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permaculture - [permaculture] Re: permaculture digest, Vol 1 #407 - 13 msgs

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  • From: Scott Pittman <pci@permaculture-inst.org>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Re: permaculture digest, Vol 1 #407 - 13 msgs
  • Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 13:11:30 -0700

At 09:37 AM 11/13/02 -0500, you wrote:
At 10:23 AM 11/12/02 -0500, you wrote:
When googling "water harvesting" I found an African site which had lots of
water catchment berms used for growing trees. I thought I'd adapt that
concept in an easier way and create a diamond pattern on my sloping crop
fields using the half V trencher instead of so many berms, like a cocked
tic-tac-toe board or a giant piece of graph paper on a slight rotation off
alignment with the slope. Thus we could plant all shade and orchard trees in
the intersections and all extra unabsorbed water in that 'quadrant' would be
channelled by the surrouding half V trenches directly to the trees, thus
multiplying the use of rain- as if several times the rainfall had occurred.

In PC we call this type of arrangement "net and pan" or boomarangs, or fish scale, all of these configurations work well on steep slopes as long as you have sufficient catchment at the end of the water run. It is a fairly simple matter to calculate how much rain you receive on a given area and then calculate how much water you want to deliver to the target tree in each segment. You also have to build up the sides of the grid with what ever material is available on the slope ( dirt, rocks, dead branches, etc), to direct the runoff to your catchment pan where you have planted the tree. I have only seen the sides of these grid systems built up and never trenched. Probable because they have only been used on slopes where it is too steep to run equipment. If you can run equipment then it is probable better to build swales where you are distributing the water all across the slope equally. If you want to concentrate the water in a swale then put in strawbale wicks in those areas, or dig the swale a little deeper in the area where you want to focus the water.

Scott P.



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  • [permaculture] Re: permaculture digest, Vol 1 #407 - 13 msgs, Scott Pittman, 11/13/2002

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