Posts Tagged ‘sediment’
Hazardous Conditions
Yesterday, while working outside for long hours in the spring wind, we exposed ourselves to enough tree pollen to cause significant irritation to our delicate tissues. I think I also successfully altered the weather to shut down precipitation here for some time.
While my nose dripped at an ever-increasing rate, I built a barrier of old, moldy hay bales in the trees by our uphill neighbor’s corn field.
During heavy rain, the water comes off that field in a torrent and washes sediment onto our property. Lately, it has started to fill in a drainage trench beside our driveway.
Oddly enough, I actually wanted it to rain today, so I could see if my creation worked as intended, but the forecast shows no precipitation expected in the days ahead.
Given that, I guess my project worked. It has stopped the sediment from pouring into our trench, hasn’t it?
While I was working in the tangled bramble of uncontrolled growth that forms the border between our property and that cultivated field to the north of us, I decided to finally address a remnant of rusted barbed wire fencing that had been swallowed by a tree.
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The tree had long ago been cut off, leaving a stump that was about the height of a fence post. Made sense, since the barbed wire ran through the tree, it was already functioning as a fence post.
Removing the rusted fencing was made easier by the fact the tree was rotting to pieces. So much of it came apart simply by prying at it with one of the old fence posts that I found myself struggling near the end, to finish it off in the same manner. Eventually, logic, and my increasingly irritating allergic reactions to pollen, led me to hasten the task by way of the chain saw.
The area looks like it has been through a serious spring cleaning now, with the added benefit of opening up visibility to the area where water flows off the neighbor’s field. It is easier to see if the barrier I built is doing the job of keeping sediment out of our ditch.
Sneeze. Cough. Drip. Stinging blink. It’s the hazardous working conditions of spring!
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Uh Oh
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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Relative Something 