[permaculture] Introduction and a question about Swales

Dieter Brand diebrand at yahoo.com
Tue Dec 30 04:36:32 EST 2008


Dick, Kathyann, thanks for the feedback.  Since my last message got through unscrambled, I will send my original message again.  Please ignore, if you have already received it.

Original message:

Jeff,

I don’t have any experience with the type of conditions you describe; however, I have to cope with extreme dry and hot conditions during the summer.  My overall rainfall is probably above yours, but in a normal year there is zero rainfall from May trough September with temperatures hitting the 100 F mark in the July/August period.

In the beginning, I did some earthworks but soon switched to zero soil disturbance.  We have a hillside property with clay soil.  Most of the topsoil washed away due to plowing by previous owners.  Any soil disturbance (making swales, ponds, terraces, raised beds, waffle beds, etc. or plowing) will turn up pure clay from the subsoil and burry the little subsoil there is.  The clay soil will crack in the sun and dry out rapidly.  Dams made for artificial lakes will often stay barren for ten years without any vegetation.  The situation may be different on sandy soil.

My strategy has been to improve the soil by keeping it covered at all times with vegetation and/or mulch, practicing zero soil disturbance and returning as much organic matter as possible to the soil surface.  A soil covered by vegetation (e.g., grass sod) will allow water to penetrate and prevent runoffs even on hillsides. A soil with good structure and high organic content can store an enormous amount of water for a very long time.  Therefore, rather than turning part of my land into swales or artificial lakes that dry out before it gets really dry in the summer, I prefer to see my entire land as one big water reservoir. The more I improve the soil the more water it will be able to store.  In the garden, I have been able to reduce irrigation by about 80% in the last 5 years.

Dieter Brand
Portugal



--- On Tue, 12/30/08, Kathyann <knat at sprintmail.com> wrote:

> From: Kathyann <knat at sprintmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [permaculture] Introduction and a question about Swales
> To: "permaculture" <permaculture at lists.ibiblio.org>
> Date: Tuesday, December 30, 2008, 12:23 AM
> Dieter Brand wrote:
> > I have no idea what happened. Did everyone get my
> message scrambled? I had the encoding in my browser set to
> UNICODE (UTF-8). Should it have been set to a different
> encoding?
> > 
> > Dieter Brand
> Fine here.
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