Erosion Control

One of the challenges we have here at the Red Clay Farm is that we are on the side of a hill. The road is to our front and the land slopes away from the road toward a stream that runs along the back of the property line. In all, it's about a 50 meter vertical drop from the front to the back.

Courtesy of Google Earth

When we first moved here, we had a huge gully that ran through the middle of the property. It was terrible and in places is was at least six feet deep. One day I couldn't find our little goat, Timmy, anywhere. I walked the pasture for an hour before I heard a faint Timmy call. I had to listen for a while to figure out where he was. I finally found him at the bottom of the gully, covered in red clay from head to toe. He was so deep that all I could reach was his horns.

After saving Timmy, I decided that I had to do something about the gash that ran across our property. So, the following week, I burned all the brush we had thrown in the gully to stem the flow of water and got the tractor and box blade out. I spent the next few days using the box blade to push in the sides of the gully and fill it in. Over the next few months, the soil settled and the gully started to reappear. There were low spots developing in area where the gully was the deepest. Water was still flowing down the hill pretty fast in this area.

Today, I pulled out the box blade again. This time, my goal was to create some small retention "ponds" along the gully to keep water from flowing like a river down the hill. After about an hour and a half of work, I had created four retention dams along the area where the gully used to run.

From the top of the hill, looking down.

I put the dams on the down-hill side of the low spots that formed. The smallest dam is about 1.5 feet deep and 12 feet across. The largest is about 18 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep.

The bottom-most dam. Also the biggest. The picture doesn't show the depth very well.

So that's how I spent my day here at the Red Clay Farm. I won't have to wait long to see how these dams work. There is a big frontal system bearing down on us tonight and we are due to have strong thunderstorms and rain. I'll report on how they held tomorrow.