Ditched!

 I left the farm early Saturday morning. I needed to stop in White Salmon and get the chickens fixed up for the day, then leave there by 7:30 to drive over to Battle Ground where I was touring a large permaculture / ecosystem restoration site. When I drove out the drive, I noticed there was water coming from the irrigation ditch that runs down the east side of the property (a branch ditch, not the big one), out onto the gravel drive and down toward the road. 

I got two texts about it during the day, one from the renter, and the other from a friend who drove by. When I got home in the evening, the water was still running. I thought there might be a blockage of the culvert but couldn't find anything like that, and finally concluded that they were just putting too much water down the ditch. I called the neighbor, who is the one who built the house on the property before dividing their larger parcel. I met him with flashlights after dark, and found that the water level had dropped several inches and was no longer flowing over. 

Problem solved? Nope. This morning when it got light I walked down to check, and found the water level back up again. I decided to put the skills I honed as a kid building dikes and dams to play with runoff from the warm summer rainstorms in Kansas to good use, and used a how to carve out a little ditch that would take the water away from the drive and off into the grass. I reinforced the drive side of the ditch with  crushed rock from a pile that was handily placed just a few yards away. 

So now I'm getting a little free irrigation for the small field near the entrance. The ditch is to the left in the picture. The overflow is coming from there through the grass, into the ditch and then flowing down hill (up in the photo) and off to the left into a grassy area. (Exciting picture, I know).