ok, as a followup to the south field plowing and sod grinding with the tiller post in that other thread... that one was getting long and there's more for me to natter on about.
after he was done plowing and tilling and it was warming up enough for me to get outside i decided to right away get back along the edge to do some changes to the end of The River Nile (which is what we've called my long drainage diversion that ran along the berm i put in to deflect water from our gardens and back to the large drainage ditch).
where TRN goes into that large drainage ditch has gradually eroded over the years and i've done various things to try to slow it down and keep it from getting worse. the fact that it goes through nearly solid clay did help for a long time but it was still getting bad. a few years ago i took some chunks of concrete and put them down to take some of the impact of the water as it dropped a level down. that lasted about four years. we really don't get too many hard runoffs each year but when they happen they can scour some of that channel away.
other things i've done is thrown quack grass in there (it's the grass they put down when they put that large drainage ditch in to begin with). however, what i've wanted to do for ever since that went in was to set it up so it could be mowed and more gently sloped. so today i got in the trench and got the chunks of cement out of there and then knocked back the banks and reshaped things and used those big clods of grass to fill in and more gently slope things and then i took some extra dirt and chunks of sod from the plowing and tilling to fill in any empty spots. hopefully this means that in the future when it rains hard enough to flow it will be grass covered enough to prevent the topsoil from washing away plus i'll be able to mow it and that will give me a better idea of how things are going in there. it's currently hard to see at all because the weeds are so tall and thick.
the end of the trench right before the ditch i'd like to put in some bales of straw or hay and stick them down good with some stakes to make sure they won't move and then let them get grown through with quack grass to further stop the flow of water and slow it down, but i think it will take four or six bales to do that. throw some dirt on them and find some extra quack grass to get going right away. it will work well to pin it all down and keep in place and then through the years it will gradually get filled in more and more as i probably can use it as a weed pile for certain root balls and such.
i also have piles of dried out thorn bushes and dried out wild grape vines i can also use to help slow down and capture debris that may be flowing through there. all will do their magic to heal that gully and then eventually we'll have it back to sort of normal.
what needs to happen along most of that large ditch is to dig the stuff that is growing in the middle (mostly quack grass) and pile it along the edges again. groundhogs and trees both have caused problems and any bare spots get exploited by high flow water events to erode the banks... which we really don't want to shift but they have. i don't have the equipment or skills to do that kind of digging (i tried one time to do it manually, um, nope, that stuff is heavy!).
so tomorrow i get the hose back there turned on and squirt things down just to get them started in their recovery from being moved or used as mulch or fill. hopefully it will all be ok by the time we get our next heavy enough flows to go through there.
ages ago i wanted to run some drain tubes along their to channel the water but i ran out of money and other things came up which made me decide that it would have been a waste of effort (not our property). if i had some chunks of drain tubes i'd put them at the end through the straw/hay bales, but i don't have either of those at the moment...
then i got on with cleaning up a garden, which i didn't finish, but those are stories not really all that interesting [ok, the stories above may not be all that interesting either, but...
] and it also gets me going on other topics that aren't really gardening oriented...
