Free Straw!

I got a call this week from a guy cleaning out a barn. He asked me if I wanted the old straw he found in the loft. I made a trip (actually a couple of trips) to pick it up today.

What does one do with 84 bales of free wheat straw? Hmmm..... Let me count the ways:

1. Straw bale gardening in the spring.

2. Sheet composting for the garden.

3. Adding organic matter to the lawn and pastures.

4. Erosion control.

5. Sell it.

Items 1-4 are very possible. I don't know if there will be any left for #5.

More on what we do with it later...

Erosion Control Update

Back in January, I decided that I had to do something to control the erosion on the property. Several years ago, the previous owner had clear cut the land and anything that remotely passed as top soil had long since washed away leaving us with nothing but thick, red clay (hence the name). Worse yet, there was a huge gully running down the middle of the side pasture that had developed over the years. Looking back at the old Google Earth pictures, that gully was here long before the land was clear cut.

This is just a quick update to my update earlier this year. After one of the rainiest summers on record here in the Midlands of SC, I am proud to say that my retention dams have, for the most part, done their job and remained strong. There are a few spots where the water washed over the dams and eroded little bits of the dam, but for the most part, they have done well to help control the flow of water down the hill. I have even managed to get a little grass growing on them to help hold them in place. My focus now is to improve the quality of the soil so I can get a better stand of grass growing, but that's a subject for a later post.

That's the good news. Now for the bad... While the upper part of the hill is doing well, down at the lower part of the hill the gully is beginning to re-emerge. It's steeper at that point and we had several large downpours that did some particularly bad damage to my work. I've got to get the box blade out again and do some more work. This time, I think I am going to have to reinforce my work with rock gathered from the property. Time to call out the troops to start picking up rock!

Erosion Control Success!!!

Well, after some pretty big storms and lots of rain last night, I'm please to say that the retention dams did their job well! Woo Hooo! Time to start looking at terracing for the rest of the pasture now. Hopefully I can get some grass growing on these dams to hold them in place.

From the top, looking down. You can see where Red Clay Farm gets it's name!

The water adds some definition to the size of the dams

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.