The New Meadow Pipeline

The New Meadow Pipeline

The meadow ditch has always been in my nightmares! When I was growing up on the farm I hated cleaning the ditch more than just about anything. Unless it was milking the cows or hauling hay. The meadow ditch was always swampy, and the grass would grow in thick and tough. When you tried to clean it, you would just think you had a shovel full, and some roots would catch and pull your load off the shovel and back into the ditch where it would splash muddy water all over you. After a while of struggling with that you would look like you had been mud wrestling, and smell even worse.

Over the years Dad placed some pipe in the ditch to help transport the water, but he lacked the necessary resources to do a good job. Where he needed an outlet, he would leave a gap in the pipe, and that was where the cows would always choose to tromp and plug things up. There wasn't enough fall in the line to keep the water moving very fast anyway, and these "tromp points" introduced a lot of mud and silt into the pipe until it was nearly plugged in many places until you could hardly get any water at the downstream end.

Earlier this year I convinced my neighbor, Garth Frehner, that if we could replace the pipe, we would get plenty of water for both of us from Redd Creek through the meadow. He did some investigation and decided I was right. He purchased the materials and provided most of the equipment and labor. My meager assistance amounted to back-filling with my skid steer and connecting the valves.

The photos below show the work progressing. We waited until what we thought would be the driest time of the year, knowing that the meadow was quite swampy even then. We had trouble with water filling the trench and the trench caving in, and getting equipment stuck, but all in all we got the job done.

The photo below shows the completed project, with one of the valves cracked enough to let some water out for the livestock.

A new head gate was also installed in Redd Creek to provide a diversion point for the water. It was designed to collect water while keeping out trash and limbs. It will also collect sediment and silt (and ash) and keep them out of the pipeline.


In addition to providing a way to get the water across what has been a very wet and troublesome bog, It will provide me with a way to fill a pond I have been planning to build. That will be the subject of another blog when I get it finished.