Grey Water Idea

We are remodeling our home next year. Currently, we have a grey water line that takes sink and laundry water out a pipe to the coulee behind our house. It's a 100-year old system that I want to believe lets me get away with whatever I want as long as we don't move the kitchen. What I would like to do is have the pipe T into a leach pipe in a flower bed. If I do this, how far away from the house should it be? How often would I have to dig it out and clean it? Is this a bad idea? Have any of you done this successfully?

I'd put in a sand pit for the pipe to empty into and let that spill out into your flower beds.
Our set up like this is only about 10 feet from the back of the house to the pit (I also have a reed bed with fungi in the line up) from these it spills into our root vegetable garden space.

Our set up handles all sinks, shower and laundry water. The system starts about 3 feet from the back wall of the house; gravel, sand, reed, moss and fungi, sand, garden beds is the order of flow through.
We found out this year that we might want to put our beans into that area, some of the beets split from to much water this year. (record rains have created an over abundance of water this year)

I run our laundry water out to a mulch pit near a young lemon tree.  So far I have not had to clean the pit though I do sometimes have to redig it to clear the opening of the pipe if an armadillo gets in the pit and roots around.

Here's a good resource for ideas about greywater:  http://oasisdesign.net/greywater/createanoasis/#mulchbasin