Posts Tagged ‘drainage’
Be Careful
Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.
We dearly wanted to improve the muddy situation that our horses face during the wet spring meltdown. Last fall we excavated an improved drainage swale, cleared out the overgrown drainage ditch along our southern property border, buried drain tile along the uphill borders of the paddocks, and applied several loads of lime screenings on the hill around the barn for improved footing.
We have been anxiously awaiting the thaw to see if our improvements worked the way we hoped. That thaw is almost complete now, and we are standing by to see how quickly the soil dries out.
What we couldn’t control was the amount of moisture we would be forced to deal with by the weather. Our mild winter left us with a below average snow cover and we have been without precipitation for over a week. The effectiveness of our improvements is hard to gauge because the ground is already too dry!
There is still plenty of time to receive some spring rain, but for the time being, we are experiencing what the meteorologists are phrasing as “pre-drought conditions.”
We wanted dryer conditions for the paddock footing, but this is not the way we would like it to occur.
It is interesting that the changing climate seems to be putting us at risk for dryer, drought-like conditions overall, while at the same time unleashing more copious dousings of precipitation from individual storm events. We get too much all at once and then not enough in between.
I am a bit concerned about how that will impact our intentions of growing hay. Over the last two years we have been unable to get more than one cutting in a season, because the spring and early summer have been too wet, and the rest of the growing season has been too dry. We haven’t had enough growth after the first cut to allow for a second batch of bales.
This year we are starting out dry. Who knows what we’ll get in the months ahead. I’m hesitant to wish for more moisture for fear of then getting more than we can handle. Wishes are not to be waved about carelessly. We should be clear about what we want and what we don’t want.
What are the rules again? I can’t wish for more wishes, but can I wish for a precise outcome? Not less than we need, and not more than we need.
Be careful what you wish for.
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Mucky Misstep?
I’m having some doubts about part of the solution we settled on for improvement of the footing in our paddocks. The water is not draining through the layer of lime screenings we added. We did not focus on packing it down immediately, thinking the process would occur naturally over time. We weren’t granted that gift of time by mother nature before the heavy dose of rainfall put our efforts for improvement to a test.
The wet screenings have taken on a consistency very similar to fresh concrete.
I’m not so sure that the water would run off the top of the surface if we had packed it anyway. It is discouraging to see standing water in all the divots left where the horses have stepped. Maybe I am expecting immediate results where the reality is that the ultimate improvement will not be perfection, but a reduced duration of muck. We can hope.
What I found to be even more demoralizing yesterday was, one of the bad spots is located above the main area that the drain tile installation is intended to help. Even after the drain tile is in place and working as designed, my impression is that the high ground just beyond the barn overhang won’t be greatly affected. I’ll be thrilled to find I am wrong about that.
On a more positive note, we are entering the winter season in a completely different situation than we experienced a year ago. Last year it was dry, dry, dry. I firmly believe that the dry fall of 2013 significantly contributed to the loss of many of our pine trees when the winter that followed was so severe. This fall the conditions are almost too wet, if that is possible. Our growing flora look healthy and happy, and should be ready for whatever winter dishes out this year.
Our animals appear just as ready. Delilah was so vibrant yesterday morning, sprinting around at full speed with a gleam in her eye and a smile on her little doggie face, looking as if the temperature had finally reached a comfortable range for her thick coat. I think her preferred seasons of the year have arrived.
Winter has always been my favorite season. Now, if I could just find a way to be as ready for it this year as our plants and animals are. First priority will be new muck boots. My two main choices of footwear have both developed leaks in them. The recent rains have been good for making that known to me.
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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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Planting Seeds
I put in an extra-long day yesterday, planting grass in addition to the normal daily chores of caring for our animals. Getting grass seed planted in the new drainage swale took almost the entire day. It was a day when I really wished I wasn’t working alone. Back and forth I walked, so many times, to get hoses strung together to reach the full length of the swale and then to turn the water on and off. The distance I seeded is almost 2 football fields long.
Just getting the full length watered down took over an hour. I did have a little “help” with getting it wet before seeding. I let Delilah chase the spray and run around in the dirt to stir it up a bit. From now on, I will need to restrain her somewhere when I want to water. With the seed down, I don’t want her tearing it all up when she chases after that irresistible spray.
I purchases a seed mixture from our local feed mill that has oats in it and is supposed to germinate within three days. That’s about all the growing time we have left this year. This is one occasion when I will be fine with a warm week or two in October.
The concern is, if I don’t get something to take root and help hold the soil in place, the water that will flow down this path in the spring could create a huge washout. I’ll deal with that if I have to. It’s just nice to have this improved definition for drainage finally in place.
upstream
downstream
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Great Starts
Our fall colors are off to a brilliant start. It was a little foggy when I woke up, and became thicker as time passed. It made me wonder what the dew point temperature was. In checking, I discovered it was 44°(F), which is what the air temperature had reached, so we were at 100% humidity.
I could see the sun rise over our horizon, and instead of burning off the fog, it became more obscured as it climbed. When it finally burned through the milky soup, the changing leaves began to radiate color at maximum glow.
My week got off to a magnificent start of its own yesterday, because the excavator finally showed up to create a better defined drainage swale across our pasture! Of all days for my cell service to go wonky, I didn’t receive the call that he was on his way. I was working down in the woods, clearing trail. I dragged a few branches out into the open to toss on the brush pile, and immediately caught sight of him up on our driveway. It was a very happy moment.
We briefly discussed a plan, which started with me moving the horses out of the way, into the pasture to the north of the driveway. Of course, I was wanting to do this quickly and placed the halter over the first horse that allowed. That happened to be Hunter. He did fine, until we reached the pasture gate. Then he became hesitant. I succeeded in getting him inside and headed back to get Legacy. Next, came Dezirea who was showing a little extra nervousness. The sound of the excavator’s skid-loader may have contributed.
When we arrived at the pasture gate, the rambunctious boys were crowding our path. I grabbed the handle of the web-line that creates our “gate,” and opened it to guide Dezirea in. As I did that, Hunter took advantage of me and hopped over the web as it sagged, getting himself loose outside the pasture.
In that second, he gained all my attention, but I had the gate handle in one hand and Dezirea’s lead line in the other. Luckily, he simply started grazing in the grass out there, giving me a chance to release Dezi from the halter and secure the gate before going after him. It was the classic opportunity for me to be in a hurry and him to not want to be caught. I know how that exercise plays out, but I felt pressured to get the last horse out of the paddock and open gates for the excavator. After a couple tries to entice him into the halter again, which he rebuffed instantly each time, I resorted to just getting the lead line over his neck.
It is not very secure, but he begrudgingly allowed me to force his return using that method, getting him back through the gate again and inside the pasture. It took some effort to relax my energy by the time I made it back to the paddock for Cayenne. She was her usual angelic self, and with the horses all together in the north pasture, I could focus on facilitating the excavating.
It was a joy watching the skill of the operator, Andrew, as he worked to create the gently sloping channel across the width of the south grazing pasture.
Now I have a time-sensitive need to get some grass seed planted. It’s so close to too late in the season that I had given up thinking about that part of the project. However, the weather prediction indicates there could still be enough time to get some growth.
Anything that starts growing now will be helpful come spring, when the flowing water could cause significant erosion if we don’t do anything.
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Wet Again
I have another picture for you to compare. On Sunday I posted a picture of the standing water in our paddock, and then yesterday, I posted the improvement visible after a couple of days without rain. Today, you can compare the difference a day —and 2-inches of rain— can make. We are wet, all over again.
Unfortunately, we experienced two different failures that contributed to the amount of water that inundated that large paddock. First, I wasn’t able to reconnect the hose that Legacy pulled off the trough and dragged into the paddock because he had squeezed the threaded end out-of-round. In haste, I grabbed the closest hose at hand, but it was a poor choice. It was one of those new collapsible type hoses, and for this application of draining the tank by gravity, that hose presented too much resistance. On top of that, it wasn’t long enough, so I grabbed another old hose that I figured I wouldn’t miss if it ended up a permanent fixture down there, but the reason I wouldn’t miss it is because it kinks easily. Kink, it did.
The end result was that the water trough beneath the downspout overflowed and poured directly into the paddock.
The second failure was a plug of silt and debris that dammed up my little drainage channel that runs behind the barn. It occurred right at the worst spot for the water to pour out of the channel and run into the most problematic spot of that paddock.
What that means is, all the water from that 2-inches of rain that fell on the barn roof, front and back, ended up pouring right into the paddock. This is the very thing that I established was the first and most important issue we needed to tend to in order to improve the state of our paddocks. We devised some rudimentary systems to prove the concept, and they have been working surprisingly well, up to this point.
I hate to be moping about this, especially in face of news about the level of suffering the people of the Balkans are enduring due to unprecedented flooding there. Our situation is frustrating, but it’s nothing like that. Yet.
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Inspiring Flow
Well, the threatened blast of a winter storm did deliver as predicted overnight Thursday and into Friday morning. We awoke to a white scene-scape with clouds continuing to unleash serious amounts of new snow. I cleared off the front steps first thing, so I could tell how much more we were getting during the daylight hours. Another inch fell in the morning, bringing our total accumulation to 10 inches. As soon as falling snow started to let up, I headed out to plow.
With temperatures following the storm predicted to rise well above freezing, all I needed to do was clear a path down the middle of the driveway. The sun would take care of the rest. Unfortunately, that simple task was made more complicated by how heavy and sticky the snow was.
Another unfortunate thing about the snow is how exponentially more muddy it has made the paddocks. It’s getting to be quicksand-like mud out there. I expect to be working on re-forming and re-opening a lot of drain channels today.
I opened the one on the back side of the barn yesterday, which involves shoveling out the slushy snow that causes the melt water to stand in place. Once the water has an open channel, it really starts flowing. In a major coup of drainage improvement, the water was not only traveling past the paddock, but even beyond the round pen before heading down toward the main drainage path. That is a great sign that my hopes for minimizing the water from above which previously drained into areas we don’t want it, can be realized. I didn’t think that was possible without more significant re-landscaping.
As good as that was, it wasn’t the highlight of my day. We have rigged one other trick to manage water runoff, and yesterday was the first time it was truly put to the test. We have placed one of our 100 gallon oval watering troughs beneath the downspout of the new gutter on the paddock side of the barn, and attached a garden hose to drain the tub. The hose is long enough to reach about three-quarters of the length of the paddock, where I have placed it into that flow channel from behind the barn.
It is working as well as I wished it could. Maybe even better. Now all the water from the barn roof that used to end up passing through the paddocks is going to be diverted around. That is a huge amount of water and will really help improve the condition of our paddocks. It’s inspiring!
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Relative Something 