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01/15/2007: "The Big Ditch!"

Jeffrey Brown is a frequent contributor to a participatory energy news and analysis site called The Oil Drum. He coined a little acronym for folks to express his view of how to navigate a world entering energy descent: E-L-P. E for Economize; imagine that you're going to have to live on half the money you make now, since the value of money is likely to be adversely affected by the ever-increasing cost of energy. L for Localize, since going forward into the future our lives are likely to be much more intensely local than in years past; some folks have even taken this step to heart and have attempted to feed themselves from food grown within a small (100-mile) radius. And P for Produce... produce value, produce energy, produce food. You can see the E-L-P in action at Living Green Farm... this posting is about producing energy.

Actually, it is more about producing water, but first we have to dispel some myths about the Pacific Northwest. It does rain here a lot... for about seven to eight months of the year. Summers are dry, dry, dry in a typical year. When does an farm produce most of its yield? During the dry summer. Last summer Nate and Channa demonstrated that it is possible to produce significant and useful food using dry land gardening. However, that is not our optimum plan for going forward; dry land farming is more like a backup plan. Some sort of irrigation is necessary for growing successful and bountiful crops in the Willamette Valley. Irrigation requires water, and water, at least on our topography requires energy to pump water from a well. Electrical energy.

We've been planning to install some solar power to generate electricity for pumping water and household use. Looking over the farm, we concluded that the best site for placing the photovoltaic panels was, as it happens, on the cow shed: it has the best unimpeded southern exposure, the structure is sturdy, and shouldn't be difficult to install the panels on the roof (the house and barn are both shaded part of the day, the cottage is not structurally sound, and shop roof is pretty poor). The only little, little challenge is that the cow shed is approximately 250 feet from the house, where at least some of the electricity will be put to use. The conventional solution, of course, is to dig a ditch. There were some challenges, namely the time of year, the weather, finding time for the project, and the the five foot sidewalk blocking our way to the house. We were able to conquer all of these, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

Fortunately, there are machines for the purpose of digging dtiches, and in this time of relative energy availability and financial stability it is relatively easy to rent one. The weekend before New Year's I was able to get down to the farm; I had purchased a ball hitch for the bumper of my truck, and fifteen minutes after showing up at Albany Rental I was tooling back to the farm towing a trailer with a Baretto ditch machine, a "ditch witch," on board.

I got right to work, starting at the cow shed. The machine seemed to work well; our electrician said that the ditch needed to be at least two feet deep ("Two feet," I complained, "The ditch we dug at my home in Portland was only 18 inches!" "Stop complaining," he said, "You got lucky with the inspector."). I set the depth to as deep as the machine would go without straining, which looked to be at least two and half feet (of course, it turned out to be only just two feet, as later measurements revealed). It was a cold and frosty morning, and the ground was muddy but not excessively soggy as the machine inched its way backwards. I made the first corner, and was trenching along slowly toward the house when the machine shudder and there were unmistakable sounds of grinding metal from the trench. I raised the business end of the trencher and backed the machine away. Channa and I peered down in the trench, and poked at something metal and circular down in the hole. I widened the hole around it; at first I feared it was the top of a barrel, which would take who knows how long to dig out. We dug more and found that it was some sort of piece of oxen harness from the look of it; another Living Green Farm archeological find! We hung it on the fence as a trophy, and I maneuvered the machine back into position.

However, we were now entering a portion of the yard where the sump pump hose from the cellar had been draining. The trencher began to have some trouble. Progress was slow, and even though the trencher had four-wheel drive its tires began to slip. I stopped for a moment and inspected the ditch: the trenching tool was midway through cutting a slit in a four by eight sheet of buried plywood! The plywood wasn't very strong, but the extra resistance was causing the tires to dig themselves little holes. I raised the trenching blade, and tried to go forward or backward, but the machine was stuck. Nate came over, and the two of us tried to pull on the handles while backing up. No go. Thinking quickly, we remembered that the woodstove installers had thrown down some extra roofing material while putting in the stove chimney; we put a couple of these under the wheels. This bought us another six inches of backwards progress, but then we hit a really soggy area, and the heavy machine bogged down seriously, without even any trenching action going on.



We puzzled over this for some minutes. Lifting the machine was utterly out of the question; it weighed hundreds of pounds. Finally we concluded that what we needed was a winch... but what to fasten it to? Nate had purchased a very fine manual ratcheted come-along last year. He got it out, and we looked at our various combinations of chains and ropes and pulleys to see how we could put it to use. The most obvious prospect was hooking it to a fence post. It took us a while, but we finally found that by doubling back the rope, and hooking through a chain we could get some purchase. I heaved on the ratchet, and slowly the beast was hauled from its hole.



After that we didn't take too many chances. I ran the machine at about eighteen inches depth anywhere that seemed a little soggy. We found some tree roots, of course. These we passed over, figuring to cut through them with the axe and Pulaski. I pulled up level with the porch, and lifted the blade. I got it returned to Albany Rental just at the four hour mark, but they inspected the hour meter and concluded that I had only used it three hours. That was all that could be done on that trip.

I brought the girls down a few days later; it was crucial that we get conduit laid in the hole before the trench collapsed from the frequent rains. While Channa and the girls made ice cream Nate and I got busy gluing together grey PVC conduit. We got that done, but ran out of time before we could tackle the sidewalk. It began raining a day after we got the conduit done, but luckily the trench only filled with water - a foot of water! Nate had to raise the ends of the conduit out of the hole to keep the pipe from filling.

Finally, last Friday I was able to travel down to the farm to finish off the ditch. On a whim, just before leaving Portland I ran into the basement and grabbed my grandfather's star drills. In the days before power tools a star drill is what you used to make a hole in concrete: you would bang on the end with the star end in the hole, and rotate it slightly after each impact. This would break the stones and mortar below the star, and it would drill a hole. I stopped at the rental place and got a demo saw with a diamond wheel for another three-hour session on the trench.

It wasn't too hard, cutting with the saw; just dusty and noisy. You get in a kind of isometric trance with your feet braced, holding the saw back, letting its weight do the work. It took about an hour and a half to cut the two lines for the outline of the last bit of the trench, and then I put the saw down. Midway through the process I had discovered that a fan was handy for blowing the concrete dust away from my cutting line. Raising Nate's sledge hammer I tried to bang on the concrete between the lines. The ground shook under my feet, but nothing moved. I tried digging under the edge of the concrete, but the ground was so frozen that I couldn't even definitively tell where the concrete ended and the dirt began. After repeated banging I was able to see a crack about eight inches from the edge of the concrete - I was making progress. The crack became larger with more pounding, and the end piece was definitely loose. I couldn't get it out, however, because my cut lines were not precisely straight.



I remembered the star drills in the cab of the truck. I took the smallest star drill and put it in the crack. A couple of blows with the hammer, and the crack was wider. I put in the larger star drill. The crack got wider still. Aha, a system! I got the saw back out, and cut the long concrete piece into eight inch blocks. I couldn't cut all the way through, but it didn't matter; the star drills were able to enlarge each crack as I worked my way back to toward the house. In fairly short order the trench was clear!



I would be very remiss if I did not mention that Nate and Channa both worked very hard on The Big Ditch. There were tree roots to be cut, and several portions of the trench were no where near the required depth. The photo above shows Nate digging the last few feet. Nate explained that Ed, our neighbor, had noticed Channa digging ditches, and had made some comment along the lines of, "Wow, your wife is digging ditches... you really ARE newlyweds, aren't you?" After that he didn't ask Channa for help digging!



[A brief note on the scarcity of postings... Channa's laptop had to be sent in for repair, and classes have restarted for both her and Nate. Hence, not much opportunity to write about our progress... which actually has been remarkably steady. Hopefully we'll get the conduit approved this week, and then the electrician can go to work making our cow shed into a high-tech Producer (it's already a pretty good low-tech Producer with Queen Aura inside.) And we'll be one step closer to an independent and relatively cheap water supply for the farm.]