Gully

By golly I found the source of my gully on our new farm.  You wouldn't think the little bit of water that seems to come across the neighbor's field under this dip in the fence could cause the deep wash a few feet beyond!

I would say we have some Highly Erodible Land there!  I am not sure how I am going to try to fix it yet so I am open to suggestions.  I really need the cooperation of the neighbor but I haven't even met the man yet.  He is elderly so maybe we will get a chance to gain control of it by ownership in the next few years.  Then again, maybe not, who knows?

I am not sure if he even no-tills.  It's in bean stubble now so it should have been seeded down to wheat or a cover crop.  The fall has been dry so there is no increased erosion this year.  Much of it happened last year when we had double normal rainfall.  But the gully looks old so it has been happening a long time.

I do have a load of bricks from under the house I can help fill the gully with.  I think I want to run a tile down through it to the creek and keep the top in sod.  It lends itself to a sod waterway very well.

Speaking of the bricks, we were talking to our neighbor Roger and he said he thought the Turner Family built our house here on Martinsville Road.  He explained that the Turner Cemetery part of the Martinsville IOOF Cemetery was made from the digging for cellars on the Turner properties.  He said the Turner's were riverboat people in the late 1700's and bought a lot of land around Martinsville and settled here.  We did not know that.  The soil from under our house is probably on that mound of dirt!

I mentioned our crumbly bricks and he said the clay they used was probably part of the problem but the major problem was they didn't fire the brick long enough to burn off the impurities.  That makes a lot of sense, too.  Some of the old houses around here are very intact and others like ours, have had to have a lot of reconstruction to still be standing.  Ours is painted white to seal out the moisture and others are the still the red clay they dug back in those days to make the bricks.

We finally got a shower this morning to settle the dust and green the wheat back up a bit.  We only had an inch or so in November so it has been a very dry fall.  Not as dry as the center of the drought map, but pretty dry for southwest Ohio.

Who knows what the New Year will bring but this drought seems to be hanging in there.  Water erosion won't be the problem out west as much as wind erosion if this pattern doesn't change.

Ed