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southern MN | > It almost seems like the water table is higher than the ground down there, can that happen?
I'm no tile expert. But that sentence decribes 50% of my farm..... Yes it can.
What happens is the water soaks into the hills - you musta had a lot of slower rains, not a heavy gully washer, but many slow rains.
The water moves slow in the clay, and tends to spread out. Gets to the sidehills, and comes out in sort of a spring out of the sidehills. Follows clay layers, or sand'gravel layers, the difference between subsoil layer & topsoil layer - whatever layers are in there. the water will come out the sidehills.
So, if your land were wetter, you would have put in a tile main along the bottom of that field, perhaps an 8 inch tile. Drain out the low spots.
All looks good, you can drive on the bottom now, really fixed it.
Until a few years later, and you get slow soaking rains again.
_Then_ you notice the middle of the sidehills are the wetspots. Where the water oozes out. So, you need to put some laterals in to pick up these oozing spots. Use a whole bunch of 4 inch tile to collect that water off the sidehills.
And it works great.
Until you get the next rainy year. Then you notice, the bottoms are wet again. the sidehills are dried up, but the bottom won't dry for an extra week.
What happens is the water runs out of the steeper hills in the 4 inch tile, and slows down on the flatter 8 inh main. The main gets swamped, and makes the bottoms wet - waiting for the high drainage tile to empty out, before the bottoms flow out.
So, you realize the 8 inch main was too small to handle what you did with the 4 inch hiigher laterals, so you are faced with putting in a second main through the bottoms. One main to drain the shallow bottoms, and one main to drain the higher sidehills.
If you are unfamilar with rolling hills, clay soil, and drainage, then none of this makes sense to you. Well, that's just silly - tile will drain....
Until you've been there. :)
I'm trying to deal with 160 acres of that sort of thing, going through 3 landowners, and one protected wetland, to see if I can recover a few acres of mine that is on the bottom, and gets filled up by the water rushing down to me, but not flowing away for 2 weeks until all that top stiuff drains out. Dad already had 3 mains headed that direction, a pair of 8 inch and a 10 inch, but the neighbors keep adding on - and I understand that - and so it's still not enough capacity.
Drain the bottoms, and the sidehills will be wet.
Add in more tile to drain out the sidehills, and the bottoms will return to being wet.
Try to plan enough main cappacity to handle that right away - can be money well spent.
It's nice to have at least 2.5 feet of soil on top of the tile so you don't hook/ crush it with deep tillage, and it used to be difficult to go deeper than 4 feet, maybe 5 feet without extra dirt work. Deep tile will dry the ground slower, but a wider area. Shallow tile will drain it quicker, but a narrower area. One would like 3 feet deep much of the time unless you are doing an odd soil type or specific pattern tile.
I'm no tile expert, don't listen to me when the smarter folk start answering.
--->Paul | |
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