Off-Grid in West Virginia

Friday

Linda

Rain, rain and more rain. Yesterday the weather was clear enough to do a job that has needed to be done for a long time. When it rains hard like it has for weeks now, our back pasture area becomes a mud bog. Water drains into the pole barn as well and if your boots aren’t tied on tight you might leave them behind in the quagmire. The guineas won’t even go in there for fear of being swallowed up by the black mud blob. The solution to the problem is to dig some drainage ditches so the runoff will flow down into the creek.

Once again the Kubota tractor was pulled into service. Sonny borrowed the double blade attachment from John that is used to dig the ditches.

Digging the drains.

Its nice that their tractor attachments are all interchangeable. I couldn’t imagine having to dig these ditches by hand especially when there are five of them. The double blade tool cut through the dirt like butter, making long troughs for the water to flow through. Although we don’t have to manually dig the ditches we do have to clean them up a bit which does involve the use of a shovel.

Double bladed drain ditch tool.

We need more earth banked up against the sides of the root cellar to help keep it at a cool and steady temperature. The excess soil from the drainage ditches will be more than enough to take care of the job. Sonny shoveled dirt into the bucket of the tractor then drove it over and dumped it by the root cellar. I then shoveled the dirt up against the walls. There are only so many hours in a day and we still have more work to get everything finished.

Our winter atrophied muscles screamed at the manual work and there was a lot of groaning and hobbling around that evening. Of course we laughed and joked about it even if it was painful to move any muscle for any reason. We may have to stop for a break more often than when we younger but we aren’t down yet. Often times there are jobs on the farm that will test your metal but the rewards of this lifestyle are innumerable.

We’ll soon see if the drain ditches work as we are in for some more heavy down pours tonight.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2011 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Off-Grid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.