Driveway Puddling

When we first moved in, I thought the way water puddled on the driveway was just a nuisance. Any time it rained, the driveway would fill up, and a few hours later it would be gone again. This winter has brought some additional frustration though. In the last few weeks, I've really begun to realize the problem that this is.




From the road, the driveway slopes down toward the garage. Just before the garage, it slopes up again steeply, creating a big cup that holds water with nowhere to drain. This puddle can be 12" deep in some spots. It often freezes over and makes a big mess. When it's not frozen, it leaves no way to get in or out of the house in the front. One of the deepest pockets is in the walkway from the driveway to the door. 

To further complicate things, the catchment area of this puddle isn't just the driveway itself, nor the roof of the garage that drains directly onto the driveway (no gutters), but the collection area extends out to the road, and all the way to the crown of the connecting state highway. We live in a rural area with no storm drains. The town's official storm water policy is to let the town's natural waterways take all of the surface runoff. A few hundred feet downslope on the road, there is an outlet to the brook. The problem is that all that water runs into the driveway instead of passing it by and going out into the brook. The driveway also has no lip on it, and being lower than the roadway, all the water flows into our driveway. 

 This is the driveway after I've shoveled the water off. It gets mostly dry, but on warm melting days like today, it will be filled up again in an hour.

Here's  a short video of me removing water from the driveway with a snow shovel. I've found this to be the most successful method of getting rid of the water.



We're hoping to be able to fix the driveway at some point sooner rather than later. The neighbors say the driveway's been this way for 30 years. At some point, the driveway definitely shifted, settled, or sunk because it's cracked all over. It'd be nice if the water drained out TO the street, rather than in from the street. Off the side of the garage, where a lot of the water drains (usually via wicking where the water level reaches the grass on the side) the ground is VERY wet almost all of the time. I bet fixing the driveway will result in that area drying out a bit, too.

Newest 1,000 members of the farm

Welcome to our newest members!

What I didn't explain in the video was how I made the worm bin. It started as a big plastic bin. 30 gallons is roughly a good size for the amount of kitchen material that 2 adults makes, so we got a bin that size. Then I drilled holes along the bottom for drainage and near the top for ventilation. I covered the bottom with screen to keep everyone who should stay inside inside and everyone who should stay outside out (centipedes love to eat worms). The whole bin went up on blocks, with a tray underneath. The majority of the bin in filled with moist paper. The moistness should be equivalent to the moistness of a wrung-out sponge.

This is the chart I made to help us remember what goes where!

Plans for 2015

Things are always in flux, and I really like to think out loud. It especially helps me while planning, because I can easily see the flaws in my ideas once I tell someone else about them. With that being said, some of the things that Naomi and I were planning for 2015 as of a couple of months ago have changed somewhat. We're also trying to focus on what we can do based on time, money and resources in the coming year. The following are some of the things Naomi and I have been discussing as of late. Naomi may have a few more, but this is what's on my mind:

• Geese, not sheep
• rabbits
• mobile chicken coop
• worm bin
• refine duckponics
• gutters on the house
• attempt to replace one rotten windowsill

Geese- I had been talking about getting lambs in the spring because we have SO much lawn. Mowing it takes time, gas, and mower maintenance. Sheep would turn that grass into something productive- meat.  Well, the summer was very dry, and when October rains came, I realized just how wet some of that backyard lawn really is, which makes it totally not suitable for sheep.

I had also been interested in getting some geese, but thought I'd save it for a later year. Once I decided sheep were out, geese seemed like an easy decision. They're much much cheaper to obtain, I can stock them in a higher density, they also eat grass, and they would love it when the backyard gets a little wet. Pretty sure that's a done deal. I'm going to try to figure out how to still use the polydome I got from our neighbor to house the geese in. They might need a little ramp and some ramp training like Penelope got when she was a baby.

Rabbits- Rabbit might be one of my absolute favorite foods in the world. They existed in such abundance at our apartment that it seemed silly to try to raise domesticated rabbits. While we saw a few here in the end of summer/ early fall, they certainly weren't in abundance. Aside from shelling out for some infrastructure and stock costs, rabbits don't seem too tough to pull off this year. I had originally planned to knock this out during the end of winter, but I've sort of hit a design flaw and I'm focusing on some other stuff at the moment, mainly music. Rabbits are reasonably easy to take care of, not cost-prohibitive in regards to feed and care, and can add a significant amount of extra lean protein to our diets. Plus, they're cute and fluffy.

Mobile Chicken Coop- I've been talking about this quite a bit lately. I want to build another coop similar to our existing one, but on a trailer platform and be able to move it around the property. I want to fence the chickens into small paddocks with electronet, or even just non-electrified fence in the beginning so that I can focus their efforts where it will do the most good, and spread them across the landscape rather than keeping them in a fixed location- which usually turns into a mudhole. Again, this is a moderate expense, but if done right, should last a long time and its benefits will outweight the cost long term.

Worm Bin- A few years back I had wanted to start a worm bin, but couldn't find an appropriate place to site the bin while living in our apartment. Our basement now seems to have a very consistent temperature, and would be a great location for a worm bin. What little amount of food scraps we've been generating have been going straight into the chicken run, but it's never enough volume all at once to get some good aerobic compost going. A big part of our tiny volume of food scraps is that with the ordeal of moving, we didn't produce nearly the amount of veggies from our garden as in previous years. We just can't afford to buy the kind of produce we're used to producing ourselves. Just this morning we were debating over the best use of our shredded paper, and it hit me again- WORM BIN. So, this is a relatively new idea, but seems easy enough to get going, especially considering we have most or all of the parts needed. We just need for the ground to thaw a bit and find some appropriate worms.

Duckponics- This is Naomi's area of expertise, but she mentioned some adjustments and upgrades she's planning on for this year. I'll let her tackle that when she sees fit.

Gutters- We dearly need gutters on our house. They would fix so many issues that we're having like basement infiltration, exterior rot on the house (see windowsills), foundation stuff, and water supply issues. I'm really hoping I can slam this one out before next fall. I haven't even begun to research the cost of this, but we've got so many water issues I can't NOT get them.

Windowsills- Most, if not all of the windowsills on our house are rotten. Like sponge-soft. It's easy to see where water sheets off the roof, hits the house, and then hits the windowsills. I need to do a lot of work on the windows other than the sills, too, (reglazing, new storm windows) but it doesn't make sense until the water issue is resolved. I am, however, planning to try replacing one windowsill and see how it goes. If it isn't too much of a nightmare, I will then plan on doing the others. I'm hoping to replace the sills, eventually get new storm windows, and otherwise rehabilitate the existing wooden-sash, double-hung windows because they're beautiful and fit the style of our home very well.

Information 2014 & 2015

Perhaps this is all in my head, but I feel as though one of my jobs in our household is systems manager (since that is something that I naturally do well). As the systems manager (that I just crowned myself as), I would be better suited to my job if I glean more information about the systems I am attempting to manage. In my year-end books read review I do for my own benefit, I noticed that not only did I not read a great number of books this year, very few of them were aligned with my goals of furthering our agricultural life. Here were the books that I DID read in 2014 that help me have a wider breadth of knowledge.

•  The Tinkerers: The amateurs, DIYers, and inventors who make America great by Alex Foege
• 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution: Ideas and resources for self-liberation, monkey wrenching and preparedness by Claire Wolfe
• Loving and Leaving the Good Life by Helen Nearing
• Getting Food from Water: A Guide to backyard aquaculture by Gene Logsdon
• The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the angels who have returned with my memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, The Gladyses & Babe: a memoir by Alice Walker

In 2015, I would like to read more, and read more books that further our life goals. I am fully aware that information comes from sources other than books, but I worry that this is emblematic of the information that I have been researching this past year.

Here's to a new year and new books to read! 

Getting Colder

I've been cold all of my adult life, and I'm sure Naomi would say the same. It seems that I can't afford to stay warm in the houses built by my grandparents' generation and heated by the systems and cheap fuel of my parents' generation. One of the reasons behind wanting to own our own home was so we could begin to deal with this problem, but there is an overwhelming number of things to consider.

How badly does our house leak? What are the most cost- effective and environmentally-friendly things to do to mitagate that? What do we replace our stupid oil-burning furnace with- geothermal heat pump, super high-efficiency bottled gas, heat only with wood? Heating with wood was another issue because we need an additional chimney, which I wasn't about to start dealing with as it was already getting cold. So I signed up for a home energy audit.

I hope that the energy audit folks will at least show us the low-hanging fruit, give us cost analysis, and set us up with some rebates. I also hope that I can talk them into not taking away all our incandescent lightbulbs so we can still use them as heat lamps in the chick brooder.

A little history

In 2010, we had our first garden together.  It was about 9'x30', and in the shade of 3 or 4 mature oak trees.  We grew some OK greens.  I especially remember the swiss chard.  We had some tomatoes, and a couple cucumbers.  We had broccoli that actually made little heads.  We grew about 6 softball-sized cabbages and I made sauerkraut from them.  We tried growing onions and potatoes for the first time, at least for me.  Both of those were total failures. I  remember getting less than a dozen marble-sized potatoes.  We then proceeded to tell the landlords that we wanted to tear out the whole lawn the next spring.

In 2011, the landlords granted us access to "the big garden."  We were fully unprepared to deal with this.  I bought far, faaaar too many seeds, laid out a plan that tried to stretch a tiny garden over a large garden plot.  Everything was way too close together, and we ended up with large fallow areas because we had no idea about spacing.  And it was unbelievably weedy, partially due to having laid fallow for well over 5 years.  We learned what mugwart was, and started to loathe it.  We grew lots of tomatoes, really good squash (mostly by accident, as most people tend to do with squash) and some really fantastic corn.  The corn was also a total accident.  There were some cucumbers in there, and we failed miserably at keeping track of greens.  The woodchucks also totally ravaged everything.  I started killing them, but just buried their bodies under the crops.  On the suggestion from a friend that I teach her how to shoot a bow so she could bowhunt (which predictably never happened- her fault, not mine) I signed up for a bowhunter safety course, since I had been looking for a reason to start shooting again.  I hadn't touched a bow in about a decade at that point.  At that point, we dipped into eating meat again, both of us for the first time in a really long time.  The neighbors were very generous with sharing venison with us.

In 2012, we got married, and Naomi claims that I put all my wedding stress into the garden.  This may or may not be true, however.  I started to get some ideas, understood how environmental forces acted on the garden site, and read some books.  I read some garden basics stuff, since I had never previously done that.  I also got accidentally turned on to permaculture, and read a couple of permaculture-related books.  I staked out beds in the big garden, and did my best at a very amateur attempt at hugelkultur. I mostly used moldy waste hay, and a bunch of small branches.  I made my mounds something like 8-12" high- which turned out to be enough to keep the beds from flooding, which had happened frequently prior to that.  We grew garlic for the first time.  We had our first success with potatoes, which we stopped trying to grow in a trench in heavy soil!!!  I experimented with growing mushrooms, was baking bread in full swing, and finally found some wild edibles, mainly fiddleheads and ramps.  We got chickens!  I build the first hoophouses, and experimented with season extension to some degree of success.  I successfully grew onions and spinach for the first time.  We had parsnips, beets, and celebrated the first official Harvest Night as a reflection on the previous year's experience.  To date, 2012 was our most successful and bountiful year across the board. 

2013 was a hard year, but also a good one.  Penelope came to us in the spring, along with many more chickens than we had expected.  I got cocky with my garden that year.  After the wild success of 2012, I thought I was an expert.  It turned out that I didn't quite do things the way I should have.  This was a year of further experimentation too.  I tried growing tomatoes in a weave for the second time, but planted them out much later than usual.  It was an attempt to push off harvest closer to cool weather in order to get maximum storage.  Also in an attempt to further protect the soil, we mulched EVERYTHING, which brought on a mice/vole problem that we didn't expect.  In spite of all the mulch, we didn't mulch the potatoes as much, and the harvest suffered there as well.  At this point, we weren't certain of the future of our garden there.  We began taking steps to get out.  I think this contributed to the way we put effort into the garden as well, letting perfect be the enemy of the good.

Now in 2014, we are finally in a place of our own.  It's been a hard road thus far, and our growing season was mostly a loss.  We did get a good potato yield, some OK garlic, a bunch of rye (yay! finally a grain success) and some other smaller stuff from "the big garden."  We've managed to create a few garden beds here so far, although much smaller (8'x6') which seems much more manageable so far.  I got all new seed stock for garlic, and we're already back to eating our own salads almost every night.  

And I think 2015 is going to be a good year.  We have a lot to learn here, but we have more experience than ever to deal with the new conditions.  I also have some great plans for the spring.  The chickens will be moving out of the static run and hopefully into a mobile coop of sorts.  I'm working toward getting some lambs to raise on our excessive lawn.  I really hope Penelope can get some friends finally, and I'm going to get some rabbits hopefully.  All of this will be in addition to getting back to our normal schedule of vegetables and fruits, plus our newly-acquired apple and pear trees, plus a handful of blueberry bushes and wild grapes.  As this year's growing season is winding down, our gears are already turning to launch into an even better year next year. 

First weekly walkaround

I decided today that it would be nice to spend some time each week just walking and observing the plants,  animals, and activity around the house.  I'm realizing while writing this that I used to do that at the big garden too, just every so often. 

I seem to come up with more questions than answers most of the time.  At least I can keep track of them this way.  So here are my observations

- there are some caterpillars deflating the milkweed plants on the bank by the road.  I wonder if they're monarchs.  I don't know what else would be eating milkweed.  

-we had a hard rain yesterday evening.   The water levels are back up.  There are also a lot of little fish in the brook now, and some of them are starting to look kind of big.  I want to get a net so I can check them out really closely since they really like to dart away when I approach the water. 

-The knotweed is really starting to resprout from my slashing project, more so where it's not impeded by piled of slashed canes.  Where it was heavily mulched with dumpings of old canes, it's having a hard time coming up. 

-there are some plants I'm really curious about:
     -one with stems that come off the main stalk at 45° angles, has a reddish tint, and starting to have small yellow flowers.

     -a succulent groundcover growing in the lawn with opposite roundish leaves of a beautiful soft green color. 

-I always find dead crayfish parts both in the brook and up in the lawn near the brook, but I've yet to see a live one.

Hopefully I can keep up with both the weekly walkaround and the corresponding posts.  I'm hoping to go back and add photos too. 

Updates and Observations

It rained HARD today.  It was the first time it rained in weeks.  The sky was really ominous for a bit, and we saw over two dozen birds of prey of some sort circling around too high up for us to identify them.  We put out every water-holding vessel we had and hoped for the best.  Our collection exceeded our expectations!  It only took about a half hour to fill all our tubs and trash cans.

Our only source of outside water has been straight from the brook.  That's not really a problem, but it's not convenient.  It requires walking all the way down to "the point," squatting down, and filling the buckets with silty water, and occasionally, minnows.  I only seem to be able to get the buckets half full because the water's been so low.  It's also been hell trying to get anything to regrow where they dug the yard out to put the new septic tank in.  The clover and buckwheat I put down shouldn't have any trouble germinating now.  I'd really like to have more than just grass. 

We're making progress on putting in the permanent chicken run.  I want to move the coops and the tractors out of the way temporarily while we finish.  I can't wait to be able to get those birds into the tractors and move them around.  It's amazing how much grass (clover etc etc) they've eaten, trampled, and matted down.

I figured out where and how the seepage in the basement happens.  It runs off the little roof of the hatch door, dribbles down and leaks between where the block and the stone foundation meet.  This can be easily fixed with some catchment, well placed plants, and a little back-filling.  Also, I couldn't believe the amount of water that pooled up off the left side of the front door.  Definitely need to do something there.  The driveway also totally filled up to an incredible level, cascaded over the side yard, around the back of the garage, and into the wetland soil, totally recharging the water level in the wetland area.  Where the brook and the little stream meet up (the point,)  the water level was all the way up to the grass.  I got soaked every time I walked out the back door from the sheet of water coming off the roof.  The carpet in the breezeway seemed to stay dry, so I'm still not sure why it has water stains.  Also, the chickens seemed to be happy with their tarps covering their runs, because they were all outside during the storm and weren't miserably huddled up like the used to do.

In the end, everything was back to normal.  The brook is filled up again, and gurgling away happily outside.  And a tiny bit of sun even peeked back out around the clouds.