The Tin Whistle Review

When we moved here we were glad there is a little branch (not enough to be called a creek or a crik) that runs through the backyard. It does not have running water in it all the time and sometimes is just a rather muddy place. We found out pretty quickly that we wanted to be able to drive across it without leaving a big muddy mess, so we had a culvert, or tin whistle put in. But it wasn’t tin, it was rubber type plastic.

There are occasions, about once a year, that we get a really hard rain and the yard floods. You can just barely see the tip of the culvert in this picture. During one of these floods when the water was up over or around the culvert, we went outside to check things out. Just about that time, the culvert came floating up out of it’s place and started heading toward the yard fence. We were able to ‘catch’ it and steer it up into the yard where we hoped it wouldn’t move anymore. We put it back in place, but after another heavy rain, it came out again. That’s when we decided we needed a heavier metal culvert.

The one we got was too long for us to haul on our trailer, so we had it delivered. Meanwhile, we added another small section of fencing across the yard to separate the chickens’ side of the yard from the garden. Because of this change in the traffic pattern through the yard, we also decided to change the location of the culvert by about 10 feet. This change in location was possible because we had removed a scrubby tree that had grown up not far from the grape vine.

Is this starting to sound like one of those country stories? Turn left on the road next to where the old barn burnt down…….

Well, after we got the new culvert in it’s chosen location, we piled up the gravel that had been on the previous culvert on top of it because we were expecting another big rain storm. This time, the culvert stayed in place. The diameter of this culvert is larger, so it will be able to handle a larger volume of water before it goes up and around or over, causing the gravel to wash away. We decided to leave the gravel piled up on top of the culvert until we could deal with the small stump left from removing the tree because it is now in the middle of the driving area when you cross the culvert. That was a while back.

We tried several different ways to deal with this small stump, but none of them worked. In the meantime, it quickly grows a tremendous clump of little sucker trees from the roots. They come up everywhere. Well, today we decided we had waited long enough to be able to use the culvert to cross the branch and we would just deal with the stump later.  So, Frank got the tractor and went to work.

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