Can You Dig It? (WA, USA)

When life hands you (practically) free use of a trackhoe and a skidsteer, you just start digging until they pry them from your cold, muddy hands.

by Laurie Branson

The Curtain Drain

Since the last update, the barn was built. It was delayed a few months due to unfortunate circumstances (our contractor suffered a small stroke but has fully recovered). With the delay we were unable to get our cover crops sown around the Zone 1 area before the temperatures dropped, so we covered everything with straw to help keep erosion down. We will be getting the cover crop seed sown in the next week or so.

Our property is sloped about 8% and with our heavy fall/winter/spring rains (54″ annually) we had to put a fairly large curtain drain in around the barn and future home building site. Friends of ours have all of the heavy equipment from a former excavation business (they built our gravel road) so we hired them to dig the curtain drain. Being the exceptionally kind and generous people that they are, they let us use the equipment while it was on site and all we had to do was cover their quarterly insurance payment. This was waaaay (hit the high note there) cheaper than renting a trackhoe and a skidsteer for even one day and we got to use them for three months! How many projects could we get done on the weekends between October and end of December?

The pic below shows the trackhoe in action. To accommodate the slope of the hillside and the building site, he is digging it at a 2-to-1 slope.

The curtain drain narrows down to a 2′ wide x 4′ deep trench that daylights into a silt pond on the other side of our road. This will eventually flow into a larger pond to be installed at a later date.

Next steps are to lay in some drain fabric, fill the trench with 2′ — 3′ of drain rock and cover with soil. We will also lay drain fabric and a few inches of drain rock in the rest of the curtain drain once the soils dry out enough to get across the field.

The Pond

Our first experience using the trackhoe on our own was to enlarge a small, hand dug pond at the top of the hill. The pond (we lovingly referred to it as a “pondle”), was used last summer to fill up a 3000 gallon above-ground cistern, which in turn was used to water fruit trees we planted in the berm of our first swale.

By digging the pond deeper and wider we are hoping it won’t dry up this summer.

Although the trees are probably okay without irrigation this year (we filled the swale with fallen alders from an ice storm and they have soaked up a lot of water this winter), we hope to dig in a second swale below planting more trees that will need some watering their first year.

The Compost

We pick up a truck-load of cow manure every chance we get from a small, family-run dairy located between our house and the farm. We mix that with wood chips from the limbs of the trees taken down when we cleared for the barn and leaves raked up from friend’s yards where they didn’t want them. Usually we have to unload the truck with a shovel, but having the trackhoe on hand sure made quick work of it.

We used the skid steer every week we had it to turn the compost pile.

The Poles

The trees taken down to clear for the barn and house site are 15-20 yr old Douglas Fir. We are peeling the bark off and plan to use them in the construction of our house. The skidsteer and grapple hook have been great for moving the poles from the field and under cover of the barn where we are peeling the bark off and letting them dry. We still have about half of them in the field, but will have to use our old Land Cruiser with a winch on front to drag the rest to the barn since the skidsteer has gone home.

The Hugelkulturs

With a trackhoe, a skidsteer and huge piles of stumps, branches and logs, you have no choice but to build hugelkulturs! We had piles from a year and half ago when we took some trees out to bring our road up through the property, plus the stumps from clearing for the building site.

It wasn’t the perfect time of year to build hugels because we couldn’t really get them planted right away with it being the middle of winter, but we had the equipment on hand and wanted to use it for as much as we could during those three months. The soil around the hugels is pretty compacted as a result, but it is in an area we won’t be planting out for another year or two. The plan is to run a rototiller through it and plant loads of cover crops over the few seasons in the meantime.

We covered the hugels with straw in the meantime and will be planting them out soon. I’m still working out the best game plan for that as they are not in our Zone 1 area. We are really trying to focus on Zone 1 first so we don’t get overwhelmed with the amount of work to do on 24 acres. One hugel is 100′ long and the other is 119′ long. Both are about 10′ wide and about 4′ tall.

The underground cistern

Originally we planned to dig in a 16′ deep x 6′ wide inverted triangle-shaped pond to hold runoff from the barn roof, but our friends (with the heavy equipment) advised us against it. They were afraid the steep sides might collapse. They recommended we purchase a plastic or concrete cistern, but after pricing them out we started to look for alternatives. We combed through Craigslist ads and came across an old galvanized grain silo and thought hmmmm, this could work! Although it was cheap, it was located pretty far away and the logistics of renting a trailer, picking it up, etc… were adding up.

We were kicking ourselves for not asking the gentleman we bought the property from if we could have this old, abandoned grain silo left in the field of the neighboring property he also owned. At the time we were intrigued by it but had no specific use in mind — just thought it would be good for something someday. Unfortunately we forgot to pursue it and then assumed the owner sold it for scrap because he sold that property shortly thereafter.

Call it kismet, but the very weekend our friends were coming to pick up their equipment, we decided to drive down the road behind our farm to see what the newly constructed barn looked like from the neighbors property. Lo and behold — there it was! We promptly contacted the new owners (they live back east and will be moving out here in the next two years) to see if they were interested in selling it but they were glad to have us take it off of their hands for nothing. I made a quick call to our friends to see if they might have time that weekend to also dig the hole and place a 20′ section of the silo before loading the equipment up. They were game and now we are the happy owners of a 3500+ gallon underground cistern!

The cistern sits across our gravel driveway from the barn. All of the downspouts are tied together underground and now flow directly into the cistern. The barn roof is 40′ x 72′, so a whole lot of water flows off it. While digging the hole we hit an underground spring. I am hoping that means our cistern will not run dry this summer (climate change notwithstanding).

It’s not that pretty right now but we are going to either put stone or brick and plants around it and install some sort of interesting spigot to dress it up a bit.

This water will be used on the plantings in that area through a passive irrigation system on contour following stone footpaths between the beds as they very slowly wind down the hill, eventually spilling into another pond. Hopefully that will be my next update since we just scored about 1000′ sq. ft. of flagstone from another local farmer that wanted it out of their yard.