Posts Tagged ‘drainage ditch’
Flowing Water
Our drainage swales are finally flowing!
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The largest ditch along our southern border was a babbling brook yesterday.
Eventually, the ditch narrows and meanders away from our property, wandering its way through our neighbor’s cow pasture.
The snow is leaving, and it will travel to rivers that travel to the Mississippi that flows to the Gulf of Mexico.
B’ bye.
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Helping Hands
We are feeling a new level of satisfaction today, after an afternoon of long sought progress yesterday. Sure, it was Sunday, but our fence contractor showed up and made quick work of removing the old section of fence on the south side of our hay-field. At the same time, Cyndie and I worked together on clearing overgrowth in the main ditch just beyond that fence line.
With the advantage of having more people than just me out there toiling away, a lot more was accomplished in a short amount of time than I ever achieve on one of my home-alone days. While Cyndie was using the power trimmer to clear some brush, I cut out some small trees with a hand saw. After a short amount of time, I switched to the chainsaw and went after one of the large trees.
It was already dead, and there was nothing around it to worry about, so I may have been a little casual in my attempt to bring it down. My wedge cut wasn’t deep enough and the tree leaned back away from it. Luckily, I pulled the saw in the nick of time to avoid the pinch. On my own, I would have started devising some laborious attempt to pull or push it over, but with the fence contractor right there in a skid loader tractor, the solution was a breeze.
After he pushed it down, he asked me where I wanted it. I would have needed to cut it into small pieces and drag it away. He scooped up the entire tree with the forks of the skid loader and placed it on top of my brush pile. Done! I asked him to push over two other trees.
If I cut down a tree with the chainsaw, there is a stump left over. Tom would push a tree down, drive the forks under the roots, and pop the whole thing out of the ground. After he carried the entire tree to the pile, he returned to fill the hole and drive over it to pack it down. It was magical. It was incredibly quick. Tree gone, in an instant.
With obstructions out of the way, Cyndie encouraged me to go get the diesel tractor and mow the ditch with the brush cutter. I hesitated, not used to moving this fast, then allowed the momentum to carry me away. By the time we wrapped up our afternoon efforts, the majority of the ditch was cleared and mowed.
It was wonderfully satisfying. For me, it was a great chance to enjoy a day’s work with the support of helping hands.
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First Test
Yesterday we received a steady rain that coincidentally arrived on the day work was supposed to begin to install drain tile above the barn and paddocks. 
Instead of making a muddy mess by bringing in digging equipment, they limited their effort to delivering the tubing and pea gravel. It was a bummer that the project I have been pining for all summer was delayed one more day, but it was great to have our water problems vividly visible in real-time for the guys who are about to install a system to mitigate the flow.
Meanwhile, although it was a bit sooner than I hoped, I witnessed the first real test of our newly defined drainage swale. The grass seed I planted at the end of last week has barely had time to germinate, so I fear a good percentage of it was probably set in motion down stream by the flowing water.
There are some wispy visible sprouts making an appearance at the far end, so I’m hoping all is not lost. The good news is that, despite some of the minor undulations that concerned me, the water appeared to make a nicely controlled flow the full length across the pasture into the ditch on our south border.
I declare that we successfully passed the first test!
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No Foolin’
I think we just might have gotten past the messiest part of the spring snow melt season yesterday. At least, that’s what the optimist in me is hanging his hopes on. It is hard to shake the memory of that 18 inch snowfall that buried us last May and significantly prolonged the drying out of our property last year, but something is telling me that won’t be our plight this year.
A remarkable amount of ground made its first appearance of 2014 during yesterday’s dose of warmth and wind. We were blessed with two separate periods of relatively light rainfall which is always a big help in melting the snow pack. I was able to make my way along a good portion of our southern property line and was thrilled to find that the new culvert we installed, along with the preliminary improvements to open up the drainage ditch, are functioning brilliantly. It is easy to see where we should continue, and I have renewed inspiration and confidence about what I want to do next to maximize the benefits possible in helping our land drain in a controlled way.
The channel I made on Sunday is still in place at the edge of the southern ditch. Looking back up toward where all the water is coming from, you can see how much it wants to spread out now. One of my goals this summer will be to dig out a more defined creek bed across this field with our tractor, and then soften the edges to a gentle slope, and seed it with grass. Most of the year it will simply be a dry depression, only filling with water during the snow melt or a significant rainfall.
Our water-loving dog, Delilah, is mad about helping me get the water to flow. She runs up and down the channels and tries to bite the water wherever it ripples or gurgles. I like it when she helps down here because the ground isn’t muddy and the water is clean, so she just gets wet. The running back and forth does wonders to burn off her otherwise endless energy. When we came in, I toweled her off as she lay on her back, and then she curled up with the towel and took a nap.
On my way back to the house, I plodded past the labyrinth and discovered an interesting phenomenon. The melting snow is creating an inverse image as compared to the way it looked when I was shoveling the route in winter. It takes longer for packed snow to melt, so the path that I repeatedly trekked with snow shoes is now taller than the border areas of stones. They appear as depressions between the paths now.
It’s true. I’m not just saying that because it’s April 1st. Seriously.
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No Rest
We are now in the season of mud and ice. In the mornings, everything that was squishy and flowing the night before ends up frozen solid. Morning is the best time to get certain things done that require traffic in our wettest areas. After the sun shines on the ground for any length of time, travel around here gets pretty sketchy. I don’t know how the horses put up with it.
Well, actually, I do know one way they deal with it. They lay down and roll in the mud. Shortly after being brushed yesterday, 3 of the 4 laid down and massaged their backs with the manure laced mud. It does wonders for Legacy’s light complexion.
Yesterday was a day of chores for us, and we were blessed by a visit from Elysa and Anne, who helped out with several tasks. In addition to brushing the horses and helping Cyndie clean part of one paddock, they joined us up on the hill of the big field where we took early action on the recently exposed ground.
There were piles of manure that needed to be spread out and broken up, sticks to be collected and removed, weeds to be cut down, and pasture grass seed to be spread. We are hoping to improve the potential of growing desirable grasses, with less weeds, so we can cut it for hay.
The highlight of the day for me was getting water to flow off our property and into the drainage ditch along our southern border. We were getting little rivers of water running from everywhere as the snow melted, but toward the lower portions of our land, it was spreading out and pooling up in the slushy snow that remained. I took a spade shovel and headed down there with Delilah.
The water was almost over my boots in some places, making it quite a challenge to navigate digging a channel out of the slush to provide the water with a straight shot into the creek of runoff that was now flowing along our property border. Because of the way water-follows-water, I like to give it a path that creates enough momentum of flow that the uphill pools get pulled down to fill the void. It’s a lot like priming a pump.
But flowing water is fickle, and if the momentum is slowed by a dam of slush that collects, the water is more than happy to pick an alternate route, or it may simply stop flowing altogether.
The last chore we squeezed into the day was painting the drywall of our new storage room. It got a coat in the morning and another one after dinner to get ready for the finishing touches by our builder this week.
It was the kind of day that leaves you needing another day of the weekend, so you can take a day off to recover. The problem with that is, if we had another day of the weekend, we’d likely end up using it to get even more chores done. There is no rest for the weary.
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Rain, Rain
The weather here has taken a turn for the wettest again. In the last 3-days, we have had over 3.5 inches of rainfall. After being so dry during the second half of the 2013 growing season that our hay-field couldn’t produce enough growth to justify a second cutting, we now have plenty of water at the time when the things that grow are in transition toward dormancy to survive the harshness that winter will bring.
We knew we would be facing some challenges in the paddocks during wet periods, especially during the springtime, but we decided to just get the horses here and deal with it as it comes. The horses have quickly been able to show us what we are facing. Managing this is now our next priority.
My long-term vision was to carve drainage paths to direct water to flow around the paddocks and toward a main ditch that will direct water to the edge of our property where there is already a waterway in place. The immediate need to address this has led me to quickly try a test of the drainage grade to see if the water will flow. In two different spots around the paddocks, I have been pleasantly surprised, and am optimistic that my idea can work.
It will take some time, and repeated attempts, to create drainage paths that are durable and stable. Ideally, there will be grass growing in them, and it will take a while for that to occur. In the near-term, just getting channels created will greatly reduce the amount of water that makes it into the paddock in the first place.
We will probably still need to add some gravel to our paddocks, and even though we were told we can’t put gutters on this barn, we will be investigating a way to do that.
In every project we consider here, we tend to solicit as much advice as we can. I am always amazed at how often the responses we receive are at odds with each other, often completely opposite with regard to what is, or isn’t, possible.
Luckily, Cyndie likes to dwell in possibility, and I am learning to trust my gut instincts. Eventually, we come to solutions that work… rain, or shine.
Mission Creep
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but our simple project to install fences on our property, in preparation for safely securing horses (in case we should ever get any horses), has grown well beyond the scope of our original intentions. Planning and budgeting doesn’t really factor into dreams and inspirations as well as we need it to. Now we are in the midst of a water management project, that was triggered when trying to finish the front fence, and it became obvious that we could benefit from a gate in the front corner, but the access from the township road was on the other side of a drainage ditch. How are we going to pay for this? Creatively.
My favorite camera returned from the Canon service department yesterday afternoon, so I took some pictures of the new culvert being installed, to test the camera out.
Relative Something 