Relative Something

I’ve got a problem with my little drainage swale that we paid to have excavated last fall. It is already filled up with sediment.

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Part of me wanted the swale to be a bit deeper than it ended up, but we had to go with the existing geography of the surrounding land, and to achieve the gentle slope we want, over the full distance we need to cross, it can only be cut so deep.

One source of my problem is that the excavation happened so late in the year that I wasn’t able to get good coverage of grass growing over the full distance to hold the soil in place. The other source of my problem is one I overlooked. There is a lot of runoff coming from the paddocks. I’m not sure what I am going to do about that.

It frustrates me to think that I need to re-dig the swale already, and destroy the areas of grass planted last year that did take, but right now, that seems like the thing to do. Get it dug out now and allow myself plenty of time to get grass growing along the full length.

Solving the runoff from the paddocks is the bigger challenge. I could probably install the little plastic fence that is commonly seen at construction sites, but that is an ugly-looking solution. I want the water to drain, but I don’t want it to carry any topsoil away when it does.

I’m going to need to do some research on that one. Just like so many things in nature, it’s a complex situation with multiple influences and the full range of possible outcomes. Maybe a little pond at the low spot of the paddock to act as a catch basin that can then overflow excess water into the swale, without the sediment.

Then I would just need to dig out the pond occasionally, and I could move the soil back uphill where it came from. I’ll take some time to pond-er the possibilities of that potential solution.

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