The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Smallholding => Land Management => Topic started by: Holleth on March 03, 2015, 09:19:12 pm
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Hi folks,
Please go easy on me as I'm new to all this!
We have a 2 acre field and always at this time of year the field is very wet. There is a drainage trench along one entire length and the field is on a slight hill.
In certain areas there is currently a touch of standing water and in some places some thick dark green plants which I presume are rushes?
Someone I know suggested I try and get someone to Mole Plough it but yesterday I got a groundworks lad down and he suggested that it was too wet to do that and that the plough will clog up.
In the summer the field seems fine...
Does anyone have any experience of anything similar?
Many thanks
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Hi. There are endless possible reasons for it and funnily enough endless solutions. Probably the single most important thought is that its just what you have and no amount of machinery or effort will change it too much. Our land is far from perfect and although we make efforts to improve it we always weigh up the time and expense against how much of a problem it is to us. I would agree with being Very wary of charging in with intrusive machines on wet ground as its likely to make things worse. Tools like mole ploughs swardlifters and subsoilers are useful if there is a deep lying compaction but will not solve broken land drains, underground springs or simply natural bowls or depressions prone to standing water. They will also cause damage to roots and is usually best done later in season or early autumn so that roots can regenerate through winter. In the spring aerating nearer the surface with a slitter or such like can open up the sward and encourage microbial and worm activity and let oxygen in to the roots BUT Before embarking on major soil upheaval I'd be taking a spade to a wet patch and seeing what I can find. Is there a plough pan, a spring a cracked or blocked land drain. Sorry not to be more helpful but it is possible to try all sorts and end up with an even bigger mess
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Someone I know suggested I try and get someone to Mole Plough it but yesterday I got a groundworks lad down and he suggested that it was too wet to do that and that the plough will clog up.
In the summer the field seems fine...
I would consider doing the mole draining in the summer then when its hopefully drier. However, you need to make sure that once the drains hit the trench that the water flows away.
Getting the field drained properly will be expensive.
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Probably the single most important thought is that its just what you have and no amount of machinery or effort will change it too much.
We have an area like that that was never going to amount to much, so we dug a pond in the end! ;D
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Thanks for the replies folks.
There is actually a pond on one part of the field and the wetter bits are the higher than the pond. From what I can see there are no land drains on the field at all.
When the weather gets a touch drier I've asked my local farmer to harrow and roll it so I might just see how it goes on this year.
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A coupe fo my fileds are really soggy at the moment. yes, I'd love to put a drainage system in but for a hobby farm it's impractical to properly lay a network of drains and re grade 2x10acres. Equally this is a shallow valley bottom so effectively it's natural for it to be watermeadow'ish. It dries each summer and grows good hay so i leave it for a successor to solve - once I'm ga-ga and unable to cope
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A coupe fo my fileds are really soggy at the moment. yes, I'd love to put a drainage system in but for a hobby farm it's impractical to properly lay a network of drains and re grade 2x10acres. Equally this is a shallow valley bottom so effectively it's natural for it to be watermeadow'ish. It dries each summer and grows good hay so i leave it for a successor to solve - once I'm ga-ga and unable to cope
Once your gaga ??? ????????????
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We bought some fields a few years ago, in some places you could lose your welly (very difficult trying to pull your welly out of the mud while other foot is sinking!)
We dug channels, found some old stone drains, now most of the land is walkable, but still wet in winter and rushes about.
What is interesting is GOOGLE EARTH, on the ground the rushes seems random, but on arial views you can see the lines of rushes, which show where the old drains are.
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good point penninehillbilly. The rushes often follow the line of blocked/broken land drains, so they are useful as markers for where to dig to repair drains. But , as has been said, draining land properly is really expensive, unless you have the machinery, time and knowhow to DIY it. Its a job that's easy to botch-up too so be careful.
If you don't need the wettest parts for pasture could you plant willow there?
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we are always interested in wet field problems being next to a river in Brittany
we either in a granite hill or a bog. but some resurch could help in the past people
used such places regularly as permanent pasture, however the animals were more adapted to these areas. Here people use the areas of dear grass (different to rushes) as a replacement for straw and the goat sometimes prefers it to new field hay?. Also I find the sheep (particularly Shetlands like the new growth) but leave it
if it is too tall. its also grate for a bit of summer bite. Here most drains both historically and present day are open i.e ditches.
good luck I would like to here what you end up choosing.
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hi sorry totally mis translated from french, not at all deer grass but soft rush.opps
anyway they still use it in the same way..