We had a bit of rain these few days. 110ish mm over the last 14 days, 25 of which decided to check in on us yesterday. So our run got flooded.
Not having the space for a truck load of woodchips, nor the time to spare, I got a couple of 23kg bales of sawdust. BTW .6USD pr kg for sawdust, what’s wrong with the world?
The chickens were quite perplexed as to the bale when it arrived, and definitely not sold on it either when I had spread it out, pic in comments. I’m going to see how it works before spreading another one.
Usually I don’t have to pump water from this area before November, but I guess that life ain’t fair and the world is mean, so we started the pump this morning. Next 5 months (we’ll I guess it’ll be 6 months if luck be) we’ll be pumping about 26m^3 from this area daily.
There’s a Danish children’s song that starts with something like “The farmer is always busy on his farm” and then lists the chores. I wonder why I that was stuck in my head as I wandered about the hardware store looking for bedding material.
I knew that the sawdust wasn’t your first choice. Farming is food in, poop out, rushing from one crisis to another. You had a crisis and you dealt with it.
I was skeptical about the wood chips but they are by far the best yard cover we have ever used. You need a deep bed of them and the chickens will constantly turn them looking for bugs.
My wife spent last year digging the shavings that we use in the houses out through the chicken doors onto the wood chips. This spring it was a terrible mess that I had to dig out and replace with fresh wood chips. I asked her never to do that again. It means that the shavings have to take the long way out, sometimes down a hallway but the yard stays nicer.
A French drain with a 3" perforated corrugated pipe with a cloth sock works well for draining chicken yards.
Shavings, that’s the word! It eluded me yesterday. I bought wood shavings, not dust. I wasn’t satisfied with that word, but my limited English vocabulary failed me.
Totally! You deal with the immediate crisis, and then you start figuring out how to deal with it more permanently. And before you’ve done that there’s a new crisis. Farmers catch a lot of flagg around here for poor handyman work, but that’s just not always fair!
If the powers that be are willing, I’m going to do a bit more draining next summer, than a single French drain.
If you care to know, I’ll jot it down here, but that’s probably more a strategy to keep myself locked onto the project. To the south of me there’s a field with a slight incline, and the groundwater is just 2m down. That means whenever it rains, water will run onto our property through our 50m long southern hedge. 10m into our property that water is then blocked by buildings, amongst them the chicken coop in my pictures. So I’m going to dig a 50m ditch, make it decline into a central well, put a drain pipe at the bottom of the ditch, and fill with gravel until 30cm below the surface. Maybe I can hook it onto the existing draining passively, fingers crossed, otherwise I’ll have to invest in a better pumping solution than the current, which relies on a floating switch that gets stuck thrice a week. If I’m really smart, which seldom occurs, I’ll manage to direct some of the water into the run for the chickens to drink.
But that’s next year’s project. Right now the chickens are dry again and hopefully none got sick from being soaked.
Man…if the water is running onto your property from your neighbors property that sounds like a them problem, not a you problem. Depending on where you live this may be a code issue. The code probably requires them to direct their run-off to the ditch instead of on to your property. Maybe they would share the cost of your drainage work.