How to get your Bitterroot land ready for spring runoff, starting this fall. Read the full guide: https://thewaterdev.com/land-health/fall-checklist-spring-runoff-montana/ You're losing more than just waterIn this area, a lot of people live off gravel roads. When there's spring runoff, it makes the roads soft. People don't really notice the road is soft, and they just drive as they normally would and tear it up. It washboards, and the erosion leaves rocks in the road. Speaking of erosion: spring runoff takes a lot of topsoil and other materials with it. Whether you're homesteading, farming or ranching, you work hard to build up your topsoil so you're at least maintaining quality, whether it's crops or orchards or tomatoes. You want to keep that nutrient density. And spring runoff just erodes it away. You're losing more than just water off your land. Where it all goesIf you don't have systems in place to catch that sediment, that topsoil, all those nutrients, it's just going to collect downhill. When you don't give water a place to at least slow down (let's not even talk about spreading it out or sinking it yet, just slowing it down), all that material just keeps going. It deposits a little bit here and there, behind a rock, a branch, some grass. But it keeps accumulating more and more until it finds a place to rest. Start by observing: be the water dropletThe very first thing to do is just observe. When I say observe, I mean pretend you're a water droplet. You fall on a piece of your property. Where do you go from there? Where does that droplet want to go? Where does it want to rest? Where does it want to spread out? And where does it want to sink into the ground? Think about the conditions, too. If it's hot out, the ground is hot, and the land is going to be hydrophobic. If your ground is compacted, it's also going to resist infiltration. When your land is hydrophobic, water just wants to sit on top of it. It won't go into the ground, or it goes in at a very, very slow rate. The bread and flour testHere's something you can try in your kitchen. Take two plates. Put a normal slice of bread on one and a pile of flour on the other. Pour the same amount of water on each and see what happens. The water on the bread gets absorbed. The bread is like a sponge, and that's what you want your soil to be. The flour is like compacted, dry soil. I first saw this from Didi Pershouse. I've seen someone take it one step further: once you have your bread and your flour, blow on them. It sounds a little silly, but wind erosion is a thing too. If you don't have that sponge of soil, it just blows away. Like the Dust Bowl. You want to increase the sponginess of your land. Why fall?Fall is an interesting time, especially this year. So far we've had higher than average rainfall for the fall. So you can already start practicing your observation. Even if it's not a wet fall, get out there and observe, and think about what will happen in the spring. Write it down, because you're going to forget, like I do. Then in spring you can see if your observations were true, or how things went differently from what you projected. Your driveway: water and accessMost roads in our area are maintained by the county, and some are private. But your driveway is on you. You've got to take into account where water runs across your driveway, through it, over it and under it. What about your culvert? Is it going to get plugged up? And if it does, where is that water going to go? Is your water sheeting off nice and thin and slow across your driveway? That's perfect. You want it slow, in thin sheets. You don't want rushing, gushing floods of water in any one spot. There's a certain pitch where you won't see erosion, and that's one in 100: one inch for every hundred inches, or one foot for every 100 feet, rise to run. That goes for anywhere you're trying to move water from one place to another, whether it's from one side of your property to the other or along a ditch. It's not always possible to keep that one in 100, especially on steeper slopes. You'd barely move across the landscape coming down a hillside. You'd need a long, long section to move any water without going past that slope. So there are other methods: Rock armoring: rocks strategically placed in the way to help slow the water down.Sediment traps: when water does come down a steeper slope, a sediment trap works like a basin, kind of a bowl, to catch sediment, sticks, leaves, any sort of debris. Put it somewhere easy to maintain, because it will fill up over time. How often you clean it depends on how much water you get, how often you can get to it, and how big you build it.My own mistakeAlong the side of my house I have a steeper area that doesn't grow anything. I drive over it all the time, so it's compacted, and it's sandy. When it rains and water comes around my house, I don't have a good way to slow it down yet. I put a stick in the way, about two inches by 12 feet, half buried, so the water runs along the slope, hits the stick and gets wicked away and down. The stick worked pretty well. Except I kept driving over it, and I didn't want to pin it down with nails or rebar. Eventually it popped out of place, and I never put it back. A water bar could work there too. Now that I think about it, maybe I'll try that. Right now I still need that space for access. Water and access are two things that constantly fight each other. The road department has to deal with a lot of water. They have all this machinery to deal with water and get it off roadways, and then they just put all the water to the side of the road. It's a whole thing. I'm not a civil engineer, but there's lots of room for improvement. Tangent aside... The plan is to go around it: a shallower, wider road with a terrace-type switchback from the top side of my house to the downhill side. Once that replacement road is in, I can start repairing the steep section. One has to come before the other so I don't lose access. Make the snow work for youA lot of our water comes as snow. Here it usually comes lightly, a couple of inches at a time. Roughly 12 inches of snow is about one inch of rain. It's been a couple of years since I've seen a decent amount of snow in the Bitterroot. In one weekend in 2021, we had about two feet of snow, and that's very unusual. Move your snow so it's piled in a place where it's okay to let it melt. Don't pile it up against your house or near it. Don't put it around your vehicles. A lot of people push it to the end of the driveway. That's sort of okay, except now we're back to the erosion issue. People just want to get rid of water as fast as possible. Push all your snow to the end of the driveway and it goes into the ditch, then downhill into creeks, rivers and streams. Instead, you can store water on your property as snow, and as it melts, it goes into the ground. More of it soaks in than you might think. Here in the Bitterroot it gets quite warm, even in winter. Any time my kids build a snowman, it's totally gone within 36 hours. The top of your soil, the topsoil, is the sponge that soaks up that melt, and anything extra evaporates. What about frozen ground? It depends on the frost. Loose, granular frozen soil still takes in water. Dense "concrete" frost, which forms when soil freezes wet, mostly sheds it. One thing to do this fallTake a look around your property and see what's still green, and what's dead. I'm talking ground cover, not trees; trees aren't a good indicator right now. What's green and what's brown and dead tells you where you already have water being held on the land, and where it dries out quicker. Why this matters to meMy grandparents on both sides were farmers. They struggled to make a living, and farmers today still do. My parents didn't want to be farmers. They wanted a better life for their children. They saw the struggle. But I always had an appreciation for the farm. I loved going up there: riding in the tractor, playing in the gravity bins, going in the corn crib. It's in my blood. Trying to grow things myself, it was: oh, that worked. This didn't work. This didn't work. Why didn't this work? But this one worked, why was that? Learning and talking with other farmers, producers and homesteaders, I went deep, and it all came back to water. Water really is the cornerstone of life. If you have water figured out, or at least you're not struggling with water, everything else gets easier and you can build on top of that. But if you get water wrong, it will only hurt you. Let that soak in. thewaterdev.com
