Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 17 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
If you wish to do it yourself, though, and on small holdings it is better sometimes to keep the government men as far away as possible, and in other countries but Britain there may not be a subsidy anyway, there are certain principles that must be borne in mind.
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The first is (and this the non-farming layman often finds very hard to understand) that a ditch dug along the contour of sloping land drains the land below it and not that above it. The layman says 'How can this be? The water in the land won't run uphill-how can It get into the ditch to drain the land?' The answer is that the contour ditch above the wet field stops more water running into the field. The water already in the field is going to work its way downhill anyway, and by the time it had got to a contour ditch dug at the bottom of the field it would have been on the point of leaving the field anyway. The rain that falls on a field is not enough to make it boggy: it is the water working its way underground from higher land that does this, and it is this water that is intercepted by the contour drain.
Open ditches drain very efficiently, but they must be fenced against cattle or the latter will break their sides down, and they must be cleaned out from time to time, which is a laborious process. It can be done by hand, or else by tractors fitted with power-arms, such as the McConnell. Underground drains may not drain quite so freely but they require no maintenance: cattle cannot break them down and you don't have to clean them out. They may not live for ever though. There are two sorts: piped drains and mole drains. Mole drains are merely opened in the soil by a mole drainer pulled behind a tractor: the moler looks like a little torpedo stuck on the bottom of a steel blade. There are plenty of contractors who do this work. Mole drains stand up well in clay soil, less well in lighter soils, and if there are too many big stones or boulders underground you can't make them at all. In good cases they last about eight years.
Piped drains are the other sort of underground drain. A narrow ditch is dug, either by hand or by machine, and a pipe is laid in the bottom of it. Formerly the pipe was fired earthenware, in lengths of from a foot to eighteen inches: now it tends to be of long lengths of plastic. The plastic has holes in it to let the water in , the earthenware pipes let the water in where they join. In either case loose stone or gravel is poured in on top of the pipe and then earth filled in on top. Piped drains may last a very long time. I dug a ditch in heavy land in Suffolk and thus revealed the carefully-bricked outlet of a piped drain with a date on it: 1880. When we cleared the mouth of the drain, water immediately began to run out of it and it was working perfectly.
You can also drain by digging a ditch and putting bushes in it and burying them (the Romans did this) and I have experimented by putting down brushwood and then laying halfsheets of rusty corrugated iron on top of it and filling in the soil. What happens when the iron rusts right away I don't yet know. You can split the sheets easily with an ordinary mattock-standing over them and cutting them down the middle. It is a very good way of getting rid of unsightly old pieces of corrugated iron.
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