PERMACULTURE IN HUMID LANDSCAPES - United...

IIPERMACULTURE IN HUMID LANDSCAPES

BY BILL MOLLISONPamphlet II in the Permaculture Design Course Series

PUBLISHED BYYANKEE PERMACULTURE

Publisher and Distributor of Permaculture PublicationsBarking Frogs Permaculture Center

P.O. Box 52, Sparr FL 32192-0052 USAEmail: [email protected]

http://www.permaculture.net/~EPTA/Hemenway.htm

Edited from the Transcript of the Permaculture Design CourseThe Rural Education Center, Wilton, NH USA 1981

Reproduction of this Pamphlet Is Free and Encouraged

Pamphlet II Permaculture in Humid Landscapes Page 1.

The category we are in now is hu-mid landscapes, which means a rain-fall of more than 30 inches. Our thesisis the storage of this water on thelandscape. The important part is thatAmerica is not doing it.

The humid landscape is water con-trolled, and unless it is an extremelynew landscape- volcanic or newlyfaulted--it has softly rounded out-lines. When you are walking up thevalley, or walking on the ridge, ob-serve that there is a rounded 'S'shaped profile to the hills.

Where the landscape turns fromconvex to concave occurs a criticalpoint that we call a keypoint.*

The main valley is the main flow,with many little creeks entering. Atthe valley head where these creeksstart, we locate the major keypoint. From there on, the keyline starts tofall from one in 1,000 to one in 2,000below contour. The dams we make inthe lower valleys will be slightly low-er at each point. They will not be atthe keypoint.

Rain falling on the hilltop runs off. The paths described by single rain-drops, wherever they fall, are simi-lar in that they cross contours atright angles, because that is theshortest drop between two contours. Water takes the shortest path acrossthe landscape from where it falls towhere it hits the river line. It is alongthis path that raindrops are doingtheir thing. As soon as they are in theriver valley, they are off to the sea.

It is possible to locate the keypointfrom a contour map. Find where thecontours start to spread. That is thekeypoint.

Having found the keypoint, we cannow treat the whole landscape as if itwere a roof and a tank. In a fairly de-scending line, falling gently away

from the horizontal, we put in agroove around the hill. This is thehighest point at which we can workwith mechanical tools. Above that, itis too steep. We make a little shelfaround the hill leading to the keypoint.No matter where this water was go-ing, we have now started to divert it,bringing it right around the hill to thekeypoint. In effect, we have put agutter around our roof, a very gentlyfalling gutter. We started at the key-point and extended a line that we lift-ed one foot at every 2,000 feet. Wewant to create a very, very gentlefall. Water just moves along it, andthat is all. We have directed the wa-ter to our keypoint.

At the keypoint, we put a littledam; for it is the highest point in theprofile of the valley that we can eco-

nomically store water. It is a ratherdeep little dam, and we need a fairamount of Earth to build it. It is notthe most economical dam that we willhave, but it gathers all the waterfrom the top of the hill to that point. We can make that keypoint dam aslarge as we can afford. It will enableus at any time of the year to run wa-ter right around this contour and let itfall on any area that we want. We leadthe water out through the wall of thedam, either by siphon or a lock-pipe,allowing it to enter a contour drain. We control the flow in the drain by asheet of canvas or plastic, fasteningit like a flag to a very light plasticpipe. A chain attaches to the other endof the flag, serving as a weight. Wemay peg that flag down within thedrain, holding back the flow until the

*Bill's treatment of keyline differs signifi-cantly from that of P. A. Yeomans, origi-nator of the keyline plan. For a more de-tailed and more accurate treatment ofkeyline, see Water for Every Farm--Yeomans Keyline Plan, an updated ver-sion of Yeomans' work available fromYankee Permaculture at the address on thecover.

Having found the keypoint, we can now treat the whole landscape as if it were a roof anda tank.

All runnoff fromabove the diversiondrain is collected at

the keypoint. Thiscan be directed froman irrigation channel

to any other pointbelow. Slopes of

these channels rangefrom 1:200 to

1:2000.


drain has filled behind the flag. Thenthe water spills over, sheeting downacross the hillside. About twice ayear, in summer, this will usually beenough to keep the countryside verygreen.

If you want to put out a bush fireyou just walk backwards with theflag, and you douse the whole hillside.One person can water hundreds ofacres this way with no effort at all. It is very light work. No pumps.

For very large dams, holding five orsix million gallons, you merely put asliding gate or lock-pipe in the damwall, generally about 18 inchessquare. This water will flow out aboutas fast as you can walk, walking fair-ly slowly. The drain being filled willfollow you along. The most restfulway to irrigate a large area in thisway is to have two people and twoflags. We peg here, and our friendgoes 100 feet ahead and pegs. Whenwe have soaked our part of the field,we just pull our flag, and our waterflows on to his flag.

The depth of your ditch depends onthe size of your dam. If you have a5,000 gallon dam and a little garden,a small market garden, you can have asmall ditch, and you can control theflow just by putting a spade in it.

Alternately, you can have some-thing as big as a lake, for which youwill need a large lock pipe with a bigwheel on it, and the ditch itself maybe half the size of this room. This willrequire a fair size flag. In this situa-tion, we may be trying to irrigate2,000 or 3,000 acres a day.

On large property, taking in a wholewatershed, we may go on construct-ing further dams on a descending con-tour. Away we go, dam to dam todam, falling all the way on this one totwo thousand keyline. As long as yourmain dam is the highest, you can comedown to all the little valleys, taking inboth sides of the watershed. The key-point should fall to both sides of thewatershed. In the next valley, thedam is a little lower, and the next onea little lower. As for the river, it willflow quite continuously. The morestorage you have on the hills, thelonger that river will flow in summer.

You can also find situations in whichone side of the valley is very, verysteep, and the other side very gentle.In this case, it is possible to put stor-ages on the gentler slope.

Sometimes, again, the keypoint iswell up-slope on very gentle, lowsloping country.

What we are up to is taking wateroff non-agricultural land, and prefer-ably forested land, collecting the wa-ter and the snow melt that has fil-tered through this forest. We don'twant to cultivate those upper slopes.They are too steep, and they shouldn'tbe cultivated. Depending on your soil,don't cultivate beyond a 19 degreeslope. You can get guidance on thisfrom your local soils people. General-ly, the sandier it gets, the less slopeyou will cultivate. With clay, youmight get away with cultivating at 20degrees probably once or twice.

The keypoint decides not only themost economical place to start to

catch the water; it also defines thepoint above which you should probablyconsider forestry, while using theland below for irrigated pasture,croplands, orchards, or even irrigat-ed forest. If you are dealing with afairly wild forest of walnut and othernuts, it is very useful to be able topour water on just about the time youare going to harvest. Then all yourhusks split and the nuts drop out. Be-low the keypoint lies the potential forcultivation.

All this that I have been giving youis just a model. I don't expect the

countryside to be like that, for herewe may have rocks and falls andtrees, and maybe a small pasture--but just as a model, that is the waywe would do it.

The slope with which we are work-ing varies between sand and clay. Even with sand, if the drop is one footin 2,000, we hardly shift a grain ofsand in these ditches. We ran an eightmile ditch recently in northeast Tas-mania. We got five or six miles alongwith one of these ditches--it was inthe summertime and it hadn't rainedfor months--and there came a light,misty rain. We walked back a coupleof miles and the ditch was running inthe sand. It had been a guess, sort ofa bet. We were doing it with a back-hoe. It was just in sand, and itworked. We filled the first dam on thefirst day of light rain.

Here you are saying, you haverocks all over the place. Yet, it isvery easy to go around outside them,or to bank up on outside of them. Ifthey are as big as this room, run theditch to the rock, let it drop down theside of the rock, pick it up at the bot-tom and go on. It is easy to go arounda rock, just go around it and backhoeit. It may only need to be a littleditch, maybe just six inches deep.

"One person can water hundreds of acres this way with no effort at all."


The best way to answer your ques-tions of how big this ditch needs to beis perhaps this way: The aboriginalpeople put mutton bird in casks. These people have an extraordinarydry sense of humor. They had a manfrom Sydney come down from a tele-vision team. He was interviewing anold friend of mine, a man named Devo-ny Brown, and he was treating him asa simple-minded idiot, which Mr.Brown is not. He said, "Mr. Brown,you cut your birds, and you split yourbirds, and you put them in a barrel." And he said, "How many birds do youget in a barrel?"

"Well, oh, well, now," he says, "asmall barrel, we don't get many, butyou get me a big barrel and I'll get youa bloody lot of bird in it."

So does this answer your questionsat all?

Look, if we are opening a valve on a5,000,000 gallon dam, and we aregetting rid of two and a half milliongallons of water that day, we want avery big ditch--right? If we are open-ing a valve in a 2,000 gallon Earthtank at the top of somebody's backyard, we just want a trickle throughthe garden.

There is another way to construct aditch that makes a fantastic land-scape. That is to make the ditch alake. Just go along and make a verybroad ditch, and widen it wherever itis easy, and let the whole ditch fillwith water, and your ditch is also astorage lake. I have seen it done once.It really makes something of thelandscape.

There is a point, perhaps beyondfive or six million gallons, that youare out of agricultural storages andinto civil work. That will be valleydams. They will be subject to floods.We do not worry about floods withthese little storages. While they mayimpound much water, they are verylow dams. If they break, a six inchflood rushes out for two hundred feet.We design only with the sort of damsthat you would feel quite confidentabout constructing. You are not aboutto put in a dam that is going to floodthe next five or six villages down thestream, that will require concrete

spillways and chutes and all that.Here on these wooded slopes,

though you encounter rocks, bracken,and trees, you look and you can seethat there are ditches out there rightnow in operation. It is up to you tofind those ditches and determine howthey are made, and who made them,and where they go. There are storag-es out there. I want you to find thosestorages and determine what theywill do. This is early springtime. There are little ditches flowing allday long out there, carrying off snowmelt. You call them roads. Just lookand see how far those roads are di-verting water around the landscape.You know, the driving of a vehiclearound the keyline will bring the wa-ter to the dam. We should use thekeyline system as our road system.

Just go and have a look at the roadsright here. See where this road col-lects the water and where it drops it,and see where it takes it from.

You are asking me why people didn'tthink of this keyline system earlier? Common sense is an uncommonquality.

Now we go back to the top profile. This time we will be dealing with thehill profile itself. What we have beendiscussing so far is the valley profile. Any dams worth making in valleysare keypoint dams. The other dams,which we will now discuss, won't bein valleys.

Here is a typical profile of ridgetops, a sky-line profile. What I con-sider now is the little saddles in theridges. Some of them are not so little. These saddles often mark points ofweakness in the landscape, which maybe massive, solid rock. The saddlesmark those places where the riversstart coming down on both sides of theridge. These rivers, obviously, haveabove them very large catchments. By making walls on either side, orperhaps on but one side of the saddle,we can obviously get very large andvery high water storages. These arethe highest water storages you canget on any property. These are realpower storages. You may get one, oryou might be able to get a whole se-ries of these high storages on a singleproperty.

Let us consider what these storageswould be useful for. They are marve-lous places for your house water sup-ply. It might be possible to generateelectricity with them. If we had avery broad saddle, maybe 300 feetwide, we would just have to make twowide semi-circular bowls on the sideof the saddle. We would have a sheet

"By making walls on either side…of the saddle, we can obviously get very large andvery high water storages. These are the highest water storages you can get on anyproperty.


of water running across the saddle,and could run a hydro-electric streamoff that. With this perched 400 feetabove one friend's garden beds--a400 foot fall is the maximum that youcan get thick walled plastic pipe tohold at that--when the tap is openedat the bottom, you should see thesprinklers! You can stage the pres-sure down. You need not bring it downat 400 foot pressure. You can bring itdown 200 feet, put a stop valve on atiny tank, maybe a 100 gallon tankthat you carry up on your back, andstart again from that little tank andbring it down the last 200 feet.

These are excellent storages for in-termittent mechanical power, for op-erating a turbine, supplyingmechanical power for grindingor for a sawmill. You can op-erate a washing machine. InAustralia, we have a washingmachine, one of our best. Itlooks like a concrete mixerand runs off a very simple lit-tle gizmo. There is also a spindryer that works on a littlewater jet. When you have 100feet of fall and a little jet anda small turbine, it is simplyyour tap adjustment that be-comes your speed adjustment.

There are other reasons forthese high dams. Up therewhere it may be a fairly aridlandscape in summer, you willfind that the complexity of wildlifeand the number of species, the numberof seed-eating birds like grouse andquail rise sharply once you have thesesmall storages up high. Wild chicks ofseed eating birds need water daily,within 24 hours. These little storagesare very enriching. These little saddledams, which sometimes occur natu-rally, are great places for wild life.

Another important use for thesehigh storages is to run sprinklers in afire protection system. Two sprink-lers will cover your two preciousacres. When fire comes, if you have asingle tap to twist and the thing runsfor half an hour, you are out of trou-ble. So all you need, really, is 1,200gallons up there.

Those saddle dams are pretty per-

manent. Even the natural ones arethere for thousands of years. What'smore, these are often filling when youhave very little water down below.They fill faster that the lower dams. We are going to get a lot of energyback out of them, for, remember, youwill not be pumping water anymore. The energy required to set up thissystem is what I call restitutionalmechanics; we use it just once.

Now we will go to the subject ofcontour dams .

For this, we choose the least slop-ing site. We build an Earth wall, andwe run our diversion drains as usual.These contour dams can perch on theknoll of a hill, where it dwindles out.

The contour dam is a shallow damwith a large surface area. It will be avery, very cheap dam. For theamount of Earth moved, we are goingto get a lot more water. So if there isany flattish area up high, even if wehave to hand-cut out diversion drainsfor a hundred yards with shovels--you don't need a big diversion drain--we will get water way up there.

These dams have two or three ef-fects. There is significant increase inthe water table in the surroundingarea because these dams all leak a lit-tle bit, and because you are runningthe water around those diversiondrains, you get a better absorption. What we are doing is giving the waterfar more time on the landscape. Wehave decreased the rush-off of water.

You know, when it rains heavily, ourstorages fill first. So we have buf-fered the erosion by taking the firstshock of water. After that, thesedams continue to give to the water ta-ble as the water table dries out, sothey are moderating systems. That'swhy throughout Australia the authori-ties encourage you to build as many ofthese small dams as you can build. Itmeans that down in the large storag-es, the power storages, there will befar more constant flow of water andthe chances of flooding mitigate.

These dams will stand up to anyamount of rainfall, because they sim-ply overflow. You put in a normalspillway, and when you put a spillway

in, you always contour itaway from the dam and gradeit out so what you get is asheet flow over it. Now youbring it out as a broad ditchand runs it along on contour,gradually letting the ditch ta-per out to nothing. We oftenplant the spilldown area withshrubs.

From the skyline of thelandscape, we have observedthe natural path of water. Wediverted it to cheap storagepoints. With very cheap, ex-traordinarily cheap earth-works, we have stored thatwater permanently, and wehave stored it for different

uses at different levels. It should beobvious to you that the high watershould be water for cleanest use, andthat as water comes downhill we canafford to let it become contaminatedmore and more with manurial pollu-tants for crops and with humic acidfrom forests.

We have set many priorities for ourclient. First, we get his domestic wa-ter supply for the house. We ought todo that before he ever starts mixinghis concrete. We then look after thegarden, the intensive garden; andthen, lastly, we look after the exten-sive agricultural system.

This applies to people with largerproperties. At present, we are doingthe grand scale. We will put 13% to15% of his landscape under water, if

" The contour dam is a shallow dam with a large surface area."


we can get it, and more if he choosesan aquatic crop.

You are asking how I define the"grand scale?" It depends upon wheth-er you are an Australian, a Texan, ora New Hampshire man. In New Hamp-shire, 140 acres is a grand scale; inTexas, or in the Northern Territoryof Australia, 5,000 square miles isreasonably modest property. In large,dry areas you are dealing with totalcatchments, total river systems. Onan area up there in Northern Austra-lia, there are five mountain rangesand five rivers, starting way up inthe hills and ending with crocodilesdown in the estuary. There we havegobs of landscape to play around on.Usually we are dealing with areaslarger than fifty acres. In this highlydissected country, little catchmentsmay lie within modest properties.

In setting the water in the land-scape, we also establish the place-ment of a number of other elements. If the first decision that we make is tocontrol the water in the landscape,then the functions that it serves, theuses to which we put it, decide thesubsequent placements, and the thingreally does start to becomeharmonious.

We have talked a lot about Type OneErrors, which a designer must avoid. One of those is the house on the hill,which I call the Berchtesgarten syn-drome. You have heard of AdolphSchickelgruber, the famous paperhanger of the 1930's? He later be-came reasonably well off, and built agreat concrete blockhouse on top of acrag, where, as far as I know, hecould have perished of thirst. I don'tknow what his eventual fate was.Anyway, there is this urge amongsome people to get as high as you can,and look out upon things. Many clients

have this syndrome, and you have tofight these illnesses.

Your forest, properly, starts at theridge top and comes down to the keypoint. This forested area has anotherfactor going for it. It is your thermalbelt. Let us look at the pattern offrost. If you can look at it from theair on a foggy day, you will see howit works, for the fog will imitate thefrost. Here are your frosts movingacross the ridge top. Occasionally aglob of it detaches and rolls downhill. Frost is not water; frost is treacle. Pour treacle on the landscape, andvery stiff treacle at that. That is howfrost and cold air behave. Frost doesnot behave like a stream flow; it be-haves like fog. Frost moves out overthe tree tops, pushing the warm airdown. There is a warm thermal beltbetween the frost above the key pointand the valley floor below.

As these gobs of frost move intothe upper area of the forest that,even when it is a deciduous forest,still holds a lot of insulated water. Itpushes the warm air out at the bot-tom. That air is several degreeswarmer than the air entering at thetop of the forest. Within this thermalbelt, just below the key point, iswhere we tend to site our client. Inthat way, he has a racing start onthermal efficiency. It is the areawhere the first buds of spring breakout, where the phenomenological cal-endar says that if you race up anddown the hills, this is the best placeto get started early in the spring. This is also the last area of autumn,where productivity disappears. So, it

is a long season area. If you walkfrom there any night up to the cragsabove, you will go through a zone ofdecreasing temperature. With an ev-ergreen forest above the keyline,even in snow, you will experience awarm down draft within the thermalbelt.

If we put in a high meadow up there,it will probably frost, and so will thetrees up at that level. You will see therime on them there. We won't get thatdegree of frost down here in the ther-mal belt. We will be several degreeswarmer.

There are several thousand reasonsfor avoiding the temptation to site adwelling way up on the ridge top.Down below the key point, the cleanwater is above us, and the house isbelow that water. Another thing, firesweeps with fantastic rapidity uphill,and good-bye Berchtesgarten, becauseyou have two fronts hitting you fromboth sides at once. You have nowhereto go. Fire moves quickly through theforest above us. Yet, we very easilycontrolled it at as this lower site.

Once we have set the water sys-tem, even if we never fully constructit, we retain the potential for its con-struction. The rest of the system isset, too.

Let us come down now to anotherarea for water storage. This is wherewe start to really store the great bulkof the water we are going to store,and we don't store it in the dams, westore it in the soils.

We hop on a little light tractor at-tached to our Wallace soil conditionerand we start to comb parallel to the

"Within this thermal belt, just below the keypoint, is where we site our clients."


keyline. We comb the soils out. Ofcourse, if you have forest belowthe keyline, this treatment won'tbe necessary, because the forestwill be doing all that. The forestis driving down roots and theyare rotting; it is putting littlesticks on the landscape, and it isholding water up, and it is layingdown duff. Let us say this is go-ing to be agricultural land, so thisis how we will proceed. If it isnow agricultural and we are goingto make it orchard or mixed for-est, then we still proceed like this.

We now begin to create thegreatest reservoir that we willhave on the farm. This is the bil-lion-gallon reservoir. It is the soil.You won't see any of this water,but it will be there. We just con-tinue to comb the soil out, movingparallel to the keyline. As we doso, we provide greater soil stor-age of water closer to the ridges.This is just a technique to get thewater out of the valley, back on to thehigh places.

The Wallace soil conditioner is avery simple farmer's machine, veryrugged. It has a disc that runs alongthe soil and cuts it. It is very sharp,of excellent steel. This is followed bya shank that has a shoe at the base.You don't need to go more than 9 inch-es deep in the soil. The disc cutsthrough the soil, the shank follows theslit. The shoe widens the slit at itsbase. You shouldn't see more than acouple of teaspoonsful of Earthemerge along that opening. A verylight tractor will do the job.

We are creating these thousands ofgrooves, running faintly across slope.Starting up on contour at one in twothousand, any water flowing on thislandscape initially follows these mil-lion little drains. As heavy rain falls,these fill to capacity. Then, the wateroverflows and descends to also chargefully the grooves below. Water isvery quickly absorbed. Just look atthe amount of absorption surface in aconditioned soil as against the originalsoil. The original soil was slopingdownhill, probably compacted by cat-tle, probably further compacted by

tractors, and the water was runningoff. Now your little holes are absorb-ing that water. When it gets downhere, it starts moving out under-ground. So it can't evaporate--the suncan't get at it.

Now we are starting to get soilswhich contain water to at least 9inches depth. Those soils will absorbwater roughly at about one inch perfoot as interstitial water. So we startto hold the majority of normal rainfallwithin the farm. Interstitial waterwill continue on down and gradually goout the streams, but that may be at avery, very slow rate. Somewhere,you know, it may move out there at adistance of less than 10 feet a day, orin some areas, 20 feet in a year.

The Wallace soil conditioner is un-like a subsoiler, which is a tool ofcultivation, and brings an enormousamount of Earth up on top. In spite ofits ruggedness, the Wallace soil con-ditioner is very sophisticated, and itis designed to do exactly what I havedescribed. It is designed to store wa-ter within the soil. Your subsoilersare not designed for this, neither areyour chisel plows. We have done foot-ball fields with these soil conditioners

and the next day then went outand played football.

What we are after is storingwater. Once we treat the soil inthis way, we never have to re-peat it, unless we restock heavi-ly with cattle for a couple ofyears, or run it over to and frowith tractors. It is the ideal toolto rehabilitate eroded soils, soilsthat we never intend to put backunder cattle, soils that we wantto devote to new uses, thoseplaces we want to reforest asquickly as possible with the high-est chance of success.

Now there are a few conditionsin which you don't use the soilconditioner. One is in very freesandy soils. Nor do you use it inforested landscapes, and ofcourse you don't use it wheremaybe 90% of the soil is rock.Apart from that, in all other con-ditions, use it. Use your keyline asyour base line to start your

conditioning.We will now describe how you start

the keyline out. You use a Bunyip lev-el, which is made up of about 80 feetof half inch hose. At either end it hasclear, stiff plastic uprights insertedinto it. These are rigidly fixed to twostakes. Fill the hose with water. Thenbring these two stakes together andmark off a level point on them. Herethey stand right together. We have thebase of these stakes on a firm, levelplatform, and mark off the level.Drive a stake here at the keypoint.One now walks 80 feet around the hilland puts the stake up or down the hilluntil the water reaches that level, anddrives in the marker. If we want a onein 2,000 contour drop, we bring itdown in proportion to whatever dis-tance we walked. Now all it takes istwo kids to run keylines all over thelandscape. They can do it in half anhour with this sophisticated bit ofequipment invented by the ancientChinese and originally made of pig'sguts, but adaptable to modern materi-als. It is called the Bunyip level. Youstart at your knoll, or you descendacross the landscape on your keyline.Or you strike a dead level thing for a

"We comb parallel to the keyline."

"We start to create the greatest reservoir that wewill have on the farm."


swale, which we have not discussedyet.

If you don't have anyone around, anddon't have any levels, you hop on yourtractor, back as hard as you can intothe valley, and then start drivinggently around the hill, and continue onparallel to that situation. There is noneed to fuss about it at all. We are nottalking about anything very compli-cated, because all you want is for thatwater to travel maximum distance.

You can make wet spots on ridges.Geoff Wallace does a little half moonright up in a very steep little valley.He gets his tractor up there, combsout to the ridges, and puts a clump oftrees on the ridge, so the trees areirrigated on the ridge points.

The results of the conditioning ofsoil are, first, a fantastic amount ofwater storage within the landscape;second, a soil temperature in winterthat may be as much as 25 degreesFahrenheit above that of the sur-rounding soils. Wet soil is an enor-mous heat mass, but you also havemuch air space in those soils. Condi-tioned soils commonly average 19 de-grees Fahrenheit above the surround-ing soil temperatures. It is frequent tosee a field that has been soil condi-tioned unfrosted in a series of frostedfields, because very often it is justthat 15 degrees to 19 degrees differ-ence. So soil conditioning sharply de-creases frost. Therefore it increasesyour growing season at both ends ofthe growing year. Trees will make afaster growth. Olives, that wouldmaybe bear in 17 or 18 years, willnormally bear within three years inconditioned soil. It pays to wait eventwo years or three years until thishappened before you plant trees. Youare still further ahead than if youplanted first in compacted soils. Youget roots following those lines rightdown into those little triangles, andthen off themselves and going on fur-ther down, again making channels forwater for even further penetration.We are not interested in going beyonda depth of nine inches. We can createthat within a year from sub-soil.Seeds wash into those little crevicesand germinate along those little ridg-

es. The plow has an attachment, a lit-tle seed box that just drips seeds atpre-regulated rates into those cre-vices, and you can go from pastureinto millet, or pasture into wheatright away. And you haven't cultivat-ed. You can go from pasture intopumpkins, if you want to.

Before you do this, it is a good ideato mow or graze the area flat, thenuse your soil conditioner.

If it is a stubborn soil, really com-pacted, you only go down to fourinches. Then you will see in theselines a very rigorous increasedgrass, which you let come out, andeither take off as hay, or mow andlay flat, or graze off. Then you re-condition down to about nine inches.After you proceed either directly intocrop or into orchard, or you startnormal grazing sequences, which youcontinue for two years, or until youdig down and find that the results ofconditioning have disappeared andyour pasture is starting to degrade.Then you recondition your pasture. Innormally strong soil, you wouldn'tneed to do that more than once everythree or four years under quite heavygrazing. On football fields, you onlyneed to do it every two or threeyears, and that is heavy compaction.You can see it is not a frequent treat-ment. In orchards, you don't need toregraze your orchard, because youare getting root depth from trees androot channels deep down in the Earth.

In some soils, you get hard pan,mostly as the result of the applicationof superphosphate and a high evapora-tion rate. When you put superphos-phate on top, the rain carries it downto certain depths; then summer comesand the moisture evaporates and aninsoluble tri-calcium phosphate formsin a concrete block 15 inches down. Itis all right to use phosphate rock oncalcareous soils, but not superphos-phate. Those soils should never havesuperphosphate applied to them. Thatis a no-no. We will get into that in thetropical section. Superphosphate is ano-no on tropical calcium soils. It is atype one error. Superphosphate youratoll and you will concrete it. We willtry to point out these type one errors

as we go along. We just did one. TheBerchtesgarten syndrome is a typeone error. Once you have made thaterror, everything else you attemptwill remain difficult forever. You in-vite a high energy situation for yourclient in perpetuity. They are alwaysgoing to be in trouble. A little camp inthe woods is another type one error. You can feel those errors in yourbones. You are asking, How aboutbuilding a house on a valley floor? There is nothing wrong with it if youwant to make a specialty of freezingthings. If that is what you want, thenjust down the valley, put a big belt ofpine trees across it, and you can livein a refrigerator all your life, sum-mer and winter. It is Eskimo ideal. Ifyou must adapt an Eskimo to southernMinnesota, that's where you put him.For us sunny people, that is not theplace. There are valley sites, howev-er, which we will get to later, whichwe deliberately choose.

Now back to the subject of water inlandscape. We store most of our wa-ter in our soil. We can get it there intwo ways. If you have poor clientswho can't afford this soil conditioner,we can get water in there with rad-ishes. I mean large radishes, the dai-kon radish. We use the same system.We slash, and we broadcast our dai-kon. The Daikon radishes spike our soilto about two feet. We never need topull them because they are biennialand rot. If the area is too steep to usethe soil conditioner, we use Daikonradish. We accomplish it biologically.Or we can plant real pioneer speciesof trees like your western red cedar,and they spike the soil. They are verygood soil spikes. They start this pro-cess. If we have a very large areacompacted, and we want to get intosome crop or other, we can use thatmechanical method. We might have tomake a hole and put in a handful ofcompost with our radish so that it canget a start. If we are dealing with avery small area, we might dig holesand put little logs in and plant ourvegetables where the logs are rottingunder the ground. We can do all sortsof things like that. We can get it done.

What we are up to is opening the soil


again, bringing it back to its forestabsorption capacity, and we do it. Ourmain aim is to store the water in thesoil. You can see now what happenswhen we let water drain, that irriga-tion drain, out across conditioned soil.It encounters a series of ribbed sys-tems that run it out and store it up.

Now let us move on down to thelower slopes. As the grade decreases,so the amount of water stored perEarth moved starts to increase. Anyimpoundments we make lower downare very cheap, and, as you nowknow, there is no need to go into thevalleys to make them on any levelarea. We can make them on the pointof a ridge, and that may be flatterthan the valley floor. This has an ad-vantage in that we don't have a flood-rush over our dam walls. It is an easysituation where we have a diversiondrain running from higher up, poolingon the ridge, and maybe running backinto the next valley.

There is only one rule about the ef-ficiency of dams. That is, the flatterthe floor that you are flooding, themore water you get for dollars spent. It doesn't matter where that is, on anopen field, or on a ridge, or in a val-ley floor. So when you are looking tolarge storage, you walk the valleyfloor and find where it levels. At thepoint where it starts to level, you of-ten find that it tightly constricts, andyou will find the logical valley damsite. Again, you are the best tool indetermining this.

It is a pleasant time of the year to

do it now, because there is watertrickling through the landscape.

Where it speeds up, that is whereyou are going to have to move a lotmore dirt. Where it is moving slowly,that is the floor of your dam. Where itstarts to speed up, that is where yourdam wall will go. At this time ofyear, just when everything is melt-ing, you can follow all the tricklesacross the landscape and work theselittle things out.

We will go now to your lower dams.They lie below your fields, belowyour animal houses, below yourhouse, but maybe just below, becausethey are good for energy. They maybe of very little use at all in this re-spect. Occasionally, though, they maybe useful for turning mill wheels be-low. They may be useful in that withenough flow we can put a hydraulicpump, a hydraulic ram on, and lift do-mestic water up 10 feet for everyfoot of the fall. They may be usefulfor high volume, low flow energies,particularly if we are putting themacross creeks. These are your oldmill dams, mill ponds. They lie allaround this district. There is one justup the road, and another one justdown the road. They move big massesslowly by weight of water. However,for the most part, the energy lowdams supply is not much good to us,so they are the last dams we install.

However, these are our productiondams. Here we produce the highestamount of yield from water. They arethe best dams for our fish and our

wild life and water chestnuts, cray-fish, all those little creatures. Theydo best down in these low dams be-cause there is a nutrient flow into thedam of dissolved solids. Water thatlooks perfectly clear may carry aheavy weight of dissolved solids. Youwill find on analysis, more masseroded from the hillside in clear wa-ter than you find in dirty water. Nowthe idea is to catch these nutrients ina biological net. We want to seize thenutrients, the dissolved solids in thewater, the calcium, etc., without em-ploying some high technology appara-tus, and get these nutrients back on tothe land.

You can do this by putting fodderplants in these ponds, algae, mussels,and snails. They will absorb that cal-cium and fix it, and you can get itback out again in the form of duck ma-nure, fish, and wild rice. In this way,you are using very efficient little bio-logical machines, working at the mo-lecular level, straining out the nutri-ents before the nutrients leave yourproperty.

The ideal situation is, starting withclean high dams, gradually dirty thewater up with manurial nutrients--keep your ducks on a slowing flow intosome of these ponds, wash your pigmanure into some of them--then startputting this water through your wet-land plant systems. You will be gettinga high plant growth, which you takeoff. Then run the water on throughother systems, and let it grow cleanagain. The water that you finally re-

"The flatter the floor that you flood, the more water that you get for dollars spent."


lease into streams, the water thatleaves your property, will be cleanwater.

Now you may not have the space todo all that, but, believe me, you don'tneed much space. In a mini-system wecan do all that from here to the win-dow. In clump, clump, clump, I cantake you through a rice patch or avery high nutrient demand patch, orthe taro patch; next, and algae-eatingfish; into a rice patch; into a musselpond with watercress. Now what wehave is fairly clean water running out.Then you can let it go off. You can doall that in a space the size of thisroom.

In many places, of course, the key-line system is not an applicable wayto treat your water. These are placesin the Ozarks where people are sittingup in little headwater valleys, awayabove any keyline. They are sitting ontiny plateaus. They call it a cove.

Now you ask me, "What is the leastslope you can put this biological net touse on?" There is no such thing as aleast slope. We have country at homethat has a three inch fall in a quarterof a mile. That is a least slope, andyou can still use this system perfect-ly well on that. At that point you canswale it. You can actually go belowthe surface, dig out ponds that are be-low grade, that do not perch on top ofthe ground at all. The main volume isbelow the surface.

Just to summarize, I will runthrough it again. We first gatheredclean water at the highest point fordomestic uses. We added nutrients towater that we ran through our plantsystem; then we ran it off intomarsh, carrying food from the naturalproductivity system to the trout; af-ter converting nutrients to biologicalforms, we release clean water backinto the stream. We can accomplish allthis within a vertical drop of six feet,going from zone to zone to zone. Sowe are not talking necessarily aboutgiant systems--we can be talkingabout real little systems. Once youhave worked out a technique for thisform of landscape, you will find your-self hitting this situation repeatedly.It is the classical humid landscape.

You will be recognizing it every-where; you will be spotting saddledams out of your car windows.

Right around here, and north andsouth of here, and increasingly as wego north toward Canada, you havevery low grade landscapes with icebuilt bottoms, that have very slowwater movement through them. Theyare basically marsh land. They arevery cheap water storage systems,very cheap marsh systems. Very lowwalls give you very extensive ponds. Keep your eye out for that kind oflandscape. It is often very cheap landbecause cattle can't move around inthe marshes, and the hills may bequite dry. Where people can't run cat-tle, land is sometimes cheap. If youcan buy that land, you can get milesof water for very little Earth moved.The best design decision, then, is togo into aquatic production, becausethe site suits to that, not to dry landproduction of cattle or corn. We spotthose sites for clients who want torear fish or trout or wild rice, orsomething else. There are also occa-sional sites where you have a basaltdike across the landscape, which ingeological times formed an ancientlake. Then the waters broke throughthe dike at one point and the riverwent on out, and what you have left isan extensive marsh with a very nar-row exit and very steep shallows tothe exit.

The value of these high lake sys-tems, saddle dams, and high meadowsis well known. They afforded the tra-ditional rich summer pastures usedextensively in Switzerland and allcold climates as summer grazingmeadows. Here is an excellent reasonfor opening up the flat ridges there.As you get closer to the coast, in-creasingly alkaline conditions com-monly occur. Then you get a copperdeficiency in animals. Their hoofs falloff; they aren't thrifty; they get lamequickly. Just shifting them temporar-ily up to those mountain pastures isgood husbandry. All the young peoplego up with the herds to little huts.Everybody loves that move. Theseare really delightful times. If proper-ly surrounded and broken up by trees,

these are relatively warm. These arevery valuable high meadows, and theyare valuable for wild life. They breakup the canopy of the forest and giveessential edge conditions for highproductivity.

So the landscape, I believe, dictatesin a very logical fashion how youtreat it. If you just ruminate on thisprofile and its thermal advantages, itswater advantages, its seasonal ad-vantages, then I don't see any diffi-culty at all in coming to a set of total-ly logical decisions about how youbegin to treat it, or where you hadbest place your client within it, orwhere you would advise him to under-take various sorts of endeavors. As adesigner, you will have one last set ofresolutions to make, and that will beto increase or decrease the variouselements of this landscape accordingto your client's wishes. If, as typical-ly happens, he hasn't a clue, you dic-tate the proportional break-up, al-ways maximizing water and forest,because that still leaves the opportu-nity open for him to decrease them atany later date.

I will now deal briefly with minorform of water storage at greatheights that can be hand constructed,called dieu-pond. These are very in-teresting and semi-mystical smallcatchments, dotting the British land-scape. Mainly monasteries construct-ed these little catchments. They aresaid to be fed by 'dieu." It is the godHimself that sends down the rain.

Now they are normally sited wherethere is a mini-catchment, maybe alittle cup-shaped area in the hill. They are hand dug, and therefore notmachine compacted. They are oftenclay tamped. But they need not be. They can be dug in perfectly goodholding conditions. Moreover, the ma-terial removed from them is laid outon the catchment so that we have theleast vegetation there, and conse-quently a greater run-off into thedieu-pond. Dieu-ponds never dry up.They can range from about three feetto a maximum of about 20 feet in di-ameter. Two or three people can dig adieu-pond in a day. Nothing to diggingholes. You are laughing? Well, any-


way, they dig this little hole so thatits walls are three to one, which isabout the resting angle of normallystrong soil. Now the reason they don'tdry up is that as they evaporate, thesurface area decreases. They will al-ways have some water. These pondsare the traditional high country wa-tering points for stock. They do needcleaning out occasionally, becausethat little point at the bottom does fillwith silt and leaves. It is an infre-quent renewal. In very low summerperiods, it pays to hop in there anddrag the leaves out.

It is necessary to give the animals astone access, or walk them into it onthe low side. They will of themselvescause some collapse of the edges of it.For normally humid uplands, this is aneternal water supply, depending onlyon the number of stock watering it.

The builders of these dieu-pondswould never tell anybody how to buildthem. Old dieu-pond builders used topass their secret one to the other.

The secret is, you taper it. I neverknew how they worked until I tookphysics. I just knew they worked. Ihave seen them all around the world-little sloppy catchments. They workbecause they don't evaporate easily,and they fill from rainfall.

To the ordinary person, they lookrather marvelous because there is norun-in, no streams, no springs, andhere is a little pond of water. Today,we would hack one out with a backhoe,if not up to using a pick and shovel.

It is very likely that in future timeslow humid bottom lands, which havethe lowest potential for soil loss, par-ticularly if treated in some of theways we will be discussing, will bethe most valuable agricultural land.These areas may be in production longafter we have lost all sorts of othersoils. This is also where eroded soilaccumulates. So those low-lying landshave a large amount of resilience. Theonly reason why we will be continuing

to farm the lowlands is that we willprobably be continuing to erode theuplands. Therefore, these are impor-tant areas. Very often, our designmay keep them out of permanent usesinto croplands. You may not see a treecrop that is appropriate to them; andyou can often reserve them for maincrop purposes. They are importantareas, and becoming increasinglyimportant.

We need to dealbriefly now withmini-terraces. Wemay, at times haveto site the clientwhere we don't wantto. You have clients,quite affluent people,who buy site unseen,subdivisional areas.It often becomesnecessary to estab-lish a terraced sys-tem for the garden.Design this in a series of planting are-as of about waist height, two feetwide at the top, and maybe three orfour feet at the base. The base of eachtier is a walkway about 12 incheswide. Mulch the walkway and putmulch on the terraces as needed. Wedon't recommend more than three orfour growing tiers in a series, and wedon't recommend that they be anymore than about forty feet long.

Your client is on this slope, diggingin, living up there. He has his chickensabove his garden, and the chickensare kicking the mulch downhill, givinghim good mulch for his little terraces. The terraces are along the hill. Welet moisture flow down in very finedischarges on these paths. We onlypermit him three or four terraces,and we don't let them come in a line,we stagger them so that we get astaggering of runoff of excess water. It comes off at separate points, so weget several little runoffs spreadingover quite an area of hillside. We will

keep the area just below our three orfour terraces vegetated with perma-nent shrubberies, small fruits, bram-bles, and pumpkins, and things likethat. The little terraced ridges arehand-patted and shaped so that thewater does not run out of this areavery easily. Rain falls, and there is norunoff over these 40-foot ledges.

Now the client can still be in trou-ble, especially the lady client. The la-dies carry all the water. They have toget water on to these high sites withno chance of a catchment up hill, un-less they have a friend and neighbor.You, as a designer, can give them twowater sources. You can provide for a

catchment tank for water collectedfrom the roof of his house.

Now from our water holding systemwe dig a little diversion drain and runit very gently across the hill, andmaybe even drop a little bit of downpipe in it, directing the water on thetrenches. We are not going to get asilt flow, because we have this areamulched, and when the water leaves,we make it run off on an uncultivatedsite. All the principles are exactly thesame as in our keyline structure. Weare still running little high keylinedams for him, but everything issmall, and his garden is small, but itis productive, very productive!

There are two ways of managingchickens in this situation. You can putthe chicken house down at the bottomnear the terraces, or you can put it upat the top and the chickens will kickthis mulch down to where it stopsagainst this bottom fence. That will bethe place from which we collect themulch for the garden. This is what I


steep slopes, you might even backhoe,or drag line one of these out.

It is handy to put a fence on theupper side, if you are going to fence,so that you can use relatively lowfencing.

These are things called delvers,which resemble joined double plows,which can be towed behind bulldozers.They have two wings behind them, andthey throw out a V-shaped drain,while the soil is spread out to thesides by the wings. They are low-slope systems. These delvers aresometimes mounted on graders, andyou grade across the landscape, delv-ing away at the same time. Graderscan be used to grade out low profiledrains. So, well, you use whatevermachinery you have. For very smallsystems, you can use just a singlefurrow plow, turning out a turf; andyou can double plow. The farmer cantravel along the hillside with his chis-el plow or his soil conditioner. Then,fixing a light blade on the tractor, fol-low along removing the loosened soil. This is a system that is useful whenwe are dealing with horticulture.

It is normal to grass the spinnerdrains, just as part of the field.

We will go to dam wall construction. This is something you need to know,without ever having to do it.

For dams up to six or eight feethigh--these are small walls--youdon't fuss too much. You give it abouttwo and one-half to one slope; on therear side, three to one. You make avery broad crown. That's your dam.The broad top should enable whateverconstruction machinery you need toroll along it. It should be over a car-width wide. You can have a little bull-dozer running back and forth whilethe big one scrapes it up. Avoid in-cluding rocks in the soil you use tobuild your dam. Rocks don't shrink andexpand like other materials, and theymake for many leaks. So when youstrike rocks, bump those to one side. Tamp every foot of your wall as youbuild it up, using your machines to rollbackwards and forwards, so that youhave a rammed Earth wall. Up to eightfeet, nothing much is going to happento that. So it is fairly non-fussy.

terraces, we can indulge ourselves inwater terraces, much more simplyconstructed. We can set up nutrientflow systems that are catching, in-troducing, and removing nutrients atdifferent points in the cycle, usingland animals for nutrient input, andthe land plants to mop up the last ofthe nutrients in the water, while wa-ter plants and water animals do theirparts in the cycle. We are into slight-ly different games here than thosewhich we will talk about inaquaculture.

Another thing that you can recom-mend to clients as very pleasant workis water gardening. You can go intothis form of terracing, or into dryterraces fairly fast. They are rela-tively easy to make and are verystable situations as far as soil lossgoes.

Now we will consider the mechanicsinvolved. On very low slopes, wherewe want to make diversion drainsand channels, and in deserts, we makeuse of a thing called a spinner, whichis simply a very large wheel rippingaround behind a tractor. This wheelhas little cups on it, and you justdrive across the landscape and thiswheel revolves and chews out a gen-tle channel and throws the dirt wayup here, so there are no banks. Theultimate result is a sort of drainthrough which the water runs along,not really visible on the landscape ex-cept in low-lying conditions. You candrive vehicles and tractors acrossthe landscape and they just enter andleave it without a great deal of fuss.

The width of the drain depends onhow big your spinner wheel is, nor-mally maybe four feet wide, and afoot deep. These are very gentledrains for low slope systems. Onsteeper slopes, the most commonform of drain is made by using a tiltedblade. The tractor goes on slope here,and blade is on tilt so that it willscrape with a very gentle back slope,and that gives a little wall of Earth onthe outside. If it is wide enough, it isalso your road, contour road, and itcan be grassed. If you have much landand a great big project, and you aremeeting all sorts of slopes, including

call the kickdown system. We plantthis area with chicken forage trees tohold the slope.

Now we will go to a relatively briefdiscussion of terraces and paddy field.

You can make those on slopes assteep as you like. You can do a Nepa-lese terrace, you know, in which youget a square foot for every 10 feetyou terrace; but normally you makethem on easy slopes. I looked out ofour bus once in Nepal. We were turn-ing a corner and the back wheels werehanging over here, and there wasabout a 3,000 foot drop. Out therewere two little terraces. There was agentleman standing on one foot, a hoeon his shoulder, looking up at me. Oh,God, I thought. All he has to do is tolean back! Also, not far away therewas a tree growing up like that, and abig branch hanging out over emptyspace--no terrace below. There was alittle girl on the road, and she ran upthe trunk of the tree and sat on thebranch without hanging on. My God! Ican't stand to look at that! Forgetthose.

What we will discuss now are broaddiversion and irrigation drains. Youwork right in them to see-saw yourwater across landscape. You usuallyhave a little lip on the outer slope.

The drains fall across slope, andthey may be very irregular in theirwidth. There is no need to make themregular. We may be leading these di-version drains from a nearby creek,letting this trickle of water into them.We take this trickle of water and leadit into an agricultural situation.

This is not European gardening. Youwon't find anything about this in theBritish gardening book, because it isnot straight, but has wavy edges onit; and it just isn't traditional.

Take a brisk look through world lit-erature on the subject, and you willfind 60 to 80 common, very highyielding plants that grow in marsh orwater. One whole group that may beof interest is the bee forages thatgrow in or near water. We will dealwith them later, when we go intoaquaculture.

On more gentle slopes than thoseupon which we constructed our mini-


likely to get much vegetationexcept right at the edge. Thesteep bank of Earth at the rear,which can be eight or nine feethigh, can have trees in front ofit. You are in a tropical climatethere. If you want to be fancy,you can glass that off and you

will have a fantastic situation, withwinter reflection of sun giving maybeas much as 60% additional heat. Youwill have absorption of direct sun-light--a good heat-up situation. If youwant to put bamboo up on top of yourEarth bank, you have maybe as muchas 60% to 63% additional heat. TheEarth bank itself stores heat.

There are two basic forms of bam-boo. One is called monopodial, and oneis called sympodial. Most of the bam-boos are monopodial and form clumps. Sympodial bamboos are more or lessrunner bamboos. You can put them inhere and they go out under the roadand come out on the other side. No-body uses sympodial bamboos becausethey are all small bamboos, seldom

exceeding five feet in height. They aregood for making arrows. So if youdon't need arrows, forget them.

Now the monopodial bamboos are gi-gantic bamboos, sixty to eighty feethigh. Some have big trunks on them.They are slow growing, with nice ten-der edible shoots. They never becomerampant. A monopodial bamboo will

That is how you make dams thatstand above the surface. Many damsdon't. There are many different sortsof dams. This is a barrier dam thatgoes across the valley. These aredams that run along contours. Theyare usually rolled Earth dams, andthey are called contour dams. Theseare the ones you build up on knolls andslopes. Then there are dams belowgrade. On very flat lands, the way tohold water that runs in is to excavatethe dam out, and throw the soil up.They are more properly called tanks--Earth tanks. A spinner drain mightlead into one of these Earth tanks, sothat a very gentle flow is coming inbelow ground level. There is no waythat these things will ever bust out.

Now when you are building Earthtanks, you can do all sorts of inter-esting things. You can sharply pile-upthe removed soil to create a sun trap.When your pond fills, you have a goodgrowing situation. Animals can comeinto this. You can pave that sectionwith stone, if you want to. The deepedge is very abrupt, and you are un-

What we have done is to re-move the top soil, get rid of allthe sticks and duff. If there isgood clay soil underneath, wepush this up, roll it down, pushit up, roll it down, roll it back-wards and forwards as we go.That's it! You can drive acrossthese dams. You will normally usethem as low valley crossings, or todrive across gullies.

Your spillways need to be broad.You have your dam across the valley.You cut a spillway into the solid partof the hill, wind it out along contour,letting it shallow out and fail. Youdon't bring it around down below. Ifyou are going in towards a continuousstream flow, you might very well doone of two things. You can either bringit out and pipe it down here and givethat a splash area, or you can put apipe in the system, an overflow pipe,which you lead out. These are smallsystems that we can handle in severalways. That is your typical dam.

When you come to building a dam200 feet long and 20 feet wide, youhave to do all this very cautiously.You make a trench here at the base ofyour dam site. You go down four orfive feet until you strike very goodclay at the bottom, then you startrolling. You pack that and the wholecore of the dam with selected clay.

Otherwise, the procedure is thesame as for smaller dams. You dothis, and hope for the best! The largerdam is a more serious job. The heightof the back of the slope may be abouteight feet, with an eight foot downwall. If you run into dry rock, you canlay it on the wall where you wouldexpect some wave splash, if it is ashallow containment. Keep rocks outof your dam structure. On largerdams, you don't want any leaks. Linethe whole vertical center right to thetop with good clay. That will be a to-tally impermeable dam. Most soils,however, will roll down to an im-permeable soil. If we are working in agranitic country, with course sand,we are not going to get a dam unlesswe do this core. The core stops thewater, and this is what gives the damstability.

"You pack the whole core of the dam with selected clay"


ing a small amount of water down hillinstead of a lot of water uphill.

Another use for mini-systems iswhen you go to broadscale quail orpheasants. You drop these little pondsthrough the landscape every 150 feetor so. Just make little holes.

If you have a lot of pear trees, youmay want to rear frogs to get rid ofpear slugs. You then place these littleponds all over the system.

Well, we have covered the keylineconcept, and in with that falls all yourlower slope control. And you have thisbold idea of storing water right up onthe top of the hills.

Only as a last resort do you dam thevalleys. You only do that in emergen-cies, or for the creation of productivesystems. Large-surface, relativelyshallow, easily constructed, cheaplower productive dams are very good!

In dry areas, and in areas whereyou are growing very intensively,you might design some form of dripirrigation. Drip irrigation systems arevery modest with water. For highvalue tree crops, they are criticallyimportant for establishment, butprobably not thereafter.

There is another form of water con-trol that is very interesting, giventhat we have some water uphill, andgiven that we have established an or-chard on the hillside down below ourglasshouse, which is bermed into thehillside directly above the orchard.We will grade little shelves almost ontrue contour all the way down, atabout 40-foot spacing, which is aboutcorrect for orchard trees. Down thehill we go, grading these little plat-forms out and leaving the area in be-tween them in grass. We will thenplant our little trees in the outer edgeof our swale. We have a pipe from ourwater source, which is uphill, and webring it down and stop it.

We can lay a hose in these systems,or we can do another thing that is in-teresting. We can bury a pipe thatcomes up in the next system belowfor reverse siphoning. We can havethese little reverse siphons going allthe way down the slope. In that waywe only need to run the hose in uphere. The water enters the highest

when it rains, which rapidly dries off. You can put a little concrete sill inyour wall and have a sliding door,called a floodgate, which you can pullup and let all those twenty acres ofwater out into a chiseled two or threeacre area. The floodgate is just like aboard in a groove, a simple littlething. You can make those by hand.They all leak a little bit. Expecteverything to leak a little bit. Eventhose lock pipes leak a little. That isnormal. Dams leak a little.

We may run this water through ourirrigation channel only twice a year,or something like that. Most of thetime we let the water go, and there-fore we have a normal spillway overthe dam.

A dam may have these four things:a diversion channel leading in, an irri-gation channel leading away, some de-vice for releasing the water--either alock pipe or a siphon over the top--and a spillway.

Now when you come to look at thedams--and we will look at a few onthis site--the spillway may not gopast the dam at all. We might beworking on a site in which we haveundulating country. We might take aspillway from the back of the dam andlead it into the next valley. There areall sorts of games we can play.

Contour dams are very cheap, no-fuss dams. They are dams in whichthe actual dam follows the contourand then swings back to ground level.

Basically, the construction is thesame as for other dams, but usuallyyou put contour dams on pretty flatland, and you grade them up prettyquickly. They may be six feet high. Itdoesn't matter if you get a bit ofgrass or rock in them sometimes.They can be a little rougher. Just rollthem down tightly and they will hold.

There are all sorts of reasons forlittle mini-ponds. Never neglect thelittle pond. When you are plantingsteep slopes with trees, you mightput a little well at the end of yourpaths. On a steep slope, it pays to digthese little wells, and line them withplastic, or drop a tire in, which is thequickest. Then when you have to wa-ter the slope, you are always carry-

form a clump as large as this room ifno one is eating off it. If you are eat-ing it, it won't be very big at all, be-cause you eat the shoots.

If we are only going to grow plantsin it, we can make our Earth tankabout three to six feet deep. If we aregoing to hold fish in it, we need tokettle them out a little area, a fifteenfoot hole somewhere, which you canbackhoe in. It only needs to be a coupleof feet wide and maybe six feet longfor about fifty fish. Your pond doesneed that additional depth unless youare going to stock it with fish.

These Earth tanks fill from diver-sion drains. There's no need to find aspring for your water source. We justtake a whole big runoff section. Youcan normally ignore springs in favorof an excellent, cheap site. Of courseif a spring comes sited well, that is,if it is at the back of a plateau, wecould run a very cheap contour damand tie in the spring, and we wouldhave a double hit. If the spring is on asteep slope, then you would need acontour plow. In that case, I wouldsimply ignore the spring and bring thewater round in contour to the dam. Atthe spring, you could do somethingquite different, which is the small,usual spring house with a small tank init, something totally different fromthe large storage. If you are lucky,and your spring is above your diver-sion drain, you can bring it in to thedam. If you have a stream runningthrough your Earth tank, it will justgive a slow circulation to it.

Sometimes you will need to usepumps while the bulldozer is going, ifyou are down below the water sur-face. We have to use them intertidal-ly, too, when you have to put in 12hours of fast work--otherwise, glub.When you are digging these, you moveyour days around to night, if you aredigging a big one. And sometimes itrains.

Lock pipes, you can purchase. Thoseflags you fit in the ditches, you canmake them out of a bit of pipe andcanvas, and a piece of dog chain.Sprinklers you can buy commercially.

On a flat site you can grade up awall and get maybe 20 acres of water


around contours, and along to otherflat fields. It is a cheap, simple sys-tem, consisting of many short lengthsof pipe and plugs that you carry withyou.

This is not a trickle-flow system. The whole thing is running like blazes. When we need to irrigate, we go upand open our floodgate, and the mainwater channel comes down and hitsthat little channel, and we stop it hereand it fills up, floods out; then wemove on and the next section fills upand floods out, and so on. You let a lotof water go, and you thoroughly soakit. Then you plug the whole thing up byclosing down your floodgates.

You can dig those trenches with alittle crawler tractor, just a smallmachine, or you can do it with shov-els. The best way to dig a trench withshovels is to use two men. You get avery broad shovel, with one man onit. Around the neck of the shovel, justabove the blade, you put a rope, andthen you put a toggle on the end of therope. One man puts the shovel in andthe other pulls, and you get a rockingmotion up. They can throw up banksabout as fast as we can walk, veryeasily, no arm strain. One man is justmoving sideways and putting theshovel in the ground, the other pulls,and away you go. Little Earth banksappear right across the country justlike that. If you have to empty a loadof gravel and have no dump truck, usethat method, with one man standing onthe ground pulling, and another justputting the shovel down in the middle.Painless. That is the way the Turksand Afghans contour enormousacreages of very shallow country.They will build and rebuild those con-tours every year, miles of them, justa couple of men. Ho! Ho! Ab-do!

One of the advantages of the keylinethat very few persons see is that ifyou have a diversion drain above yourfields and household systems, thatworks just as efficiently to removeexcess water in winter as it does todirect water into your drains. A well-keylined and combed landscape thathas been soil conditioned doesn't getboggy in winter and doesn't get dry insummer. People forget that the same

of the field. The side channel has a lit-tle fall to it. We block off the sidechannel at intervals, and throughthese blocks we put short pieces offour to six inch pipes. We have a plugwith a handle on it that fits into thosepipes. When we let the water go intothis side channel, it fills up to thefirst block, which we have plugged sothat the water cannot go beyond thisbarrier. We have also done somethingelse. Leading out through the side wallof this main drain, we have many lit-tle two inch pipes directing water outinto our field. Our side drain conductswater through these little pipes outinto graded channels running down thelengths of that field. There are treeson little banks between the channels. Again, this area has been planted withgrains, and can be graded up to eitherbank. So we have banks made up ofloads of clover and topsoil, with treeson them.

When all those little pipes are con-ducting water down over the firstsection of our field, we pull the plugsfrom the first barrier, and plug thesecond barrier. When that section ofthe field saturates, we move ourplugs down to the next area. Therecan be four or five or even six orseven of these little two inch pipesleading the water in an even flowfrom the main drain to the irrigationchannel. We can irrigate hundreds oftrees with very little effort. That'sfor flat lands.

If we want switching systems, weput in another one of these barriers,and we just pull the plugs and let thewater go down. We can direct water

swale; it runs along and soaks up allthe Earth, then enters the reverse si-phon and runs down to the next level,and so on. One person can water hun-dreds of trees in about an hour.

Then you can do something very in-teresting. You can plant this swale toa highly nutritious crop, such as whiteclover. Then you mow the grass stripand throw all the grass on the swale.When it is looking all rich and good,you run along and regrade it, bringingthat rich top soil up to your trees.Your trees will get bigger. You gradeagain, cutting it back a little bit. Youdo it two or three times. By thattime, you have a great mound of blackEarth, tree roots growing in it, and awell-defined walking platform thatyou can walk along, and an easy wa-tering system. No problem with thatone.

You stagger your trees down slope.You should also alternate species,putting your narrow leafed species upat the top--peaches and apricots--andyour broad leafed species down be-low, because it is getting wetter allthe way down.

That is a very easy way to run anorchard, and a very easy way to setit up. That is real Chinese style,building up the richness in your paths,and then scrape your paths off and putthat around your plants. But alwayskeep your stems free. You also have anice little garden path in which to setyour ladders for picking. It's a gener-ally sensible little set-up.

When you get to very flat land withhardly any fall, you can make atrench, a side channel down the side

"We can bury a pipe that comes up in the nextsystem."


drain that diverts water off the hill-side also prevents bog situations andseepage situations below. Once yourstorages are full and your soil ischarged, you can direct a winter run-off into a creek if you want to. Youcan take it off the landscape throughthis system, just as easily as puttingit on. We often run a descending di-version around the valley slope justto keep the drain bottom dry in win-ter. The same diversion drain,plugged, will irrigate the valley insummer.

Now when you are wandering aroundwith this diversion drain, bringing itdown to your dam, and taking an irri-gation canal out of your dam, if youcome to a little gully or something,you can easily make a little pond thereas you go. It is quite easy to do that.

Another way to go about bringingmore water into the landscape, stor-ing water on the land, is to run broadswales. This has a particular applica-tion in urban areas. A swale is a criti-cal technology for winter-wet Ameri-ca that is not much used. It is also avery useful technology to use whenlaying out forests.

You cut shallow blade trenches ontrue contours, with no movement ofwater along the trenches. The trench-es are quite broad, hardly ever lessthan four feet wide, and often muchwider. You wouldn't do this on a steepslope, just a moderate to shallowslope system. You walk it out along

the pegs; the bulldozer follows you. If you strike clay, leave it narrow, orelse deepen it. As a rule, in clay,deepen your swale in profile, and insandy and gravelly places, widen it.

Along the swale, where you think itwill hold, you have little ponds inclay. Where you think it will soak intothe ground, you widen the whole wa-ter system so the surface area islarge. Rain, particularly storms,comes down the swales, too. The wa-ter finds your widened areas, whichare free, and soaks in, and thuscharges your ground water instead ofgoing down the hill and off the proper-ty. In three or four years, you willhave 17 to 20 feet of fully chargedsoil. Your forest, just above yourswale, is alive and has access to thiswater. Your forest will be alive whenyour neighbor's ground water hasflowed away out of sight.

If you ever have the chance to de-sign a suburb in a place where thereis a semi-dry climate and storms,particularly summer storms, suddenrain rushes, this is how you do it: Yourun a hard-top road, swales, littlebridges, houses that are back to back,footpaths, down pipes. This wholesystem is swales, with double rowsof houses sitting between the swales. All the roof run-off is going into theswales, and all the road run-off is go-ing into the swales. There is no gut-tering, no curbs. The swales some-times pass under the roads.

An immense variety of treatment ispossible, such as little block steppingstones across swales, little rocksacross swales, little graveled areas,little ponds in swales, frogs croaking.You set your trees out along theswale edge, but not in front of the

house, not onthe sunnyside of the

houses. It can be a remarkable envi-ronment! The swales are probablynever less than two feet deep, verygently shoaled edges on them, greatplaces for children to run in thestorms and hop into them. Then whenthe storm ceases, the water, becauseyou have broadened the swale at plac-es, seeps away within a day or so.The swales will then contain wateronly in the over-deepened clay areas,the little ponds that we made.

This system exists nowhere that Iknow of except in the village projectat Davis, California. Here they sit ona plain near Sacramento, and becauseof swales the place is an oasis in adesert of disaster. Nothing quite likeDavis has ever happened in America,and is not likely to happen until we getout on the ground, 300 or 400 of us.

The trouble with America is thatthese things that people have been do-ing have been just with their ownhomes, keeping it to themselves. InDavis, you have the benefits of designorientation. A whole set of low-energy systems are demonstratedthere. More of your urban areasshould be permeable to rain so yourstreet trees would remain healthy.

Ordinarily these urban swales willend up nowhere--start nowhere andend up nowhere. However, if you dothink there are going to be very cat-astrophic rains, then you can lead theend of the swale out of the situationinto a more normal drainage system.But in moderate rainfalls, the swalecan hold it all. The efficiency of theabsorption in swales increases asthey age and as trees grow alongthem, because the trees penetrate thesubsurface and carry water down. Ithink Davis initially absorbed about40% of its water, then 85%, and now100%.

Now it is absorbing water from off-site into its swales. It collects run-offfrom off-site and gets rid of it on itssite. So that is very good. The olderthe swales get, and the more the treeroots penetrate down into the swale,the better they get rid of water.

These swales do not have to be re-newed. I think possibly if they de-cayed badly, you would probably have

"Swales have a particular application in urban areas."


Next scene: You have a dry hole?Just leave it dry. There are all sortsuses for dry holes. In dry climates,you can hop down in them and mulchthem, and they are shady, an extragood growing situation.

Or you can do something else. Whenyou see you are getting a fair amountof leakage, you can strew rich hay allaround the edges of your pond. Whenthe water turns green with algae, ifthere is a leak through cracks in theclay, the algae glue it up. You aregleying it, but with algae.

But in midsummer it dries out.Didn't work. So now we are gettingdown toward the final solution. We putgreen sappy material right across it,six inches thick. We gather the mow-ings from the golf course, and any-thing we can obtain. We pack it down.We chip green leaves and sappy mate-rial, second cut hay. We cover all thiswith sand or plastic or old carpets ora combination of all of those. Then itstarts to ferment. You can find outwhen it does, because it is slimy. Assoon as it goes slimy, you fill it withwater and it fills without any trouble,and will never leak again. It is calledgley. The only reason why it might notwork is if you didn't do it properly. Soyou then go at it again, and find thespots you didn't do properly, and do itproperly right there, because the restof it is permanent.

If it is a very big area and you havea very rich client, you run across itwith bentonite, which is a clay thatswells up to 14 times. You spread abit and roll it in hard, and then you fillit. That seals it. But it is costly. Thisis by far the most satisfactorysolution.

There are many solutions that plugsmall holes, such as a sheet of plas-tic, or concrete. But gley is the bestsolution. You can make a dam in agravel pit with it.

You would be lucky to dig a verydry hole, because usually it is on aslope. You can ordinarily get an entryout at slope level. Roofing it is easy.

Nice and sound-proof in there. There was a big one that a friend ofmine made. It should have worked, butit didn't He stuck in sides to it and

I will show you an unusual tech-nique, just throw this one in. You willdiscover these situations. Here is alittle house that looks like a graniteboulder. Its occupant is a rock freak. We have rock freaks in Australia,houses that just disappear in therocks, and they look like a rock. Allaround this great granitic dome thereis 40 feet of course sand, so good-bye water. You also have all sorts ofgranitic slabs and surfaces. So yourun chicken wire around your granite,and go around with some cement andsand, constructing gutters, and youlead them into tanks. We have done alot of this. Some of those graniteslabs are big. You bring the waterdown, and put your tank at the bot-tom. You have to be able to use youreyes. You look at that slab and say,"A roof! a roof! and it is uphill." Nokeyline is possible, but in these condi-tions building concrete works well.

Suppose you dig a little Earth damup on a hill. It rains. Nothing happens. It keeps on raining. Nothing happens. You have a dry hole. Bad luck!

A friend of mine had an open under-ground stream that ran like fury. Hehired contractors to dig a dam. Itshould have worked. But he went afoot too deep, and--glub. You can'tpredict these things.

Well, you now have two or threethings you can do. What we have uphere on the hillside is a big hole. Wehave a dry place. So we put a coupleof sills there, and raise a roof, andpour a floor. We are in business. Niceplace! Good barn, good storage, cheap!The only thing you have to make is aroof. It's a good place for cattle inwinter. Haul in your hay. Trap doorright up here, throw your hay down,wheel it out. Take advantage of havinga dry hole.

Now, change the scene: The holefills, either because you pump waterin, or there comes a rainstorm. So itis not a real dry hole. Stand by thebank and throw in three packages ofwater dynamite. Boom! It bumps thebank, and any cracks in rocks aresealed with great water pressure.

You might do it two or three times.That is fast, and often works.

to just chew them a bit, but it is not abig job. You could do it with a coupleof kids and a spade. No work repairingdrainpipes; no pipes; no gutters; nocurbs--cheap!

Swales can also be quite usefulgrowing situations. You might be ableto raise ginseng up here in the swales.Your swales are obviously ideal sitesfor certain useful plants that like thismoist, rich, highly mulched situation.Blueberries! You swale below a pineforest, grow blueberries in theswales. There are many techniquesyou can use with water in landscapes.

There are other good reasons forconstructing swales. In a forest,many leaves will arrive in that swale,and they rot quickly there. It is amoist site. Your little salamandersrun around in there. You can deliber-ately add to the leaves in the swale. It is a long composting system on site.Occasionally, you can take from theswale for the garden.

Swales greatly decrease the risk offorest fire because they collect a lotof fuel and rot it very quickly. Swalesmake for a far more moist forest thanexisted before. It is amazing how fewtrees you have to remove to run aswale in an existing forest. However,it is a good idea to swale a forest be-fore you plant it as a forest. Sometrees can stand in the swales.

Another reason for swales is thatyou are in an isolated place and thereis no chance that you are going to beable to go out with your Land Roverand bring in mulch material for yourgarden, you can swale out from yourgarden, and mulch into your swales.

Now you decide the sort of mulchyou bring in, because you plant treesabove the swale to give you the mulchyou want. We get alkaline mulch fromwestern cedar, acid mulch from oaks,and so on. So you treat your gardenfrom a continuing input from the ma-ture system, thus reversing the axi-om that maturity exploits immaturity.We make immaturity exploit maturi-ty, because maturity is exploitable. It is also a great accumulator. Leftalone, the forest will exploit the gar-den; but with us in control, the gardencan exploit the forest.


We take some of our excavationmaterial and make an island in ourlake. If we have fierce winds acrosswater, we make a barrier islands, sothat we have a quiet patch of water infront of it. When we put our island inthe lake, we have increased ourshoreline. We may, if it is a bad firesite, in an area where people keepgetting burned out every four years,put our client out here on a peninsulain the lake. We might do that for otherreasons, too. We give him a deck outthere and a little dinghy. Instead ofleaving all our shoreline as a gradualshelving system, we might grade inhere, making somewhat extensive,but constant-level marshes.

If we know that we are going to bedrawing quite a lot of water downfrom this, if we know that we mightpull four feet off it sometimes, thenbefore we make the main dam, wethrow up low dams across easilydammed sections that flood at highwater. In this way, even when theother water is four feet down, thesedams hold and preserve the shorelineflora. Many small animals that livealong the shore continue to have ref-uge. As the water rises again, it cov-ers the whole area.

What we have done in there is toplay around with the edge of the

turned it into an indoor auditorium.You can get in there with a rock bandand not annoy anybody.

Once you set the water systems,you also have set a lot of other sys-tems. Wherever possible, your fenc-ing and your access roads naturallyfollow your water systems, and canbe well integrated. Both assist thewater systems.

If you are wandering around with acurvilinear fence, you run a series ofapproximate short fences, becausethe only fence you can build is astraight fence. So your fences, andyour tracks, your on-farm tracks, allfollow that system. Then, if you dothat, your animal tracks turn intokeyline tracks because they follow thefences, and animals will also havebeneficial effects on run-off. If youdon't do that, then your animals al-ways walk anti-keyline. They alwayswalk ridge down to valley, and ani-mals can become a major erosive in-fluence. If you set your fences valleyto slope, your animals walk yourfences, and all their tracks will key-line where you can't get.

Everything follows from that. Yourforests follow. Your forests growabove those channels. They are them-selves very water-conserving and in-sure steady water-flow systems.

Your forests that are of high value,your constructed forests, are belowthose lines. You can irrigate these.There are special sets of trees thatmay go on the ridges, very hardytrees that don't need irrigation. Youwill need to determine for your areaits ridge-top planting set of hardy,drought-proof trees.

So far, we have only been talkingabout the water characteristics ofyour system. I would like to look moreclosely now at any one dam that webuild, and see what structures weneed within it to have a biological in-put into the dam. There are only aboutthree or four things we would need todo. Say that we put in a six foot val-ley dam for a lake. We pegged it allout before, so we knew exactly wherethat shoreline would be, and we mayhave logged it out before we built thedam.

catchment, make shallows and bar-riers and islands--all sorts of usefulthings. You can put little pillared cot-tages out on those islands, little con-templative places, quiet spots, littleretreats. You can put little steppingstones out to those places. We havedone that.

Put in some underwater stones. Thismakes it a very lively place. Waterbirds nest on those islands. They arefox-free, except in winter, when theyare not nesting. The shelving along theedges gives a very broad plantingspectrum. You can align those shelvesat different levels, specifically forcertain plants, eighteen inches tothree feet for wild rice. You can makemarshes by grading off, away fromthe edge of the dam. Those marshescome out of little low mud walls, sothat they marsh up.

If your dam fails, you still haveyour marsh for arrowheads and otherduck fodder. If you do all that first,then flood the situation, you havecreated something that looks verygood.

When you draw off water, your is-land sticks out a bit higher. Your shal-lows are mud-dammed, almost at wa-ter level, so that the main waterrises over them a bit, going throughthem in pipes near the surface, and

Structuring a biological dam.


hills and mountains because it is a ro-mantic place where they can look outon the world down below. They wantto be up there. You can use largershelves to get people down a little be-low the ridge. You can get water tothem from the saddle dam above. Youcan also use shelves for their garden.

Some of their wastes can add tothat system. You can run off water toorchards further down. Then whenyou get down deep here into thesevalley systems, you can create wetforests, we will call them, that willblock fire out, keep it from running upslope easily.

You have water control on slope,and you have fire control on slope.Get your clients to build their storageunits up high, units that themselvesdo not use water, or use very littlewater--the garages and the barns andthe workshops. We don't have to sup-ply these buildings with water, but

when it falls, your little mud wallscome out and hold the shallows. Youdon't bother about sub-surface damswhere you have constant level pro-ductive water. Your larger fish can'tget into some places that are too shal-low and too weedy. They provide ref-uge for quite a lot of fry. We intend tomake a biologically active system outof our water storages.

What we are giving you is classicsolutions, ideas that you will have toadapt to individual circumstances.

Slopes give us a very great advan-tage, and I pay a lot of attention toslopes, to how a system can be laidout on slopes. When we have thisgravitational advantage, it is possibleto do all sorts of things.

This is a section of a ridge, andthere is a ridge running along. Wecould put a little saddle dam here, andit would collect water from all aroundthe higher area. People often go to

Adapted from Permaculture Two, by Bill Mollison. ©Figures 2.6, 2.7; pps 17 & 19, by Andrew Jeeves.

their roofs can supply very cheaptank water. Put all tanks up on theslope above house roof level, if youcan get them up there. You never fill atank from a house roof, if you canavoid doing so. Of course, on the otherhand, a friendly neighbor might dothat, add a tank to his roof for thebenefit of somebody further down hill. That can happen. There might be somecases where we supply them with wa-ter better than they could supplythemselves.

The diversion drain falls to the sad-dle; the road probably falls out to theslope; the garden should fall out fromthe saddle, so the water comes downfrom the saddle to the garden. So youmust decide which inclination you givethese various shelves as you workdown the slope. It is obvious that ifwe can get water doing its work downslope and across slope, we are in agood position.

"Slopes give us a very great advantage."


trees that are high water demanding.You put the really drought resistantspecies up here. It has a secondaryeffect, too. Many of those drought re-sistant species are very good mulchproviders. If you go high on the slopeand put in tamarisks, and some of thepines that grow on the ridges, you geta good mulch layer to bring down hill.

After a few years, you can let yourirrigation system decay, becauseyour trees are established and proba-bly don't need much water, or you cankeep some of these maintained, de-pending upon conditions.

Arrange to have barn and loadscoming into the barn on a level abovethe house. Have your animal accom-modations up here. The wastes arethrown out here and rolled down toyour annual garden system below.Your banks that are collecting waterfrom the roof of your barn will pro-vide a gravity flow system for thehouse and garden below.

Tanks themselves can be usefulstructurally. You can bury them to getthem out of the way, or build overthem; but you can also use them asquite bold structures. Often we trellisoff them so that in summer you can besitting under a trellis shade with acentral ivy-covered tank that givesyou a real cool place, real nice for hotclimates.

Tanks can be structurally integratedinto barns. In some areas, large tankscan be the base of the buildings. Build-ings placed high on the slope can taketanks below them. The water will beused on lower areas, to which it runsdown by gravity flow.

The intervals between these littleplatforms are those that would nor-mally separate trees, squashed up abit, because the advantage of slope is

that tree crowns stack much better to-wards the light. You will get a lotmore trees on a steep slope than youwill get on flat land. Dribbles of watercome down these drains, gathering inthese pans that are absorbing over-flow. It is, again, a small scale sys-tem. You can't run it on a very largescale, and you will have to interruptit with planting bands. It is particu-larly effective in very rocky countrythat you would normally not use fororchards.

A group of five or six of us did afairly large orchard in three days ona little system like this. We cut littleflats in the slope, which we put a treeon, and we had a little water rollaround it, soaking in. When it over-flows, it comes down and soaks in.

Place your narrow leafed fruittrees here, and broader leafed spe-cies down there. There are exceptionsto that. The fig is an exception. Weput the fig higher because it is farmore drought resistant. There are afew, but not many, narrow leafed

For reasons I could never fathom,you often see hot water or hot aircollection systems on the roof. In lev-el country, the good place for a hotwater collector is below the sill level,so the thing thermo-siphons inside thesystem. You can clean it easily.

There is not much more chance of itbeing broken than the window itself. And it is low. Hot air systems alsocome down slope. I have friends whohave set up large collectors on slopein front of their house, and bring hotair in low. Your hot air systemsshould go down slope, and low. Yourwater systems go up and run around.

You use all these techniques onslope. You must think it out, thinkwhich way the road will slant and forwhat reasons, and which way the gar-dens will slant, where your diversiondrains must go in, what must comeout, and so on.

If our slope is not an extreme slope,we can put a pond right here in frontof the house. That is a great advan-tage. It is also a fire barrier, and it isa light reflector; it also makes for apleasant environment. I think here wemight attach glasshouses. We shouldexamine each site to see if wecouldn't also put a productive pondjust in front of the attached glass-house. The pond will provide additionalheat buffering. It has the ability to ab-sorb all but 15% of summer sunlight,while absorbing very little wintersunlight, and reflecting most of thewinter sunlight into the living situa-tion. A pond is a beautiful, automatic,self-regulating heating surface.

Where you can't get ponds, and youstill want the effect of low winterlight bounced up into the house, youcan use white gravel, and highly re-flective surfaces there. Snow isexcellent!

On stony and steep slopes whereyou can't possibly run shelves alongthem, not even shallow shelves, yougo to very small scale systems.

Here is a slope that we will describeas net and pan. You set up very shal-low guide lines for drainage. You canhand cut the drains. You clear theslope of vegetation at the junctions,and make little flat planting platforms.

"A pond is a beautiful, automatic,self-regulating, heating surface."

A net and pan slope.


One of the advantages of locatingchickens above the garden site is thatthe chickens will provide mulch wastefor your garden, which can be easilybrought down. That mulch will be al-ready shredded. Chickens are shred-ding machines, and they also removethe seeds. So by the time your mulchhas come to your garden it has re-ceived added nutrient, the weed seedshave been removed, and it isshredded.

It is mainly used right in the garden.You can also take it through a watersystem below the garden again, orwithin the garden. The idea is to stripthe nutrients out the way down, get-ting a product for it. In this kind ofsystem, your nutrients are fallingdown. You use your slope. How oftenyou go to places and see all of thiscompletely in reverse, and people areworking hard because of that, pushingwheelbarrows uphill and carryingmulch uphill, carrying water uphill.

On slopes, fire will always traveluphill fast. Water, roads, Earth walls,stone walls, and short grazing sys-tems toward the downhill sector areall fire defenses. Only in rare circum-stances do you need to be really wor-ried about hot downhill fires.

The way that we set up all thesesystems also suits fire control. A damwith an Earth bank is good fire con-trol. A high access road is also goodfire control. So once you get peoplecorrectly placed on the slope, and theelements correctly placed aroundthem, you again find that you havedone a lot more for other conditions,such as fire safety, than you hadoriginally planned.

You might have planned that damjust for biological production. Itworks also as a fire barrier. Youmight not have planned for it to workfor fire except to provide water. Youwill find it has high radiation defensebecause of its Earth wall, and so on.

Start to get things right and theyget real right. That is the reason weput that rain forest in right at thebase of the slope in the valleys.

In steep valleys low down, verysteep valleys that you are not goingto get to work in, and in which youdon't put dams, you can, neverthe-less, bring small drains out of thecreek. They are usually hand made, orlight machine herringbone systemsthat pull water out of the creek anddrop it down the banks. You can set uprain forests very fast if you can sat-urate that valley with ferns andmosses. Once your rain forest is es-tablished, it becomes self-perpetuating. It holds its own water.Again, you can let those little diver-sion systems decay. So try to getyour major advantages out of slope;don't let a slope go without using it.

Engineers generally want to dam avalley, put in a monstrous pond. Thatis their solution. Yet we have beenable to set up these high water gravi-ty flow systems without any troubleat all. Electrical pumps are one of thefirst things to go in a fire. A charac-teristic of fire on site is that youhave no water unless you have gravi-ty flow.

We will leave the hills now and lookat some house situations on very flatlands. We will move out into theplains--300 acres, two foot drop.

There is no way out here that wecan get all the advantages we had onthe hills. I will describe a site planthat we designed. You could see allover that country for miles. Here,water is always stored below groundin tanks.

When I arrived on the scene, the ex-cavating had already been done. TheEarth was piled in four great heapsaround the edges of the hole. That's anormal situation. It wasn't very aes-thetic, not very pleasing. I said,"Where will we put the house?"

For a while, it didn't look veryhopeful.

We first determined the directionsfrom which summer cooling windswould be coming in, winter coldwinds, and summer hot winds. In anywesterly belt, the cold winds comefrom off sun, while hot winds comefrom on sun, from middle interior.

Depending on which side the conti-nent lies, they will come from theNortheast or the Northwest. In yourcase, here in New England, hot windscome from the Southwest. Coolingwinds will come in at about 45 de-grees from the coastal summer winds.For each site, that set of characteris-tics is very easily determined. Anyold timer will tell you. For the site it-self, you then look for any deflectionof that system.

So we brought the man back in, andgot him to reorganize his Earth. Welocated his house so that it would haveall the advantages of pond reflection,be sheltered from the south wester-lies and from the hot winds, whichwould have to pass across water andthrough vegetation, because we plant-ed the banks. For the cooling winds,we have a good brisk circulation goingby Earth banks around the whole sys-tem. We don't have any noise on thatsite. It is very private.

So what I want to say about flatlands is that, rather than paying somuch attention to the water and watersurface, let us have a look at theEarth we move, at what we can dowith Earth bank.

The fastest way to run a windbreakis to grade up Earth bank and swale.Rise a four to six foot Earth bank and

"Arrange to have barns on a level above the house"


start your planting work. The swaleworks perfectly well. The fall herewas very minute across the site.

We did a diversion off our roadway.The water came in and around thepond and went out again. Part of theannual garden is water garden. Accessfrom the living area to workshops andvehicle areas comes in through thebank.

We planned for a single story housesurrounded by Earth bank, and a tallbarn with water tank. That is the so-lution to the water problem in flatlands. You have to make your slopes,throw up your roofs, and throw upyour tanks, while you keep your houselow. Or, you can put up a high dwell-ing, but these upper rooms must bebedrooms, and the lower rooms, yourservice rooms. In that case, the houseroof also becomes of uses as a watercollector. That is an elegant site now,a highly admired site.

Don't be frightened to use Earth

bank in flat landscapes. You can usewater effectively for cooling. Flat ar-eas are often hot. In general, you canuse Earth banks in two ways. Theygive you a racing start in windbreaks;and they provide a very good live-stock shelter with quick growingplantings on top. Those plants can bethings like pampas grass and bamboos. Earth banks are excellent radiationshields from fire, and they will de-crease noise, particularly trafficnoise.

There is one main rule to follow. From the crown of the road to the topof the Earth bank, we want to deflectin a straight line so that we clear theroof of the house. Vegetation does notdo a lot for noise reduction unless youcan get a hundred meters of it. Ittakes a lot of vegetation to absorbnoise. Street noise is just like that. Awell-insulated house with an Earthbank protection can be near a fairlynoisy system and be quite quiet.

Achieving privacy and insulationagainst noise can really be a problemin some flat areas.

In flat land, you often find fairlyeroded gullies with little steep banks. I will tell you of another real situa-tion. It was a flat site, eroded gully.There is only one place to build hereto get away from fairly noisy condi-tions. The client had made a damacross the gully with provision fordraining it. What we did was use abackhoe to dig a cave under the housesite. He built his house over the top of

this cave. The cave extended beyondthe house at both ends. It opened outto the pond at water level. We justtrellised the top of it there.

"We don't haveany noise onthat site. It is

very private."


Then at the other end of our cave,we glassed the top of it, making it in-tegral with the house structure. Itwas very cheap to do, and veryquickly done, because it was an allu-vial plain. So he now has an under-ground glass house in which we alsomade a shower.

He is proposing to grow bananasthere. The cave end next to the pondis his cold cave. So he has good heatcontrol. He can bring heat up throughthe ducts anywhere within the struc-ture. The cool end of the cave is goodfor storage of root vegetables.

The whole thing opens out on thedeck above, under the trellis, over-looking the water. His cave is dry as achip inside. It is about a foot above thedam level. It is a beautiful place in thesummer time, down, out of every-body's sight, by your own little lake,on your own deck, which you enterthrough your cave.

So in flatlands, you can do excava-tion on site in all sorts of ways.

We had another site, an excellentwild site, with a lot of excellent treesand other growth. But it was a verybad site for water. After a rain, youcould see little twigs and leaves upagainst things. We designed a below-grade Earth tank, a lake. There was alot of excavated dirt with which wemade a peninsula into the water, about9 feet above grade level.

We put his house, which was twostory, up on this high peninsula. Thisis a high fire frequency site, with afire about every fifth or eighth year.So we put the client on this peninsula.We got him up high enough so thatfrom the second story he has a goodview of the mountains. Surrounded onthree sides by water, he has all theadvantages of light reflection. As heis a good fisherman, we put fish in hispond.

We ran two very low Earth banks todeflect the down-flow of floodingrains away from the garden site. Wedirected all the water from off siteinto the dam site. When this water isflowing across landscape, it brings alot of silt and mulch. These Earthbanks we have thrown up accumulateleaf and silt that we transfer asmulch to the garden. That works verywell. It is good mulching material andvery cheap.

An enormous amount of water di-verts through these Earth banks,flushing out the lake. Water divertsfrom the garden at the same time thatsilt and mulching materials deposit atthe outside of the garden wall. Theflotsam stops here and defends thedam from silting up.

The client has a couple of hundredacres. We restricted this whole thingto about two acres. He only wanted asmall garden. He is a very good gar-

dener. He is also the director of parksand gardens in Melbourne, and a land-scape architect. He hired me to fixthis place up.

This man wanted a windmill, a rath-er odd thing with all this water com-ing down across the site. Still, hewanted a windmill. He got a windmill. He was sort of fanatic aboutwindmills.

I pointed out to him, though, that wecould at any time raise the Earth bankwith a tank in it, and we could runwater off his roof for him. He knowsthat. He just wanted a windmill. Heliked it. He sits and looks out of hiswindow at his windmill.

His sole purpose in choosing a twostory house was that he wanted to seemountains, which were on the shadeside. So he had to get up above thetrees. It gets very hot there in sum-mer. We gave him a shaded veranda onhis second story where he can sit andlook at the mountains in the summer-time. This gets him up above thetrees, rather than clearing trees toobtain a view. A two-story house is avery efficient structure forinsulation.

Here are three totally different so-lutions to flatland situations. One so-lution defends from noise, and doessomething for privacy and cooling.The second one deals with a situationnear a gully in a flatland. We gave theclient an interesting house with lowheat and a cool place to go in the sum-mer. In this last situation, we gaveour client a very sophisticated sys-tem of water control, plus a mulchcollecting system. I can't tell you howto deal with flatlands in any generalway. Just study the flora and seewhat your client wants, and what theproblems are, whether privacy,noise, water, whatever. You can buildup a whole set of solutions, and youhave plenty with which to do it.

* For more precise definitions of theterms used in the Keyline Method, werecommend a careful reading of thelatest edition of Water for EveryFarm… by P. A. Yeomans, availablefrom Yankee Permaculture.

"He built his house overthe top of this cave."

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