patandchickens
Crazy Cat Lady
Have you actually looked into the cost of a dumptruckload of cheap aggregate (usually roadbase is the cheapest -- a mixture of dirt/sand/gravel used for road foundations and gravel driveway bases -- or sometimes sand). Around here, a really quite *large* load of it runs a coupla hundred dollars, less if you want less. It can be quite useful in a heavy-animal-traffic area. YOu needn't even *necessarily* spread it out much yourself, you can have the truck do a "running dump" and then let animals and mother nature take care of it beyond that. Do not even try to put aggregate onto muddy soil, it will just disappear within the year -- wait til the ground is DRY and then it will LAST. (You often need dry ground in order to get the truck in there anyhow!)
Hogfuel (chipped wood) is good in some situations but if you are on soil that gets really muddy it can get you into a situation where you have to *keep* adding hogfuel every year or two to keep things abovewater, because as free says it will add to the organic content of the soil as it breaks down, and ultimately make the soil spongier and muckier. Price of hogfuel or tree chippings varies wildly with region, you should ask around -- or even just call local tree-trimming companies and your local utilities/municipal-road-maintenance dep'ts, and let it be known that if they should ever want somewhere to dump their stuff for free when they're in your area, you would be happy to help them out
For animal-traffic areas, you can do the following (aside from, or in addition to, adding gravel or hogfuel):
-- put gutters and downspouts on ALL buildings anywhere near the muddy areas, and direct the downspout runoff WELL AWAY from problem areas (4" corrugated drainpipe makes a good flexible "elephant nose" drainpipe extension, and is pretty cheap)
-- trench puddles and lakes and wet areas to let water run off to lower areas... the point is not just to drain the standing water, the point is also that the drier that former-puddle-or-lake is, the more the soil there will rise back up slightly adn be less likely to puddle in *future*. Chronically-soggy soil 'collapses' and gets lower and lower and it becomes a vicious cycle.
-- also take a look in heavy rain or with significant flooding and see if there are places you can do trenches/ditches to *divert* water *around* animal pens etc. It needn't be a big fancy earthmoving exercise with skidsteers and bulldozers and all that, just a couple hours with a shovel (or even 10 minutes with a shovel every day for a couple weeks) can do WONDERs in the right place. This is how most of the ditching on our property has been done --- gradually, by me + shovel ---- and it is SO much less floody now!
-- if there are any paths fencelines driveways etc that cause water to back up behind them, consider putting a ditch or culvert there. Again, the longer an area sits flooded, the lower it gets and the floodier it stays -- dry it out and it gets better-able to STAY dry.
-- consider having multiple gateways between paddocks/pens/whatever, if you have problems with one gateway getting unusably splorky during mud season. you can use that gateway til it becomes a real problem then switch to the other one which, because it has not been recieving traffic, will be in good shape still and hopefullly get you by until drier weather. This works best in larger paddocks, not teeny pens (where EVERYthing gets churned into awful mud).
-- there is a lot to be said sometimes for having ONE small sacrifice-paddock that you truck in gravel for, so that the animals always have ONE high and dry place to hang out, and thus you can also keep them off the more-vulnerable paddocks during wet weather. By preventing the pasture/dirt from getting churned up and punched, you keep the turf healthier AND ALSO keep it much drier. (Punched/churned ground captures lots of water; intact turf lets the water run off and then when the grass gets growing it also evapotranspires the water away)
-- for "people" footpaths, lengths of old board work well, or discarded carpet strips (from curb-cruising) laid over a path made of pallets. Or you can go all fancy and make sections of movable boardwalk, by rebuilding pallets or by putting plywood on pallets or by building from scratch with whatever lumber you can scrounge. I would recommend sections only 4-8' long, depending on width and construction. You can then pick them up and store them during the dry season.
Something that is extremely helpful here but maybe not to you (I don't recall whether you actually get freezy weather?) is to wait til the ground is maximally-frozen and just *about* to start to thaw in the spring, and then cover mud-prone areas with something insulating. I do a total cleanout of the horse stalls and chicken pens at that point and dump the used shavings in a 4-6' wide path, maybe 6" deep, from the horse shed out to the higher drier parts of paddocks. The shavings layer keeps the ground beneath frozen for considerably longer than the surrounding ground, so the horses have a firm "commute". By the time the shavings road starts to get real squishy, the surrounding ground has usually dried considerably so they just switch.
So I dunno, maybe there are some thoughts in there you could use?
Good luck, have fun,
Pat
Hogfuel (chipped wood) is good in some situations but if you are on soil that gets really muddy it can get you into a situation where you have to *keep* adding hogfuel every year or two to keep things abovewater, because as free says it will add to the organic content of the soil as it breaks down, and ultimately make the soil spongier and muckier. Price of hogfuel or tree chippings varies wildly with region, you should ask around -- or even just call local tree-trimming companies and your local utilities/municipal-road-maintenance dep'ts, and let it be known that if they should ever want somewhere to dump their stuff for free when they're in your area, you would be happy to help them out
For animal-traffic areas, you can do the following (aside from, or in addition to, adding gravel or hogfuel):
-- put gutters and downspouts on ALL buildings anywhere near the muddy areas, and direct the downspout runoff WELL AWAY from problem areas (4" corrugated drainpipe makes a good flexible "elephant nose" drainpipe extension, and is pretty cheap)
-- trench puddles and lakes and wet areas to let water run off to lower areas... the point is not just to drain the standing water, the point is also that the drier that former-puddle-or-lake is, the more the soil there will rise back up slightly adn be less likely to puddle in *future*. Chronically-soggy soil 'collapses' and gets lower and lower and it becomes a vicious cycle.
-- also take a look in heavy rain or with significant flooding and see if there are places you can do trenches/ditches to *divert* water *around* animal pens etc. It needn't be a big fancy earthmoving exercise with skidsteers and bulldozers and all that, just a couple hours with a shovel (or even 10 minutes with a shovel every day for a couple weeks) can do WONDERs in the right place. This is how most of the ditching on our property has been done --- gradually, by me + shovel ---- and it is SO much less floody now!
-- if there are any paths fencelines driveways etc that cause water to back up behind them, consider putting a ditch or culvert there. Again, the longer an area sits flooded, the lower it gets and the floodier it stays -- dry it out and it gets better-able to STAY dry.
-- consider having multiple gateways between paddocks/pens/whatever, if you have problems with one gateway getting unusably splorky during mud season. you can use that gateway til it becomes a real problem then switch to the other one which, because it has not been recieving traffic, will be in good shape still and hopefullly get you by until drier weather. This works best in larger paddocks, not teeny pens (where EVERYthing gets churned into awful mud).
-- there is a lot to be said sometimes for having ONE small sacrifice-paddock that you truck in gravel for, so that the animals always have ONE high and dry place to hang out, and thus you can also keep them off the more-vulnerable paddocks during wet weather. By preventing the pasture/dirt from getting churned up and punched, you keep the turf healthier AND ALSO keep it much drier. (Punched/churned ground captures lots of water; intact turf lets the water run off and then when the grass gets growing it also evapotranspires the water away)
-- for "people" footpaths, lengths of old board work well, or discarded carpet strips (from curb-cruising) laid over a path made of pallets. Or you can go all fancy and make sections of movable boardwalk, by rebuilding pallets or by putting plywood on pallets or by building from scratch with whatever lumber you can scrounge. I would recommend sections only 4-8' long, depending on width and construction. You can then pick them up and store them during the dry season.
Something that is extremely helpful here but maybe not to you (I don't recall whether you actually get freezy weather?) is to wait til the ground is maximally-frozen and just *about* to start to thaw in the spring, and then cover mud-prone areas with something insulating. I do a total cleanout of the horse stalls and chicken pens at that point and dump the used shavings in a 4-6' wide path, maybe 6" deep, from the horse shed out to the higher drier parts of paddocks. The shavings layer keeps the ground beneath frozen for considerably longer than the surrounding ground, so the horses have a firm "commute". By the time the shavings road starts to get real squishy, the surrounding ground has usually dried considerably so they just switch.
So I dunno, maybe there are some thoughts in there you could use?
Good luck, have fun,
Pat
