CHAPTER X. 



TILE DRAINING SWALES, CAT SWAMP, ETC. 



f HB last chapter treated of tile drainage in general, 

 for farms with heavy soil that need to be drained 

 regularly all over. But we have many farms where 

 only partial drainage is needed. Most of the soil 

 may be sufficiently underdrained by nature, but 

 there are clay spots, or springy spots, or swales, or 

 little swamps, scattered around on otherwise well drained farms. 

 It may be poor business economy not to regularly drain a clay 

 farm, but is much poorer to let these wet spots in an otherwise 

 drained farm go year after year. A little money invested here 

 would pay so largely, as a rule. My friend, W. W. Fenn, of this 

 county, has evidently done some work of this kind lately and has 

 neighbors who have not. Hear what he says in a late Ohio 

 Farmer : 



"Why don't you drain the water out of those spouty wet 

 places where you get rag weeds instead of oats, or the clover don't 

 catch, or if it does it freezes out? Why don't you drain those 

 places in your fields that make you wait in the spring, or you 

 have to plow them wet, and, if planted, the potatoes*rot and the 

 corn is small? Why don't you drain those places where you 

 throw your lines on the drag and let your team wallow through 

 while you run around? Why don't you drain those swampy 

 places that have never been plowed so you can go straight through 

 with all your work and get a crop from the whole field ? I am 

 getting the heaviest crop from these wet places since they were 

 drained. There is nothing else I have done on my farm that has 

 paid me so well or made me feel better." 



I have had a good variety of this kind of draining to do on 

 my farm and can fully endorse everything Mr. Fenn says. L,et 

 me give you some examples. Three or four rods from the north- 

 west corner of Lot 6 (see plan in Chapter VIII.) was a natural 

 depression when I came here, locally called a cat swamp. It 

 wasted perhaps a quarter acre of land by what it actually covered 

 by water in a wet time, but from its peculiar location it really 

 spoiled about an acre. You see the little space left between that 

 and the fence was not worth plowing by itself. This w r as right on 

 the road, where it spoiled the looks of the field, too. And it was 

 alwaj^s full of water in winter, and seldom or never all dried out 

 in summer. A nice hole to have so near the dwelling-house, 

 wasn't it? But it had been there since the country was settled, 



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