Posts Tagged ‘erosion’
Home Happy
I’m still thoroughly enjoying being home again but last night’s dinner of grilled pork chops left over from one of our fantastic meals up at the lake gave me a moment of hesitation as I mentally revisited the greatness of those days.
It’s a rough comparison since my day yesterday was spent sweating over pulling weeds, running the power trimmer, and mowing grass in the tropical heat wave of the hottest July on record. Who wouldn’t prefer to be back up at the lake?
Well, I’m pretty happy being able to sleep in our usual bed with the conveniences of a bedside table. I really like our shower. I’m spoiled by how much room there is, allowing for soaping up just beyond the spray of water. My regular routine of charging my phone and laptop works best with my home setup.
I like having the manure compost under daily control. Once every week or week and a half is just too much work all at once to get piles cooking efficiently again. Getting grass mowed before it gets too long is also a preference.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
After dinner, we walked the trash and recycle bins down to the road with Asher at our sides, making it back with time to spare before the first wave of thunderstorms arrived overhead. That weather came in with an ominous-looking cloud line and a dramatic burst of tree-bending wind.
The brief duration of the heavy downpour was a bit anti-climatic when that ended up being all that happened.
Not that I was looking for weather trouble. Quite the contrary. We already have the makings of a small canyon in the paddocks where draining rainfall has washed away the lime screenings into the main drainage swale. The battle against gravity and moving water is never ending in my quest to best manage runoff.
I’m afraid it’s time to extricate the back blade from the depths of the shop garage for attaching to the diesel tractor to scrape gravel back “upstream.” I was relatively successful the last time I tried doing that but the exercise remains on the fringe of skills I have acquired on the big tractor. It always feels like I am on the verge of making things a lot worse instead of better.
Regardless, we are home and that is making me as happy as it always does.
.
.
Bridge Built
It hasn’t started raining today yet, but precipitation is on the way. Knowing that, yesterday I made it a priority to finish the bridge I started a week ago. I wanted to get it done while the weather was nice. I’ll let the pictures tell most of the story:
Once the frame was complete, I used the cut pieces (previously employed as shims to level joists during assembly) for reducing friction when I single-handedly dragged the base across the gorge. It was heavy!
For now, there will be a step up onto the deck, but at some point in the near future, I plan to dig down so the ends will be at ground level so the lawn tractor can roll smoothly up and over.
I wonder how heavy it is now.
If we get too much water flowing, the whole thing will get pushed out of position. However, if that happens, we will have other flood-related problems to deal with that will make the shifted bridge a minor concern.
I’m going to bank on the likelihood that’s not gonna happen.
.
.
Serious Soaking
First, I want to share an image that I received from Cyndie yesterday morning after she read my post. Exhibit A:
She had forgotten to send it earlier, but my description of how Delilah loves rubbing her snout in the snow reminded her.
Just as I predicted, there is very little snow left now. It was very gloomy all day, and rained throughout, but being mostly chained to my desk, I didn’t really notice how much rain actually fell. All I had to go on for what was happening across the state line at home, was the weather radar.
My main concern was over how the thunder might be upsetting Delilah. I wasn’t sure about what hours she might have the company of Anna, our animal sitter who helps out between classes at University of Wisconsin – River Falls. It’s hard to pinpoint the minutes of big thunder claps booming.
I did find the telltale evidence of a throw rug at the deck door pushed up into a pile, indicative of her usual tizzy of “shouting” down the big bully who is threatening us with all that rumbling noise.
From her location and behavior when I walked in the door, I’m guessing she tired of the stormy weather and took refuge in the one place without windows. She didn’t get up until after I walked in –an uncharacteristic behavior– from the rug in a short hallway between bathroom and bedrooms, where she had obviously been sleeping.
The situation at home turned out to be an anti-climax to the alarming sights I witnessed on my drive after passing through River Falls. The whole way from work was wet, but closer to home there must have been an extreme downpour.
Just south of River Falls, I spotted the first epic flooding, where it was pouring over a side road, making it impassable. A short distance later, I noticed a car turning around on an adjoining County road. As my car moved past the intersection, I saw that a highway crew was trying to deal with a missing lane of asphalt that had washed away.
Five miles from home, I cross what is usually a little meandering stream, but the outlines of the banks were completely indistinguishable beneath what was now a giant flowing lake.
The water flowing in ditches looked like raging rivers. I worried about what I might find at home.
Luckily, although there was an abnormal about of water wherever I looked, the damage was minimal.
We now have a pretty significant washout on the path around the back pasture. I’m afraid I will need to resort to a bridge over that gully now, if I want to keep mowing that route with the lawn tractor.
It used to be a slight depression that I could drop into and drive up out of, to keep mowing without interruption. Any attempt to repair the gulf with fill, so I could continue to drive over it, would just get washed away with the next heavy rain.
That spot is calling for a load of field rocks, which then leads me to the plan of needing a bridge for the lawn mower.
Our land is in a constant state of change. I think the rate of change is accelerating due to a certain alteration of the global climate.
It’s intimidating.
.
.
Making Peace
It is getting to a point where I think I just need to make peace with the fact that water runoff on our property will carve its own path no matter what feeble attempts I make to direct it.
We received another short-but-robust deluge from the rain gods yesterday afternoon, which generated eroding runoff flow digging ever deeper into all the existing rills and washouts that had already evolved from the last few downpours this summer.
While standing on one of the spots inside the small paddock where our insufficient attempts to establish a direct route to the drainage swale had long ago spectacularly failed, I tried to envision what a successful solution might look like.
I picture a much more assertive effort along the lines of what you would see done to create a drainage ditch along a roadway. If we dig an unmistakable ditch, we could dump the material we scoop out of it to fill the washouts we’d rather not have.
The big challenge with a serious excavation is getting planted grass to sprout and hopefully hold soil in place before rainfall gets a chance to wash it all away. If money were no object, maybe we could line the ditch with enough river rock to form a creek bed.
Aw, heck, why stop there? Let’s just line it with a rubber pond skin first, and then pour on the rock. Wouldn’t that make a sharp-looking dry creek that’s always ready for a flash flood. It’s called Rainscaping.
There are a lot of images out there depicting some incredibly artistic solutions along these lines. Fifty dry creek ideas right here! But there is one thing missing from all photos I saw: weeds.
If we tried any of those solutions, in a very short time, you wouldn’t be able to see the beautiful rocks through the 3-foot tall weeds that would happily take root.
Maybe there’s a happy medium in there somewhere. I’m thinking I need grass to grow to hold soil in place, or rocks. How about grass and rocks?
It would be a hassle to mow, though.
Back to reality. The rocks to cover the distances I need would be an awful strenuous effort to accomplish, in addition to the cost of having them delivered. Grass seed is something I can afford and plant easily myself.
It doesn’t cost anything to dream. I like picturing the possibilities. In the mean time, I am stuck looking at the ongoing and frustrating erosion that has had the better of me for the last five years.
I want to work on making my peace with that.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Standing Corrected
I stand corrected. My neighbor finally got my message and stopped by yesterday to discuss the soil eroding from his corn field. In my angst over the mess, I had jumped to the conclusion that he had neglected to leave a patch of un-tilled grass waterway.
In fact, he did, and it has a wonderful patch of grass, below which are some weeds taller than his corn. I had not walked far enough up into the field to notice the full scope of what was going on. Had I looked just beside my focus of the current source of sandy top soil, I might have noticed.
I think it was the willow tree that obscured a full view.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The sad truth is that the heavy flow of downpour runoff has simply migrated to either side of his grass waterway.
There isn’t really anything he can do about it right now, but just the fact he is now acutely aware of the current situation helps my mind. When he cuts at the end of the growing season, he will better be able to see the whole picture of what is happening, allowing him to consider options going forward.
It may simply be that he tries making the grass water way wider. I got the impression that he believed it was just an unlucky timing of heavy rain in the spring, before the planted corn had sprouted, that created this situation, so the fix will rely on a hope we get lucky and it doesn’t rain like that next year.
I am more of a mind that the likelihood of heavy downpours will only increase until the global temperatures somehow reverse the current trend and drop a degree or two.
Either way, the solution appears to involve a wider portion of un-tilled soil, but that won’t take effect immediately. For now, I am facing the challenge of dealing with the filled silt fence and finding a way to stretch its effectiveness through the rest of this summer and fall.
I’m trying to decide where I can put the sandy soil if I dig out the front of my silt fence. I’d like it to go somewhere that doesn’t end up just washing away the next time it rains, and that’s a daunting feat. I love the hilliness of our terrain, but the runoff erosion tends to be a constant result.
I’m back to that challenge of striving to work with the natural order and not against it. I want to figure out a solution that involves allowing water to take the easy path it seeks, but without it causing such extreme erosion. It’s hard to convince water to flow gently when the land is not so flat.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Nature Wins
This round goes to Mother Nature.
I’ve heard tell that our warmer climate allows the atmosphere to hold more moisture. With a pattern of increasing frequency, our anecdotal evidence of the years we have lived here is that downpours are increasingly bringing multi-inch totals that overwhelm the old drainage paths.
Overnight Wednesday we received over 2 inches, bringing the 24-hour total to more than 5.5 inches.
When I combine our experience and the recorded data of measurable climbing global temperatures, I get the impression we are seeing the beginning of downpour trend that will, at best, keep happening at this level, or worse, continue to grow more extreme.
This presents a daunting challenge for devising a plan to improve our drainage paths to a point they will be able to handle ever-increasing volumes of massive flow in a manner that avoids major washouts, if that is even possible.
Our attempt to stem the tide of topsoil flowing from the neighbor’s cornfield came up short of successful after not very many storms. I don’t know if there is a more industrial version of a silt fence or we just need to pull out and re-install the one we have, above the new ground level.
Ideally, we would like to enlist the assistance of the neighbor-farmer to get him to not plow the portions of that field where the runoff flows and instead, create a grassed-waterway.
Recent efforts to contact him have thus far failed. I have a sense that his not having already maintained a protective waterway reveals a certain lack of interest in having one, so I’m imagining I may need to be prepared to offer a convincing sales pitch.
I suppose I could pull out the corn plants that washed down from his field and are now growing on our property, and bring them over to his house to see if he wants them back.
If it wasn’t so much work, I’d love to also bring him a load of the mud that poured out of his field and now covers the grass of our walking trail.
Since the rain will likely keep dumping on us, maybe his field will just empty out and that problem will go away. I can switch my attention to marketing the sale of a large amount of sifted soil that magically became ours when it crossed the property line.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Okay Already
I’ll tell. I’ll tell. Enough time has passed that she’s gotten over the shock and trauma and has been able to have a few good laugh-till-out-of-breath moments over her escapade on Saturday.
Cyndie stepped on a rake.
There. I said it. It’s true. Yep. A rake.
I’m pretty sure OSHA would not approve of the unsafe work practice of letting a rake lay on the ground with the tines all pointing at the sky, but she somehow let that happen. How many times can you do that and not suffer any consequences?
Doesn’t matter. All it takes is once…
I gotta clarify, though, this was no standard namby pamby garden rake. She was working with the dreaded level head bow rake. Yeah. Ouch.
It wasn’t a slow roll up to her noggin’ it was a lethal instant THWAP to the head.
Cyndie was under the willow tree at the time of the incident, and a gust of wind blew the wispy branches in her face. In her (probably somewhat out-of-balance) reaction, she planted a foot to catch herself and stomped on the business end of the rake.
The sound made by the handle smacking her skull was frightening. Then, that was followed by equally frightening sounds of her pained reaction.
Thank goodness that’s behind us now and we can laugh about it.
We celebrated her birthday yesterday by installing a silt fence uphill of her garden of flowering perennials which was inundated by the flash flood a few weeks ago. If the bizarre laws of “the way things go” plays out, now that we have this in place, it won’t rain again for months and months.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Just in case it does, and comes in one of those all too frequent 4-inch-at-a-time hundred-year events that happen multiple times a year now, we think we have a better chance of controlling the flood.
Time will tell.
Moral of the story, be careful out there. And always lay your rake with the tines down.
Yep, just like the cartoons. WHAM!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Rainy Results
One day later, with the sun shining brightly, I surveyed the results of our crazy mid-summer type of thundershower in October. As I drove in the driveway after work, I could see right away from the car that the grass was laid flat below the culvert.
There was a clear impression of how wide the little runoff river rose after the deluge.
Our rain gauge collected over an inch from Monday night’s dramatic evening cloud burst, and that was on top of a previously accumulated inch that Cyndie had dumped out of the gauge after a drenching earlier that same day.
When we moved to this property, which happened exactly 4 years ago this week, we had no idea the warming climate was going to start dishing out the kind of gully-washing downpours that we have witnessed with increasing regularity each year since.
We have tried a variety of ways to manage the flow —or with regard to the sub-soil, the lack of flow— of water across our land. One trick to reduce the muddiness of our paddocks was the installation of drain tile to help dry out the soil in the springtime, but that didn’t do much to help with the immediate surface runoff of heavy downpours.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Pouring rains rush down our slopes and carve a multitude of rills around the paddocks below the barn. Dezirea surveyed the sad scene with me yesterday and agreed it kinda sucks.
The geography of our property makes this a difficult thing to prevent, especially since both the frequency and intensity of rainfall have continued to increase since we arrived.
Water will always find a path downhill. The hilly features that we adore so much about this property are also the cause of our erosion problems. We want water to drain from our land, but we would like it to depart with a lot less energy, …preferably leaving all our precious lime screenings behind.
That’s hard to accomplish when the clouds repeatedly unleash inch amounts in spans as short as mere minutes.
Maybe we should look into terracing the paddocks and turning them into rice paddies. Do they make rubber boots that fit horses?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Failure Happens
We received 3-and-a-half inches of rain in the storm that hit this region on Tuesday evening. With reports warning of wind gusts between 60 and 70 mph, we were a bit anxious about what might happen when the full force arrived. Luckily, we did not experience any loss of trees from that high of wind, but the paddocks have the makings of a couple new canyons shaped by the heavy rain.
While cleaning up manure, I came across evidence of a failure I had been suspicious of for some time. The drain tube that was buried from the barn gutter to the main drainage swale has made its way up to the surface. There is no way it can be draining properly.
That helps explain the dramatic runoff that has been occurring from the corner of the barn. It doesn’t really matter that I cleaned out the bird’s nest from the down spout when the drainage tube the spout is connected to is plugged somewhere down the line.
After work yesterday, I disconnected the down spout from the tube that leads underground and rigged up an above-ground series of tubes as a temporary solution for protecting the paddock from erosion.
I don’t know what I would do different, but the failure of that buried tube reveals a flaw in our plan. Once again I am reminded of how fluid (as opposed to static) the “solid” ground actually is. Buried things don’t tend to stay buried around here.
Each spring farmers find new rocks sprouting in their plowed fields. Those rocks aren’t falling from the sky. They are pushed up from below, just like that section of my drainage tube that now protrudes above the surface.
I probably won’t ever succeed in preventing erosion from runoff of heavy rains, but I would sure like to reduce and confine it as much as possible. My next idea will involve a way to capture the water running off the roof into a giant barrel of some kind.
Then I just need to figure out what to do with the overflow from that vessel whenever it fills up.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Natural Results
Despite all our efforts to influence outcomes toward results which match the visions in our heads, the universe continues its reluctance to conform to our exact specifications.
A year ago I paid an excavating company more money than I really wanted to part with, to have a drainage swale shaped across our property. The plan was to have me plant grass in the new spillway to control erosion, but the excavation didn’t happen until too late in the year and my effort to cover it with grass was only partially successful.
Meanwhile, the earliest series of spring rainstorms testing the new swale turned out to be extreme gully washers that initiated a distinct washout crevice. The topsoil that flowed down stream from then on began filling in the swale, spoiling the plan to have a clearly defined trough to constrain runoff and drain water from our property without obstruction.
Maybe I could apply for a partial refund.
The good news is that the desired flow of runoff still seems to happen well enough, despite the deviations from the ideal we envisioned. However, I prefer to not have the growing canyon in that pasture and would like to reclaim the originally planned swale from the sediment that has accumulated.
I’m considering the possibility of digging it out myself next summer, and bringing the soil from below to fill in the crevice. I would want to wait until later in the summer, in hopes of finding a time when there is a reduced likelihood of heavy rains, but early enough that I would have plenty of time to get it covered with newly planted grass.
Another option is to leave it go to nature’s design, until such time that it fails to function as we want. It might just be an exercise I need to experience: allowing it to be a little rough around the edges and not so refined as I envisioned.
It seems odd to me that I find myself wrestling with the different extremes that I am drawn toward. On one hand, I prefer to have things be as natural as possible, so the naturally carved drainage ditch should be appealing. On the other hand, I don’t want things to look neglected here, or function faultily, so digging it out, filling in the crevice and covering the entire length with new grass would appeal equally well.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Relative Something 