Clogged Drain in the Field

It has been an incredibly wet spring. There's a ton of snow in the mountains, the ground is already saturated, and it's been raining a ton on top of it. All this moisture has made agricultural work difficult (and impossible in flooded areas in the northern parts of the state). Our farm has the added problem of having a clogged drain in the field, so the moisture in ground isn't going away and the ground is too wet to do any work on. A few weeks ago Uncle Martin had come up to try to disk (dig up dirt and weeds in preparation for planting) one of the fields and the ground was so wet he got not only the disk stuck, but the tractor too. It took a while for the weather to let the ground dry up enough to get the tractor out. The disk is still there...

Martin hired some excavators to come out and dig up a few drains to see if they could be unclogged. We went out to go watch!

This is the bottom of the field. The stick with barbed wire around it to the left of center of the picture is the fence around the far west part of the field. The water in the background is Utah Lake. It's really close this year. It's really only a few feet (both horizontally and vertically) from hitting the bottom of the field.

This is a view from the bottom of the field to the south. Those trees (I think) are the southern edge of this field.

Here's the pipe they got installed to fix at least one of the drains. I think there are several along this edge of the field.

The excavators have this strange/weird/cool thing they use to tell if there's water running underneath the ground. Apparently Joseph Smith invented it (and if I hadn't tried it myself, I never would have believed it, so I don't blame you if you think its nuts - I did). It reminds me of those cartoons you see with a guy holding a stick shaped like a Y and running it over the ground to find water... This is a little bit different though. There are two sticks, both made of metal. The part you hold in your hand is a tube, and inside the tube is another piece of bent metal, free to move - it's only held in place by a nut that's larger than the tube on the end that comes out of the tube. Apparently when you hold them in your hands, with the long part of the thinner metal parallel to the ground, mostly they stay that way, but when you walk over a void in the ground (hole, running water, etc) the two metal bars cross each other. Strange and witch-doctory I know. I did a horrible job explaining what those are, but maybe some of the pictures will help.

Here's Mark holding the witch sticks

Emily waiting for some snacks. It was lunch time when we headed down there - we didn't time that very well


Shelly giving up with the water sticks

She tried it again, but just for the pictures

Hanging out, waiting for the tractor to start doing some digging

Not sure if you can tell, but I'm holding the sticks in my hands, trying out this voodoo that doesn't really exist

Well, what do you know... The sticks actually crossed - not sure if you can see in this picture, but the two rods I'm holding aren't straight out in front of me, they're each almost hitting my other hand - crossed.

Maybe the pictures don't explain it well at all... Oh well.

The tractor work starts again!

It was fun to watch them dig up the drains

The tractor dug all the way from the dark dirt in front of it to the fence line behind it. Those guys are talented in using a tractor!

Just keep digging, just keep digging...

and we'll just keep watching

That's a lot of dirt

Uncle Martin watching the progress with the rest of us.

Here's a view of Orem from down at the bottom of the field. Or is it Provo that way? I can't tell... All I see are trees (and weeds - too bad the disk is stuck or they could do something about those weeds)

The kids took a break for a snack. It was lunch time remember? They were hungry

How are the pretzels bud?

Shelly seems to like them

Running water! But not nearly enough... with how wet the ground is, the water should be almost filling that pipe, not just trickling out. There's a clog somewhere up the line. Finding that clog is another day's project.

See the whitish spot? That's clay. There's only dirt for a few feet and then it's clay down there.

But clay is fun to play with! Mark grabbed some, and then went back to get enough for the kids to each have a piece to play with.