OPEN DITCHES.

The most obvious mode of getting rid of surface-water is, to cut a ditch on the surface to a lower place, and let it run. So, if the only object were to drain a piece of land merely for a temporary purpose—as, where land is too wet to ditch properly in the first instance, and it is necessary to draw off part of the surplus water before systematic operations are commenced—an open ditch is, perhaps, the cheapest method to be adopted.

Again: where land to be drained is part of a large sloping tract, and water runs down, at certain seasons, in large quantities upon the surface, an open catch-water-ditch may be absolutely necessary. This condition of circumstances is very common in mountainous districts, where the rain which falls on the hills flows down, either on the visible surface or on the rock-formation under the soil, and breaks out at the foot, causing swamps, often high up on the hill-sides. Often, too, in clay districts, where sand or loam two or three feet deep rests on tough clay, we see broad sloping tracts, which form our best grass-fields.

If we are attempting to drain the lower part of such a slope, we shall find that the water from the upper part flows down in large quantities upon us, and an open ditch may be most economical as a header, to cut off the down-flowing water; though, in most cases, a covered drain may be as efficient.

At the outlets, too, of our tile or stone drains, when we come down nearly to the level of the stream which receives our drainage-water, we find it convenient, often, and indeed necessary, to use open ditches—perhaps only a foot or two deep—to carry off the water discharged. These ditches are of great importance, and should be finished with care, because, if they become obstructed, they cause back-water in the drains, and may ruin the whole work.

Open drains are thus essential auxiliaries to the best plans of thorough drainage; and, whatever opinion may be entertained of their economy, many farmers are so situated that they feel obliged to resort to them for the present, or abandon all idea of draining their wet lands. We will, therefore, give some hints as to the best manner of constructing open drains; and then suggest, in the form of objections to them, such considerations as shall lead the proprietor who adopts this mode to consider carefully his plan of operations in the outset, with a view to obviate, as much as possible, the manifest embarrassments occasioned by them.

As to the location of drains in swamps and peculiarly wet places, directions may be found in another chapter. We here propose only to treat of the mode of forming open drains, after their location is fixed.

The worst of all drains is an open ditch, of equal width from top to bottom. It cannot stand a single season, in any climate or soil, without being seriously impaired by the frosts or the heavy rains. All open drains should be sloping; and it is ascertained, by experiment, what is the best, or, as it is sometimes expressed, the natural slope, on different kinds of soil. If earth be tipped from a cart down a bank, and be left exposed to the action of the weather, it will rest, and finally remain, at a regular angle or inclination, varying from 21° to 55° with the horizon, according to the nature of the soil. The natural slope of common earth is found to be about 33° 42'; and this is the inclination usually adopted by railroad engineers for their embankments.

If the banks of the open ditch are thus sloped, they will have the least possible tendency to wash away, or break down by frost.

Again: where open ditches are adopted in mowing fields, they may, if not very deep, be sloped still lower than the natural slope, and seeded down to the bottom; so that no land will be lost, and so that teams may pass across them.

This amounts, in fact, to the old ridge and furrow system, which was almost universal in England before tiles were used, and is sometimes seen practiced in this country. The land, by that system, is back-furrowed in narrow lands, till it is laid up into beds, sloping from the tops, or backs, to the furrows which constitute the drains. This mode of culture is very ancient, and is probably referred to in the language of the Psalmist, in the Scriptures: "Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly, thou settlest the furrows thereof, thou makest it soft with showers."

The objections to open ditches, as compared with under-drains, may be briefly stated thus:

1. They are expensive. The excavation of a sloping drain is much greater than that of an upright drain. An open drain must have a width of one or two feet at the bottom, to receive the earth that always must, to some extent, wash into it. An open drain requires to be cleaned out once a year, to keep it in good order. There is a large quantity of earth from an open drain to be disposed of, either by spreading or hauling away. Thus, a drain of this kind is costly at the outset, and requires constant labor and care to preserve it in working condition.

2. They are not permanent. A properly laid underdrain will last half a century or more, but an open drain, especially if deep, has a constant tendency to fill up. Besides, the action of frost and water and vegetation has a continual operation to obstruct open ditches. Rushes and water-grasses spring up luxuriantly in the wet and slimy bottom, and often, in a single season, retard the flow of water, so that it will stand many inches deep where the fall is slight. The slightest accident, as the treading of cattle, the track of a loaded cart, the burrowing of animals, dams up the water and lessens the effect of the drain. Hence, we so often see meadows which have been drained in this way going back, in a few years, into wild grass and rushes.

3. They obstruct good husbandry. In the chapter upon the effects of drainage on the condition of the soil, we suggest, in detail, the hindrances which open ditches present to the convenient cultivation of the land, and, especially, how they obstruct the farmer in his plowing, his mowing, his raking, and the general laying out of his land for convenient culture.

4. They occupy too much land. If a ditch have an upright bank, it is so soft that cattle will not step within several feet of it in plowing, and thus a strip is lost for culture, or must be broken up by hand. If, indeed, we can get the plow near it, there being no land to rest against, the last furrow cannot be turned from the ditch, and if it be turned into it, must be thrown out by hand. If the banks be sloped to the bottom, and the land be thus laid into beds or ridges, the appearance of the field may, indeed, be improved, but there is still a loss of soil; for the soil is all removed from the furrow, which will always produce rushes and water-grass, and carried to the ridge, where it doubles the depth of the natural soil. Thus, instead of a field of uniform condition, as to moisture and temperature and fertility, we have strips of wet, cold, and poor soil, alternating with dry, warm, and rich soil, establishing a sort of gridiron system, neither beautiful, convenient, nor profitable.

5. The manure washes off and is lost. The three or four feet of water which the clouds annually give us in rain and snow, must either go off by evaporation, or by filtration, or run off upon the surface. Under the title of Rain and Evaporation, it will be seen that not much more than half this quantity goes off by evaporation, leaving a vast quantity to pass off through or upon the soil. If lands are ridged up, the manure and finer portions of the soil are, to a great extent, washed away into the open ditches and lost. Of the water which filters downwards, a large portion enters open ditches near the surface, before the fertilizing elements have been strained out; whereas, in covered drains of proper depth, the water is filtered through a mass of soil sufficiently deep to take from it the fertilizing substances, and discharge it, comparatively pure, from the field. In a paper by Prof. Way (11th Jour. Roy. Ag. Soc.), on "The Power of Soils to retain Manure," will be found interesting illustrations of the filtering qualities of different kinds of soil.

In addition to the above reasons for preferring covered drains, it has been asserted by one of the most skillful drainers in the world (Mr. Parkes), "that a proper covered drain of the same depth as an open ditch, will drain a greater breadth of land than the ditch can effect. The sides of the ditch," he says, "become dried and plastered, and covered with vegetation; and even while they are free from vegetation, their absorptive power is inferior to the covered drain."

Of the depth, direction, and distance of drains, our views will be found under the appropriate heads. They apply alike to open and covered drains.

BRUSH DRAINS.

Having a farm destitute of stones, before tiles were known among us, we made several experiments with covered drains filled with brush. Some of those drains operated well for eight or ten years; others caved in and became useless in three or four years, according to the condition of the soil.

In a wet swamp a brush drain endures much longer than in sandy land, which is dry a part of the year, because the brush decays in dry land, but will prove nearly imperishable in land constantly wet. In a peat or muck swamp, we should expect that such drains, if carefully constructed, might last twenty years, but that in a sandy loam they would be quite unreliable for a single year.

Our failure on upland with brush drains, has resulted, not from the decay of the wood, but from the entrance of sand, which obstructed the channel. Moles and field-mice find these drains the very day they are laid, and occupy them as permanent homes ever after.

Those little animals live partly upon earth-worms, which they find by burrowing after them in the ground, and partly upon insects, and vegetation above ground. They have a great deal of business, which requires convenient passages leading from their burrows to the day-light, and drains in which they live will always be found perforated with holes from the surface. In the Spring, or in heavy showers, the water runs in streams into these holes, breaks down the soft soil as it goes, and finally the top begins to fall in, and the channel is choked up, and the work ruined. We have tried many precautions against this kind of accident, but none that was effectual on light land.

The general mode of construction is this: Open the trench to the depth required, and about 12 inches wide at the bottom. Lay into this poles of four or five inches diameter at the butt, leaving an open passage between. Then lay in brush of any size, the coarsest at the bottom, filling the drain to within a foot of the surface, and covering with pine, or hemlock, or spruce boughs. Upon these lay turf, carefully cut, as close as possible. The brush should be laid but-end up stream, as it obstructs the water less in this way. Fill up with soil a foot above the surface, and tread it in as hard as possible. The weight of earth will compress the brush, and the surface will settle very much. We have tried placing boards at the sides, and upon the top of the brash, to prevent the caving in, but with no great success. Although our drains thus laid, have generally continued to discharge some water, yet they have, upon upland, been dangerous traps and pitfalls for our horses and cattle, and have cost much labor to fill up the holes, where they have fallen through by washing away below.

In clay, brush drains might be more durable. In the English books, we have descriptions of drains filled with thorn cuttings from hedges and with gorse. When well laid in clay, they are said to last about 15 years. When the thorns decay, the clay will still retain its form, and leave a passage for the water.

A writer in the Cyclopedia sums up the matter as to this kind of drains, thus:

Draining-tiles are not yet either cheap or plentiful in this country; but we have full faith that they will become so very soon. In the mean time it may be profitable for us to use such of the substitutes for them as may lie within our reach, selecting one or another according as material is convenient.

PLUG-DRAINING

has never been, that we are aware, practiced in America. Our knowledge of it is limited to what we learn from English books. We, therefore, content ourselves with giving from Morton's Cyclopedia the following description and illustrations.

MOLE DRAINING.

We hear of an implement, in use in Illinois and other Western States, called the Gopher Plow, worked by a capstan, which drains wet land by merely drawing through it an iron shoe, at about two and a half feet in depth, without the use of any foreign substance.

We hear reports of a mole plow, in use in the same State, known by the name of Marcus and Emerson's Patent Subsoiler, with which, an informant says, drains are made also in the manner above named. This machine is worked by a windlass power, by a horse or yoke of oxen, and the price charged is twenty-eight cents a rod for the work. These machines are, from description, modifications of the English Mole Plow, an implement long ago known and used in Great Britain.

The following description is from Morton's Cyclopedia:

A correspondent of the New York Tribune thus describes the operation and utility of a mole plow, which he saw on the farm of Major A. B. Dickinson, of Hornby, Steuben County, New York:

Major Dickinson himself in a recent address, thus speaks of what he calls his

SHANGHAE PLOW.

From the best information we can gather, it would seem, that on certain soils with a clay subsoil, the mole plow, as a sort of pioneer implement, may be very useful. The above account certainly indicates that on the farm in question it is very cheap, rapid, and effectual in its operation.

Stephens gives a minute description of the mole plow figured above, in his Book of the Farm. Its general structure and principle of operation may be easily understood by what has been already said, and any person desirous of constructing one may find in that work exact directions.

WEDGE AND SHOULDER DRAINS.

These, like the last-mentioned kind of drains, are mere channels formed in the subsoil. They have, therefore, the same fault of want of durability, and are totally unfitted for land under the plow. In forming wedge-drains, the first spit, with the turf attached, is laid on one side, and the earth removed from the remainder of the trench is laid on the other. The last spade used is very narrow, and tapers rapidly, so as to form a narrow wedge-shaped cavity for the bottom of the trench. The turf first removed is then cut into a wedge, so much larger than the size of the lower part of the drain, that when rammed into it with the grassy side undermost, it leaves a vacant space in the bottom six or eight inches in depth, as in Fig.14.

The shoulder-drain does not differ very materially from the wedge-drain. Instead of the whole trench forming a gradually tapering wedge, the upper portion of the shoulder-drain has the sides of the trench nearly perpendicular, and of considerable width, the last spit only being taken out with a narrow, tapering spade, by which means a shoulder is left on either side, from which it takes its name. After the trench has been finished, the first spit, having the grassy side undermost as in the former case, is placed in the trench, and pushed down till it rests upon the shoulders already mentioned; so that a narrow wedge-shaped channel is again left for the water, as shown in Fig.15.

Fig.14.
Wedge-Drain.