Digging a Ditch
Water is very important to the farming and ag community here in Palisade. Colorado as well as numerous other states rely on the Colorado river for its primary water source. With that in mind, when we were looking at different properties, we always made sure the property had water rights tied to the specific acreage.
Our property has two acres of water rights. Prior to us installing an irrigation system in the area we will be growing our market garden; the hay field was watered via flood irrigation. This is when the farmer opens their irrigation, usually a large surface pipe, and floods the field with water. Many farms that surround us still water in this manner, many more have moved away from this to a drip system that conserves water through more targeted watering. This second system is the type of irrigation we have installed for our property.
That said, because so many other farmers still use the flooding method, our property as do others, must have run off ditches so that as the flooding flows down from one property to the next, it doesn’t flood an adjacent farm and its field, or home! The later, we’ve recently learned happened to a neighbor of ours. This is why, I think, they have a really big run off ditch in comparison to others I’ve seen. Our ditch is significantly smaller than our neighbors, and it became even smaller as our landscapers were working on installing our pathway that lines the outer edge of the Market Garden.
Although I didn’t see a lot of water in this ditch last fall, I still think it wise to dig the ditch out so that there is a clear path for the water to flow. I would rather play it safe and not risk flooding all that we’ve planted in the garden. This is why I set out last week, excavating our ditch. It was slow going thanks to an abundance of rocks and overgrown hay that combined with dirt, made digging very hard. Who needs a gym membership when you have ditches to be dug? After hours of labor, I maybe made it quarter of the way down. I had Andy come through with our weed burner and burn away the Hay that I couldn’t remove, that helped but at the end of the day it was a very small, and narrow ditch… great if the water comes in small amounts, not so much if it is larger.
One thing I’ve learned since living in the country and trying to create a market garden and reviving the property is to know when you need to call in reinforcements, in this case asking my contractor who owns a mini excavator. Although it will cost more than if I did it myself, it is worth the extra expense. He had it finished in no time and distributed the excess dirt (of which there were six trailers of it), around where the future Airbnb will go.
The lesson here… know your limits and know when it is more practical to call in more skilled folks that have the proper tools to achieve your end goal. Digging a ditch by hand might have been the thing to do 100 years ago, but in 2024 we have industrial style equipment, smaller scale of course, to do the work of ten men or in my case one woman!
