Water Management
On Saturday, May 27th, King Conservation District will lead a tour of Remlinger Farms (Carnation, WA) that will focus on managing water drainage. Details and registration can be found here.
Learning about drainage may not be exactly the way you imagine spending a weekend morning in May. Add in the likelihood that some of this tour will cover agricultural drainage, including animal-waste runoff, and you may find your weekend house chores suddenly more attractive than ever.
But the tour will cover all kinds of properties, not just farms. Whether you own a small patch of lawn, a large woodland, or, yes, a farm, you’re bound to learn useful info if you attend. As dull as the topic may seem, you should care about drainage—how water moves under and across your property and where it goes afterward—because it matters to your property’s and the Island’s environmental health.
Drainage is, like almost every form of water’s movement, complex. You can hire a hydrologist to advise you how to manage it if you face a complicated drainage situation, but there are two DIY property hacks that are obvious and likely error-free.
First DIY practice: Slow down water flow on your property. Altered landscapes tend to speed up drainage movement because they often have soils compacted by building construction or, in some cases, livestock overgrazing. They also may feature paving, which is impervious to water penetration. As a result of these alterations, drainage may just sheet over the hardened surfaces, picking up momentum. Adding to the problem are any roof gutters and downspouts, which channel rainwater into fast-running rivulets.
To slow drainage, apply mulch or compost on hardened ground surfaces or, better, break up compacted soils by tilling or forking the ground and then incorporating compost or sand. To manage roof runoff, pipe your downspouts into dry wells (lined holes filled with gravel) or, if possible, rain gardens (more work to build but yield better results).
Second DIY practice: Keep drainage away from where it shouldn’t go. The most important out-of-bounds for drainage is streams unless the drainage in its current state contributed to the stream before the landscape was altered. If you don’t keep unmanaged drainage out of streams, you may be contributing to sedimentation, the deposit in a stream of soils carried by fast-moving drainage. Sedimentary deposits choke riparian (waterway) systems and can cause unnatural flooding by slowing a stream’s rate of flow. Salmon can’t spawn on heavily sedimented streambeds.
To manage healthy contributions of tributary water to streams, begin with the first practice above (slowing down drainage) and then consider, if you own the creek property, installing or improving native shoreline plantings, which filter out soil particles before they can reach the water and cause sedimentation. (These plantings should be undertaken only with the advice of riparian professionals and any required permissions.)
