Rain, rain, rain

This post was going to be about how well we have managed to drain the soggiest parts of our land however, Mother Nature had other ideas - not limited to our neck of the woods but apparently for a large part of this country and the world - so while we still feel very successful in the event of normal levels of rain, the recent deluge saw us underwater again.

In November we had a great rain event and we were able to really see where the land was not able to run the water off successfully. The parts we were mainly concerned about were the horse laneway and the chicken yard as we use these parts of land regularly at the moment. Here are some pictures:

  

We did some rudimentary trenching to try and alleviate the problem.

When the ground finally dried out we decided that putting in some trenches and filling them with some rocks would help the land to drain itself. Our block slopes toward the front right hand corner so we are using this natural sloping to help all water drain in that direction. One of our biggest problems was flooding in the chicken yard so this area was definately a priority. Here are some pictures of the trenching we have done so far:

This is how it held up after the first recent rainfall:

We were very happy with this result and so now we are confident to do some more trenching using the same method.

Of course, after these photos were taken we experienced the recent deluge of rain and I don't think anything we could have done would have helped us to clear the water any quicker. The good news is that our trenching has really helped the ground to dry out more quickly than it did before and we are walking on the ground after only 2 days where it was over a week after the November rains.

Thanks to Roy, our trenching machine :)