The OFF GRID Mistake That Floods Your Land

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com He stood in that field in August and it was bone dry. Hard ground, grass down to nothing, and he walked it in work boots and never got them muddy. Flat, open, trees behind it. This is the spot. Then in the autumn it rained for three days and the whole of it went under. Water standing a foot deep across the ground he had chosen, with nowhere to go. None of that was bad luck. That ground had flooded before, many times, and it had flooded so often that it had changed what grew on it, what colour the soil was, and where the frost lay in the morning. Every one of those things was there in August, in the dry, while he was walking about deciding. He did not make a mistake about the weather. He made a mistake about reading. My grandfather taught me in a dry August when I was seventeen and had a plan. There was a flat piece at the bottom of the home field where I meant to put a shed, and I had already cut some of the timber. He said no. I asked why, because that piece was as dry as the lane that day. He did not argue. He walked me thirty feet to one side, stood me in front of a stand of rushes growing head high, and asked what rushes drink. I said water. He said then there is water here, and you cannot see it today, and that is the whole of what I have to tell you. Then he walked off and never raised it again. I went back in April. Six inches standing where I was going to build. What we go through: The plants that only grow where the water table is high, and why they cannot be persuaded otherwise Why a strip of darker greener grass in a dry month shows you the path of water through a flat field The high water mark in the bottom of a fence, which is a measurement somebody else's flood already took for you Digging one hole two feet deep, and what grey and mottled soil means Filling that hole with water and coming back in the morning Why your eye cannot read a slope, and why walking it in heavy rain beats everything Looking uphill, because all of it comes down through you Where the old buildings sit, and why the easy flat piece in the hollow is empty Culverts and ditches, and why a great deal of flooding is a pipe nobody clears Frost, snow, worms and leaning trees Asking the neighbours rather than the seller And the season matters as much as the signs. If you can only walk a piece of ground once, walk it in late winter or early spring. A field in March tells the truth. The same field in August is on its best behaviour. The plain limits. Flood maps are incomplete and often out of date, and a great deal of flooding is not a river but water coming off a hill with nowhere to go. Every sign here can be absent on ground that still floods, if what will flood it has not happened yet: a new road above you, a field drained into your ditch, a culvert that silts up. The land tells you about its past, not about somebody else's plans. And if you have already built in the wrong place, you are not finished. Ground can be raised, water can be led round a building instead of into it, and a ditch and a bank in the right place change a great deal. This week, walk your ground looking down. Find the rushes and the moss. Look at how high the dead grass sits in the fence. Dig one hole two feet deep in the most tempting spot and look at the colour. Then next time it rains hard, put a coat on and go and watch where the water goes. Tell me in the comments what colour came out of your hole at two feet. And if you have told me your county before, tell me instead whether your place has ever been under water, and whether you knew beforehand or found out the hard way. Next time we go to the other end of water, because a well with no power in it is not a dead well. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #OffGrid #Flooding #Homestead #BuyingLand #Drainage #Soil #Preparedness #OldWays #SelfReliance #Homesteading #WaterTable #RuralLiving #LandBuying #Floodplain