Banking on Rain with Swaling, Ponding and Tankage TPS-0007

So this week, finally, the temperature has gotten to a point where I can put in a couple of shifts per day at dawn and dusk. Put in a couple hours each of hand digging swales and ponds and doing micro earthworks by hand to prepare for the winter rains.

As per the permaculture design course design, designing in a desert, you're designing for a flood. Not just the cyclical floods that can take decades to cycle through, but just the fact that there's so little organic matter in the landscape, and because of the nature of the climate, there's just a massive downpour, usually in a small number of days or even hours.

Unlike in a temperate climate, growing up in the Northwest, there were storms, of course, but the general precipitation was so mild and light, you almost didn't need an umbrella.

It was just almost a fine mist and just plenty of moisture for life to grow on the ground and in the forest.

So it’s a very wooded, very forested, despite civilization being there, it’s very green, the cities up there. So much life that there's inherent erosion control, and therefore, except for the massive, extreme rain events that cause massive sheet flows and flash floods...

It's a totally different equation in the desert regions, and where I'm at, luckily, I wouldn't say I'm on high ground, but I'm not at the lowest point.

One of the most fun parts of permaculture, is you do your best to be like an investigator, reading the landscape, being literate with tools and with your intuition, with your experience, being able to see obvious things like, where in massive rain events is collecting? Where is it carving into the landscape, making little channels and dry creek beds and stuff like that?

Obviously there's no year round running water where I'm at, but there are on my property a number of very distinct flow patterns.

I've been here over six months now, the rain that has happened has not been such that it's caused there to be a steady flow over those dry beds.

So I have to worry and fear two things, not enough and too much.

It reminds me of being in this band, we did a lot of our own promotion, and we would book clubs with a promise that we could pack the place. So we put it on ourselves to do a lot of the promo and the street teaming.

So somebody asked us at one of the shows, hey, it looks like a lot of people are showing up, are you nervous? And we're said, no, we'd be more nervous if there weren't a lot of people showing up.

So it's funny, it was counter intuitive, but makes me think about, I should be worried that if there's flooding happening all over the world right now...

And I don't know if it's just that I’m biased now, because I'm reading more climate news, but it definitely seems like...one of the obvious things is that it's not just sporadic, disconnected, extreme weather events.

Flooding storms, all the different types of natural disasters are basically happening in a synchronized way around the globe, which is very interesting and something I don't know hardly enough about, but I definitely feel like, I'm wondering what's gonna happen to me if there's major flash flood warnings.

I've seen some very hardcore clouds in the sky, lots of lightning, but so far, the periods of downpour, they haven't lasted more than a few hours.

I have yet to experience from this position what an extreme event could be, however, given the fact that where I'm located, for my dwellings, shall we say, my camp, basically, it's in between various systems of dry creek beds that are very shallow and just distinct because they're compacted.

There's nothing growing in them. There's no activity of the critters digging holes within them, which shows me that it's more compacted.

So now the strategy is from the “slow, sink and spread” permaculture design philosophy...capturing the energy and the resource of water in the landscape while it is within the boundaries of your property, increasing the amount of duties that it has before it's either lost to evaporation or transpiration through the plants...Or gravity pulls it below ground to a point where it's no longer useful to you, and therefore it runs off underground passed the edge of the property boundaries.

Considering that basically you have the boundaries of your property, and the game with water is that if you don't wanna be poisoning the landscape and poisoning yourself by piping it in from municipal supplies, then if you can capture it…

Even in the desert, even if it's only one, two or three days of rain events where the majority of the rain you're gonna get the whole year are gonna happen, if you could only capture enough of that rain during those scarce few opportunities, you could have enough to hold you over until the next year.

The drought can be obviously buffered, and the pressure is totally different. If you can't take for granted that you're gonna have steady rains...it's a privilege to be in a temperate client or a tropical climate where it's humid versus a dry.

Here it’s arid, baking heat and various degrees from just killing everything that isn't super well hydrated and well shaded and buffered from the wind...

It's harsh, I’m trying to bootstrap a forest ecology.

It's rough. There wasn't much I could do for many months, just basically trying to stay alive and trying to stay sane, always be humbled to a point where I didn't venture off much. I didn't exert myself much. I didn't want to risk the liability to myself, to my finances, of lone wolfing something in the summer heat and then just ending up dead. It was very limiting and and extremely humbling.

It stole my manhood, for sure, to be like, I'm this tough guy, beast mode, landscape designer. I can build, I can design. I'm always out there doing this stuff. But this year I was literally forced into being laid up for months.

I could do some yoga. I could stretch. I could sometimes do a little bit of dancing, but there were times where the nights were so hot, I couldn't even dance at night. I couldn't do anything that I would normally do in permaculture, landscaping, gardening, beast mode during the day.

And then dancing at night, all that stuff from the coastal California, more forgiving climate, that was all gone.

I was just hoping to make it to where now it's the perfect time, the perfect weather.

It's not yet cold. At night, I only barely have to put on a blanket, early in the morning. I'll go to sleep without a blanket. I'll wake up and wanna wrap myself up, you for just a couple hours.

I didn’t know if I was gonna make it to see this point. But this is a beautiful time. I'm pleased to say that my manhood has returned, and like clockwork as soon as it wasn't debilitating heat the moment the sun came up, I've been able to work for a couple of hours, and there's a cooler breeze, you know.

Even though the sun is up, even if I'm working up a sweat, it's tolerable. It's just amazing having gone through this summer and having lost the memory, almost of what it was like to be able to just function and get things down and exert myself and build, not be just hiding in little pockets of shade. Only being able to do anything when there was major cloud cover. Okay, there's a list of things to do when the sun is blocked. Now, hurry up and do as much as you can, because When those clouds are gone, you're cooking again, you're stuck, you're paralyzed.

During that time I hoped I’d be alive, have enough time between when I'm able to work again and when the inevitable rains come to where I can do the Earth surgery, to be maximizing the capture of that rainfall on the land, for horticultural systems, for irrigation.

Also to be filling water storage tanks and collecting rainwater in a very scaled up and efficient manner, because it might not just be a hobby at some point where as a survivalist prepper, you want to not be the one ending up in a soup line.

Not begging and pleading for help from the outside. You wanna be resilient and possibly ideally, capable of not only taking care of you and yours, but also being a resource to those in need around you, who may also not get support from the outside due to whatever scenario.

Normal, predictable, natural and human-made disaster situations put a strain on resources and make it so you you gotta wait in line.

So not having to wait in line is an art. Because you were prepared in advance, and you've been building systems of resilience and independence, ahead of time...

I have a lot of catching up to do relative to the state of the world. There's people who have been dug into their properties, their homesteads for decades waiting for the Big One, or the doomsday preppers.

Or they just were smart, savvy people who wanted to go back to the land for no negative fear based reason at all.

But the scary and unfortunate thing now is that a lot of things that were predicted, or that were prophecies, as far as you know, the world being an unsafe place to where you're gonna wish that you did more to be deeper off grid and just more topped off with your supplies and everything.

There's people who would say the pressure is decreasing since, the toilet paper crisis of 2020, where people didn't know how hard the virus was gonna hit, or what it was gonna do, the economy, how bad and how long the lockdowns were gonna last.

Normalcy bias is coming back, but I say don't gamble on the idea that you have a lot of extra time to figure everything out.

I gotta pace myself. But I gotta continue to behave as though it is a state of emergency. Because if I had built out more of the infrastructure over the course of decades, then it wouldn't feel like an emergency.

The stakes wouldn't be that high. But for me, where I'm at off grid, I've already gone without a lot. It's a blackout, if there's no sun. So, obviously, on solar, off grid, your batteries only last so long, all your batteries.

I'm not gonna use a generator, technically your vehicle, if you have an inverter, is a generator. So as much as you wanna gamble with the life, the lifespan of your alternator, and there's people who would argue this in different ways, but technically I have a generator. It's a vehicle. It is the engine of the vehicles that I own. I don't believe I'm gonna want or need to have a generator where I'm just creating another source of pollution.

I kind of like the idea that if it's overcast, then I do more reading and yoga, and get a little bit beyond, the electronic lifestyle.

I don't rely solely on anything electrical for survival.

My water filtration is mechanical, and it's just the electricity that's in my own body.

I try not to get hit by bolts of lightning. But other than that, it's a treat when I can't turn on my computer.

If I had to go a few days without having any charge, if I needed to, I can turn on the engine of a vehicle and charge up a phone for an emergency.

Back to the idea of the sense of urgency that I have to push myself to get water stored in a landscape, to be able to more of what I've already been doing, which is slowly scaling up my potable water storage capacity,

So far, it's required 100% importing the water from a city source. So I bring in barrels and tanks, and then figure out the drum pump situation, which is very good workout, but the ergonomics of it are not always great.

Then figuring out the awkward dynamics, such as using gravity and a siphon pump to make it a little more efficient to get water from storage tanks into, into the filtration.

Every time I come back here and I set up longer duration water storage capacity, the freer I feel, the more resilient, the more stabilized I feel, which is very important,

The first time I came out here, I had maybe ten gallons and then I got stuck, and I had to call in for support from a friend to come and bring water and traction matts so I could recover my two wheel drive truck.

I spun out and dug myself in deep. I tried to save money and not buy anything synthetic, tried to put down wood planks and two by fours to dig myself out of the sand but it was no use. The wheels just shredded them up.

The traction matts worked though, you dig them in, under your spinning out tires, and then it gives you enough traction for a couple of feet to where you can get out of that rut. I had to use those a lot. Now, with a four by four that’s a full size truck I can haul quite a bit more water. I can load up way bigger capacity tanks and drums.

I'm pushing myself towards a scenario where I just go back and forth multiple times. Accept the expense, and just import here what I need to make it for more than just three months at a time, but at least six months, then have the systems in place to where, as those get depleted, when it rains, I'm able to top them off without having to go out and get more water.

The ideal scenario is that you put up the money, you put in the effort, you do the design, and you are always situated to have an extended period where, if you can't or do not want to interface with the outside world because of a pandemic contagion.

Or because of political/social unrest issues, or because of any other issue, personal financial collapse, whatever it might be, the threat probability matrix, if you will, it's likely that stuff will hit your fan more than it will hit everyone's fan at the same time.

So the common denominator is just days forward of calories and water supply.

If you're homesteading and growing stuff in a dry climate, you're thinking, for me, every drop of water I put on even the tiniest garden that I'm trying to make out here...I'm watching the days be evaporated literally from just living off of stored food and having water to drink.

It's not a perfect efficient system to water soil for plants to grow in. There are ways to optimize it, which I'm relatively skilled in, just minimizing evaporation and transpiration is what it's about.

I think what is happening at this point, checking in on the state of this beautiful transition for me, between the deadly heat and bitter cold, this is a very sweet, sweet time to really enjoy and also really get a lot of work done.

Digging the trenches, basically what they call swales, or ditches on contour, that allow for water flowing, not just capturing the rain straight above,but the sheet flows of water that would have just flowed across the surface and gone from the top of your property to the bottom of your property without even hitting a speed bump.

So the least that can be done, some people will create rock walls and what they call check dams. Just putting a speed bump of rocks in the flow of water will be like a dam for it to build up a wall of water along the rocks there.

Water flows through them but it slows down the rate and so forth and therefore decreases the amount of erosion the forcefulness of erosion and then some amount of water will percolate into the ground more than would have otherwise.

The more strategic and more labor intensive approach is to dig ditches. There are different scales and sizes, depending on what you're trying to achieve, but Lawton says the smallest he's done, for the most part, are swales that are about the width to comfortably push a wheel barrow through.

There are various ratios that I've heard on the depth to width.

They’re are inverted speed bumps in cities, where instead of a bump, it's actually a depression. So it's concave for slowing down, slowing, spreading and sinking water.

I've got three dimensions. Three factors that I'm designing for. One is the rain that comes straight down, it's all about funneling, creating extensive and massive means to funnel that. Right now, I've got my tin roof, that's designed for the footprint of my dwelling, to funnel that water into tanks, rain barrels with rain chains and bamboo.

I have done the testing of the proof of concept, but that was basically a trickle.

So I don't know yet how many gallons in a major downpour I'm gonna be able to collect. So there’s the water from above. It's gonna be some iterations and some calculations, some trial and error to figure out how much I gotta spend and how much I gotta build.

For now, I can forgive myself for not really capturing as much surface area of rain as possible into tanks but I’m trying to work out the math of the cost of catching rain water versus hauling it it. There's reasons to not feel good about that, such as the price of gas to bring it in.

I want to pressure myself to not be complacent. I don't wanna wait ten years to do what I should have done ten years ago.

I want to safely pace myself but if It's a matter of investing the money then so be it.

How can I do that intelligently?

The worst thing that could happen is for me to be where I'm at and for the world to get worse, and for me to only have a month of water stored and it's not gonna rain again rain for months.

It's gonna be about waiting for some major downpours, testing out some proof of concept designs, and then once I have that data, and hopefully everything works so well that all I have to do is scale up that model.

I don't want to have to go back to the drawing board and reinvent something.

I'll go into more of those details as they get tested out.

What I'm doing right now, every day, twice a day, what I can do while it's just cool enough for me to use my body again...I don't know how many linear feet but I've put in hundreds of linear feet of swales already.

They need to Be touched up, widened, but for the most part.

I put in a small pond that is, I could try to roughly calculate the number of gallons...Probably between over a thousand and 2000 gallons.

The amount of excavation material that comes out of that and the effort that goes into that, it's very interesting, the idea of hand digging ponds as a workout methodology, it’s definitely getting me to feel some muscles.

I've done this before. But what's interesting is really feeling into the ergonomics of starting out digging shallow, how that feels to toss the sand, then once you have to send that sand further and higher, because you're digging deeper further.

The mound that is the lip of the pond that's going around it, that's getting higher, and you're wanting to arc that and design that so it doesn't just fall back in on itself. There's an interesting and beautiful pattern that goes into it.

It's interesting the way I have to pace the work of doing that. I start doing that earlier because it gets really tiring later. But the contours are revealing themselves. And it's a beautiful process when you do Earthworks to discover the land.

It brings into full relief almost like you're outlining a silhouette. Or you're drawing the lines around objects that otherwise would have not been so distinct.

There are techniques that I will be using for longer swaling than I'm doing now. For now it's on a small enough scale to where if the ground that you started at, if the top surface of the ground wasn't totally level at every point that you can manually set it to be level enough.

At a bigger scale you need to be more precise and use flags and a water level, or it an “a-frame” level.

You just flag every few feet, whatever the span of the average a frame level is approximately.

If you have it done correctly, then water should spread evenly at the same height within the ditch. So if you get enough rain for that ditch to fill up a whole foot, you have a problem if it's only 1" on one end of it and 11" on the other, so it's spilling out one side and it's not even. It’s not even getting all the way to the other side, then you had a problem with the leveling.

So it's really interesting, the way with experience that you can kind of intuit and as a designer, as an artist, sort of feel and know intuitively what level is.

I'm feeling that out, just moving along and trying to get the wire-frame in place, the proof of concept, because it could start raining anytime.

In fact, it has rained. Every time it does rain, I'm thinking, oh, is this gonna be one of the few big ones?

Will I have done enough right now between the earthworks and the rainwater catchment?

I'm at like 10% of where I wanna be and, I will be pretty happy with myself if I'm able to get to 60% by the time the rainy season is over.

I'm not trying to break my back worse than it already is, and I'm not trying to make hasty decisions with design and money and buy a bunch of infrastructure that that doesn't prove itself out.

So I'm in between, a moderate pace and a brisk pace.

It feels good to be back in my body.

It feels really good to be out there working the land, being in this land that I bought, and basically spent six months hiding in a shell since I got it, not being able to do hardly anything.

Now I can actually stretch and flex and feel and be part of it and just enjoy it and know that this is how I'm gonna be spending a lot of the rest of my life.

These are the glory days, the early retirement glory days of retiring from working for the man and just beginning my real career of intimately working with my own land that wasn't my family's land or that I inherited.

It's completely undeveloped, rich in wildlife, rich in minerals, but very poor in organic matter.

And the water, just when it comes down hard, it just flows down right through the sand.

But the beautiful thing is being able to read the landscape ad knowing that I can put a dent in the storm water runoff.

I can very beautifully design ways for that water to go through a maze of ecology that before it escapes, and most of it will have been put through many cycles of use.

That's where it gets very interesting with how you can mulch the swales and dig pits and do various types of design where you're just depending on the deep, shaded organic matter, holding the moisture from rains long enough to where seeds can germinate, and then they can grow the deeper roots into the lower levels of moisture further and further down. That is the game that I'm in.

I'm gonna see how much of a maze I hand dig.

I'm not saying I'm never gonna bring out bobcats and heavy equipment. But I feel like there's a grace...I really like the idea of being able to say, this was done by hand.

There's no grease and diesel spewing everywhere, there's no rubber tire tracks.

I may change my mind. There are financial thresholds and stuff hit the fan scenario thresholds where I would say I tried to do a bunch of Earthworks by hand to have that honor, that credit.

But there is a point at which I will have to say to myself, time is running out to really do the work on this land that is gonna make thousands of years of sustainability happen.

To quickly have epic ponds here, and full size swales just call up your local heavy equipment rental company and get it done on the weekend.

Also with enough help, you don't need those machines.

I like the idea of not just going to the machines first, but they're an option, they're on the table. But for now, I’m thrilled to share the positive energy, and the positive feeling that I have, which is to be reconnected with my manhood, being able to be upright again, and actually on the land doing the earthworks by hand, and knowing that for all I know, they could be overbuilt because there's hardly any rain coming, or they could be drastically under-built and they're all gonna get washed away.

That's the fun part, you just have to wait and see. I've got my rain gear ready, and hopefully the major rains happen when it's still warm enough, and I can watch and count and measure.

The swales I’m digging now, will be joined by many, many more, but at least for now from the highest point of the property, to the other side of the contour is covered.

Eventually, properties will be sold based on their contour characteristics and lines.

I’m designing for those low points, digging ponds and having those ponds be able to overflow into swales and backflow to re-hydrate a system, so you can get almost like two flushes. The first flush, maybe relatively sterile, versus the second flush, which is a back flow from a pond where now you're doing what's called fertigation, and the fertility of the living pond pulses back up through the maze of swales.

Then if that overflows, hopefully it does so gently in a way that you design and a way for that to flow back out to the next system of mazes further down the slope on your property.

You will want to have extra extracted as much nutrient as possible and kept it on your on your property, and certainly not be polluting anything downstream.

So trip trap, it feels like shoots and ladders, ponds and swales, and just playing that game even without heavy machinery, I'm doing it by hand.

It's just a fractal of the scaling that will continue over time.