We had a bit of rain these few days. 110ish mm over the last 14 days, 25 of which decided to check in on us yesterday. So our run got flooded.
Not having the space for a truck load of woodchips, nor the time to spare, I got a couple of 23kg bales of sawdust. BTW .6USD pr kg for sawdust, what's wrong with the world?
The chickens were quite perplexed as to the bale when it arrived, and definitely not sold on it either when I had spread it out, pic in comments. I'm going to see how it works before spreading another one.
Usually I don't have to pump water from this area before November, but I guess that life ain't fair and the world is mean, so we started the pump this morning. Next 5 months (we'll I guess it'll be 6 months if luck be) we'll be pumping about 26m^3 from this area daily.
There's a Danish children's song that starts with something like "The farmer is always busy on his farm" and then lists the chores. I wonder why I that was stuck in my head as I wandered about the hardware store looking for bedding material.
Man...if the water is running onto your property from your neighbors property that sounds like a them problem, not a you problem. Depending on where you live this may be a code issue. The code probably requires them to direct their run-off to the ditch instead of on to your property. Maybe they would share the cost of your drainage work.
I don't think that we have codes for that here... That sounded weird, this is Denmark after all, home of the unnecessary regulations and unwarranted beaureaucracy. I'll have to check that out.
Anyway there is a ditch, it's just not that effective when it's full because the ground water table rises to 1.5m below the surface in the fall.
I didn't realize that you were in Denmark. I knew you weren't in the US because you didn't measure things in Freedom Units.
High water table is a pain in the ass. You can dig down a few cm here and find water. In the spring there are parts of our land that are under half a meter of water. There is standing water all year in parts of it.
I just checked the rules here in Ontario. If the water has not been collected, like, into a ditch, then it can run naturally onto ad adjacent property. The owner of that adjacent property can protect their land from your water by building a berm or taking other action. They can also sue you to install a ditch to collect the water and direct it to the municipal ditch. Maybe your chickens need a treehouse?
Pretty sure it's the same deal here. It seems reasonable at least. But I'm not suing the owners of the neighboring land. First off we're on somewhat friendly terms, as in they let me use the drain in the field to the north to drain the clean water from my sewage treatment plant and they'll run their liquid manure hose across my access road when we're off at work. Secondly the water that we battle with goes into our pond, which then flows over into their field, causing their machinery to get stuck. Thirdly they're massive. Like 1200 hectares of land owned and another 600 rented, and an organization with a CFO and 4 people in the kitchen making lunches for all the mark hands. I'm pretty sure they can afford the representation, and to such a degree that it would be 10 times more expensive to sue, than just digging the damn drain myself. Nope, nothing good will come of suing them for something as small as this.
Besides it's not their fault that the water table is where it's at, that's just force majeure. Life ain't fair and the word is mean, so I'll deal with my problems myself. Oh I'll still bitch and moan here, but I'll be paying and digging too.
Lol I'm pretty sure that the two eldest Araucana mixes would love that, they used to sleep +5m up in the tree above the old run.
But actually the coop is raised about 25cm because of the water issue (that's 10 of the short units in that "system" only used by the US, Liberia and Myanmar... If you can call that a system /s). So it's a bit of a tree house.