buckets full of rocks which I used to fill in a groundhog hole under the back porch. The next time I have to dig this up it will be much easier!
You can’t even tell there was a hole!

It was definitely worth the $225 for someone else to do this job!