By the start of 2021 Helen had decided the paddock was going to have to become home to some new additions to the pets/livestock inventory, namely two rheas. For those of you that don't know (and I didn't at the time) these are large flightless South American birds not dissimilar to emus/ostriches. Our two had been raised by Helen from chicks she had found in not very good condition at a local bird auction and for which there were no other takers so fearing their possible demise if she didn't bid for them they were duly bid on and 'won'. Since then they had been living in the potting shed with heat lamps and various other mollycoddling luxuries that had seen them successfully raised from not very well looked after young birds to fine youthful specimens mainly thanks to Helen's attention and dedication. Their rate of growth was becoming an issue however so Helen knew they would soon need to be moved to a bigger home hence their impending arrival in the paddock.
Not long after they had moved in a very wet late winter revealed a new problem, the paddock was waterlogged to the point where if you walked across it you would be ankle deep in water. Luckily neither the rhea or the sheep suffered with anything medical as a result, but it was clearly not a nice place for them to be when it was like that. Therefore, we moved them out and re-homed them... no I’m just kidding, we instead decided to do what any sane human being would do and spend thousands installing land drainage in the paddock to ensure it would be much drier in any future wet winters for the little darlings.
Much research was done and a herringbone pattern of perforated land drain sitting in 20 mm gravel was settled upon with it feeding into a central drain that would then drain off into an already existing runoff into the wet ditch that runs along the east side of the property. We couldn't use a soak-away as percolation tests showed that the soil was way too rich in clay to allow for any such drainage system hence the only option was to move the water into a drainage ditch. The problem with this solution is that the run off drain was much higher (at around 400mm depth) than the minimum 750mm depth of land drain outlet so we had no option but to install an attenuation tank to hold the water and then have a submersible pump that would pump it up and into a pipe that would be connected to the runoff drain. This pump would use a float switch to turn on and off so would be connected 24/7 but would only run when the water level in the tank rose sufficiently switching off when it dropped.
The land drain digging and installation was contracted to the same people that helped us dig the lake, but before they could start we needed to relocate the rhea and the sheep to the cottage garden where they would live while the work was undertaken. Once this was done a large digger and dump truck were soon on site and with a portion of the fence removed (as the gate was not wide enough) they could access the paddock and start work. It took less than a week to dig, line with gravel, install the perforated pipe and back fill as well as digging a hole for the attenuation tank.
The land drains under construction.
The hole for the attenuation tank.
A further task that was undertaken at this time while a digger was on site was to dig away a portion of the south end of the paddock around the stable and along the fence to allow for the installation of a gravelled section in order that when going in and out to feed and clean the animals in winter we could walk on the gravel rather than churning up the grass and wearing it further away over the wet months.
The gravelled area under construction.
Once the land drains were in the entire paddock was loose ploughed to a 200mm depth and re-sown with meadow grade grass seed. In the meantime, a new issue had arisen (the paddock seems to attract issues like flies to manure) and this was the fact that the three emus my partner had raised as chicks (yes I did say emus - it is a genuine mad house isn't it? Gerald Durrell eat your heart out :-)) were in need a proper home. They were, like the sheep and the rheas, now living in the cottage garden and the overcrowding was making at least one of them restless so much so it had managed to leap over the fence on at least three occasions all of which resulted in a tense rounding up operation to return said bird to its friends. So it was decided pretty quickly that they should live with the rheas and the sheep in the (obviously much larger) paddock, but the big issue with that was the fence height. At 1.2 metres it was simply not high enough to prevent the emus running and jumping over it so the fence we had installed less than two years ago needed to be replaced... again.
Then another problem arose (yes, it’s the ‘gift’ that keeps on giving) in that after a month the grass seed hadn’t germinated. It was opined that this was due to the extremely dry weather, but there had been some rain and it had been watered via tractor on at least one occasion so it’s more likely the seed was no good especially as the weeds were growing nicely. So we now had the joyous three pronged task list to install a new fence, get the paddock re-seeded and finish the land drainage system by installing the attenuation system before we could move the livestock back over, but we needed to move them over as soon as possible to try and lessen the number of 'great escapes'.
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