A Day of Damming
Suffolk is a dry region of the country. The farm is on a hill and the ditches have been expertly laid out so the water is channelled off site as quickly as possible. The heavens open, the rain thunders down and soon there’s a bubbling of brooks as everything drains away down the drive and off into a larger network of ditches. This might seem advantageous. It really is not.
Why?
Because with the seasons becoming increasingly irregular and our region already being dry, I want to try and keep as much moisture in the land as possible. Of course, ditches are fantastic are helping avoid waterlogged pastures and as the grass becomes sodden, gravity works to seep the wet out of the meadows and into the manmade channels. But once in these ditches, if undeterred, all that lovely rain rushes away.
Over the course of the past few years I’ve been cutting back foliage, clearing out and digging down into the various waterways on the farm. But, importantly, I’ve also been adding dams here and there. This is not to prevent water loss but to slow it, giving it a chance to soak into the surrounding soil, to be sucked up by thirsty trees and to create little pools that wildlife can live in and around.
Cutting back brambles and opening ditches
Today was one of those days.
Our new onsite office is arriving in a couple of months and is being situated parallel to one of the largest ditches on the farm and the main funnel off-site. We’ve already decided to build the office on a raised deck, not only to help avoid water rot, but to stop rodents from building warm little nests below the floorboards. With the water rushing down behind the cabin, I thought it would be nice to dig out the ditch, place a relatively high dam and create a little pool that would constantly ebb and flow with the rain. I even hope to have a few fish in there and pop in some marginal plants.
The dam itself doesn’t have to be watertight. In fact, a small trickle is beneficial as it means the water course is always moving and shifting. I’ve got loads of scrap metal and old plastic food bags around the farm, so I dug in an old tin sheet, placed some plastic membrane around the bottom edges and then back-filled it with some thick clay. There’s still some water moving through, and the pool hasn’t reached the height I quite wanted it to. However, we haven’t had any rain for a while so the drainage off the land is currently extremely low. Before I make alterations, I’m going to wait for a downpour to see just how it fares!
I enjoy projects like this. Things that can be done and completed within a day. It gives you a sense of achievement before you can move on to the next project on the list (a list which never stops increasing). And I’m already picturing sitting out there on a warm summers’ evening, watching little fish and listening to the water as it bubbles and trickles downstream.