Just Digging It

The irrigation water is being turned back on this Monday.  The pond will be full again, which will be nice to see and will provide ready water for a lot of our animals.  It also means that the water problem we have behind the barn will rear its ugly, wet head again.  We’ve only a few more days to try to figure it out.  We assume we have an old pipe leak or old drain leak from the fields around us and we need to find the leak and divert the water back into the irrigation ditch.  All we could do last spring was move the water away from the barns by digging a trench to run the water back to the ditch.  We never really figured out where it was coming from and we’d all had different stabs at it and gotten different results.  My Loving Spouse had stuck his arm in where there were bubbles and felt some sort of round object that seemed like a pipe of sorts, so he went out the other day before work, stuck a shovel in the ground, hit something and said, “Dig there, I think I found the broken pipe”.

And so I did…. I dug and dug and dug…. There was no ‘pipe’ but there was some wood, so I dug some more.  I remembered Our Friend the Farmer saying that a lot of the old drainage ‘pipes’ were actually made of wood, so I was hopeful that I had found ‘it’, the problem, the leak, the issue, etc.  I dug 3 feet down, 2 feet wide and about 4 1/2 feet long, which equals to a lot of digging, a lot of moving dirt, during which Dixie tried to assist me and I received numerous texts from My Loving Spouse inquiring as to my progress.  I kept digging and then, it happened, I found ‘it’!  A hole in the top of the wooden box, just about where we had the beginning of the ‘leak’ or rather the beginning of the Barn Bog.  I was feeling very proud of myself and I was feeling very sore.  I was more than ready for the “atta girl”, I expected when My Loving Spouse got home, because I had found ‘it’!  Except, I got a “Why did you dig there?”  and “That is not a round pipe?”  Which my sore muscles and I did not actually appreciate very much.  We had what one might call a bit of a disgruntled evening.

With only two more days before the water goes back on, the issue needed more attention.  We worked out a game plan, which included more digging on my part.  It was not lost on me, that last spring when we did our digging we had not only more man power, but a rented back hoe as well!  This time we had, me and my two favorite shovels.

I was just setting up for my big dig, when My Loving Spouse called.

“Why don’t you wait to dig?”, he sweetly inquired.

“We can’t…we don’t have enough time before the water goes on.  Do you know what to say, when you get home?”  (We didn’t want any more disgruntled evenings).

“Oh, yes”, he said, “I’ve got it this time.  I will say, ‘You’ve done a wonderful job digging My dear, would you like some Advil?”  Exactly!

I proceeded to dig, with plenty of help from the chickens and a cat or two…

So I commenced digging from the hole to the old trench so we could add a pipe to divert the water.  About a half hour into the trench deepening project (which equals a lot of shovelfuls of dirt), I found a pipe… a round one… more what My Loving Spouse had expected.  Our ‘ah-ha’ moment  we had not one problem, but two, which is why we had so much water in so many different places baffling us all about the source and the problem.

We now need a two-pronged attack.  At least the trench is dug, we know where the pipe is, which direction it is going and we have plenty of Advil.