Thursday, April 28, 2011

Rain gauge

Everything's a huge, sloppy mess!

My mom mentioned something she said she didn't know about before she moved to the farm ... and it's field tile.

Most fields with crops in the Midwest are tiled, which means they have big plastic pipes underground that drain the excess water out of the field into a creek or ditch or some other waterway. This way, the field doesn't get too wet and kill the crops. If you're selling land, it's worth more tiled than not tiled.

They're strategically placed in fields for the best drainage. They're put in with giant machines called tile plows. The end result - all that you see - is a plastic pipe sticking out of the ground.

Right now, water is gushing out of all the tiles, because there's so much rain. I went out to take a picture of the tile near our creek, but it was covered by the water from the creek!



Sometimes the tile just can't keep up - many, many fields around here are little lakes today.

The grass is growing really fast, but we can't put the cattle out on pasture yet because it's so wet they'd just tear it up. Our builder is really ready to continue - he came just by himself today - but it's been too wet. Our lawn is squishy, we have puddles everywhere, and our basement has a little stream running through it. Though even field tile wouldn't help that.

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