Positively. Most of my site is extremely wet. Part of the problem is that when I originally built terraces to plant peach trees, I wanted long rows which were almost 500’ long.
Here’s the story.
The ground cooperated most of the way, except for maybe the last 40 feet of the terraces. In other words the ground had a natural slope which made for nice drainage running parallel to the terraces. All except the last 40 feet in which the ground had a slight reverse slope. I could have graded that reverse slope out, but it would have taken a lot of machine time to do it (all I had at the time was a motor grader to push dirt and what I needed was a dozer).
So I left a small reverse slope in the drive lanes (row middles). It was only about an inch of reverse and I thought it won’t be bad to drive through an inch of water. Big deal, right.
Well it turns out it was a big deal. Here’s why. I have to pull a sprayer (which weighs 5000 lbs. when full of water) through the drive lanes. This has to be done once a week in the early part of the growing season, when we get the most rain. The first time driving through an inch of water was fine. But…each time one drives through the water, it cuts ruts deeper and deeper. The ruts never dry out, so water just sits in there, making it worse the next time. Finally ruts are so deep, I literally have to “drag” the sprayer on its belly (sort of like pulling a sled).
It takes all 4 wheels locked in on my tractor to get through the mud run. You can picture in your mind how much mud is being churned up with all 4 tractor tires spinning, while dragging a sled.
Well, it turns out that when you continually plow soil that way, somehow the soil goes away (it’s not erosion because it’s sort of like a pond). So what started out as an inch low spot, becomes a 6" bog.
I’ve had to “fill in” the bellies in the drive lanes many times. I have arborist pruning crews dump loads of wood chips in the low spots in the row middles and I blade the wood chips down. It works for a while until I have to spray a lot in wet weather, which again churns up the soil, and makes it go away.
The point is that some of the row middles have standing water most of the spring. The peach trees are fine though. The key is that the terraces I built are large, so there is enough soil above grade for all the roots.
At one time, I was worried about erosion of the terraces (which is why I built the terraces plenty big. But that was dumb because each time I drive through the lanes it tears up a little soil which goes away. So over the years the lanes have gotten deeper relative to the terraces where the trees are planted. Now the terraces are getting too tall in some places.
The other issue is that there are seeps all over the area. When I first bought the place when it was pasture, a 4X4 pickup got stuck (this was even on a hillside). I had to be careful where I drove.
Here is a pic I posted here ten years ago in 2015 of my sprayer stuck.
I’ve been battling this ever since.
Last year (2024) I put in a bunch of field tile to try to drain some subsurface water away. It was a lot of dirt work. Here’s the bill for just the dirt work.
The amount was originally $1000 more (i.e. $10,500) but I traded out some custom work I did for him, which he took off $1000 for. That was just for dirt work. I also had $5000 in gravel plus another $1000 in field tile and hard pipe, which I provided, along with other incidentals (tile tape, fittings etc.). So the project was in excess of $16K. I’m still not quite done with it, but I can finish it with my smaller equipment. All this work was done not to provide drainage for the trees, but to provide drainage for where I have to drive a tractor (row middles).
Similarly about 20 years ago I put some field tile in my back yard to better grow fruit trees there. That cost me about $3000 for that back then. It’s expensive to build good water drainage.
I can build terraces and mounds much cheaper, even when I’ve had to rent equipment to do it.
