The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Flood: Day two

Reflections in the flood watersTwenty four hours later, the rain has stopped and the flood waters have begun to recede.  Every plant in the floodplain has been swept so that it faces downstream and a thin layer of sediment is being left behind to fertilize the ground.  The salamander tadpoles I found a few weeks ago have been washed to new puddles and I find them in unexpected places, making me take more care where I place my feet.

Our driveway crisscrosses three sections of the "alligator swamp" --- areas we call "baby fords" --- before it reaches the creek proper.  One of these baby fords is a drainage ditch which previous farmers dug in an attempt to farm the floodplain, but the other two are actually the original bed of the creek.  At some time in the last fifty years since our area's topo map was creat
Black walnuts floating in the flood watersed, the farmers got together and dug a new, straight channel to make more dry land for their fields on either side.  I can't help wondering if the channelizing of the creek is one of the causes of its frequent floods.

Yesterday, I could only reach baby ford number one before the flood waters turned me back.  This morning, I made it all the way to baby ford number three, just barely out of sight of the footbridge.  Maybe by this evening, we'll know if the footbridge survived the flood.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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