Man Made Mud

This time of year, the late winter/early spring in northeast Ohio is the maple syrup season and the mud season.

One of the more interesting, surprising observations of my 50+ year life is mud is mostly man made; there are exceptions, of course, but mud is generally a product of disturbed nature, that is, where the natural courses of drainage and plant growth are destroyed or disturbed.

My property illustrates this very well. In the spring, some areas of our yard, that is the grassy areas of the property where all the trees were chopped down many years ago can turn into a swamp in February/March. Then if people, or animals like deer, walk through the swamp the soil percolates up through the grass and it turns to soupy mud in spots.

In the wooded areas of the property, where the soil is composed of the same glacial till at the same slopes, there's no mud. There are leaves on the ground this time of year from the fall, plus the forest root system seems to form a ubiquitous drainage network. The tree root systems in a long lived forest like that are everywhere, even coming up just under the leaf mat. There are areas which are natural pools formed by long dead trees that fell over and uprooted... even those drain in a day or two after a heavy rain.

People try to dry out the grassy lawn areas with french drains and similar strategies, but the lifetime of shallow drainage systems is pretty short. If they're not buried below the frost line, eventually they'll break up from frost heave, or get clogged up or collapse, or get ripped up by trees or animals. The previous owner of our house went all-in on such drainage systems and they started failing about 10 years ago. They probably lasted 15-20 years, plus they don't really drain the swampy lawn areas, so they're kind of pointless.

I let some of the muddy areas of the lawn grow wild. After a couple of years they turned back into a meadow. Meadows generally do a good job covering up the mud as well. The taller, thicker weeds like goldenrod or berry bushes will collapse under the heavy snows and form a thick mat after a couple of years. Eventually trees will take over there too and in the distant future that will turn to a nicely drained forest area as well.

In perpetually damp areas that were wrecked by annual mowing and rolling, it's difficult for even a meadow to establish itself, and moss takes over, so even in that case, the mud gets covered. So generally a property manager doesn't really have to "do something" to cover up mud, eventually it takes care of itself. However, eventually might be a really long time.