Saving Water and Nutrient with Swales: Weedy’s Garden Walkabout | Efficient Swales in Weedy’s Garden

This video is sponsored by theweedygarden.com G'day everybody it's Weedy here again in the Weedy Jungle. I'm going to show you the swales and update you on the swales that I made. Remember this series of swale videos this three-part series where Jeff Lord and my permaculture teacher showed me and you how to build swales. Well we got them all built in a day. I'm going to tell some of my friends and I would say it's one of the best things I've done here in the Weedy Garden. We rely on each other as we are one. You notice how quiet it is now because the temperature has cooled down here up in the Weedy Garden so the cicadas they're not making as much noise at all. So welcome back to a bit of peace and quiet here in the Weedy Garden and just so you know I don't use worm castings and my worms I don't use down here in the swales. I use that only up in my vegetable garden but I'll show you my vegetable garden later but I use camomile and sometimes there's nice little mushrooms that come in the journey from next door and land right on the swales here. So in this video I'm going to explain to you a little bit more about what a swale is and how they're so beneficial for my garden up here on the hill and I'll tell you how I feed the trees in my swales. So welcome to another episode of Weedy's Garden Walkabout. A little series I'm doing which is a walkabout from one end of my garden to the other and I haven't come very far from this end actually but let's go on this journey about swales. I want to show you my swales but I want to try and help you understand what a swale is. If you can look at this terrain I'm standing on the side of a hill you can see it's sloping down here right if I didn't have the swales so when it rained you know what's going to happen all that water is just going to hit the ground and it's going to flow downhill. What we did is we did some digging and what we do is we get this level line first of all that's really important but you can see how I did that on the video about how I make it this is not a video about how to make swales this is a video to show you how well swales are working. So this trench all along here that's level and that's on contour if you don't know what that means then just look at that video series and so what happens now is the water comes down the hill and it falls into this ditch and this bankman here stops it because we've dug out this soil here and put that topsoil because this is all topsoil and we dug down into the topsoil and we put that topsoil on top of the topsoil that's already there so we've doubled the we've doubled the height of the topsoil and what happens when it rains the water comes down and hits this trench the water stops flowing down the hill guys it gets stopped in the swales right and that's the good thing because then that slows down the water and the water then instead of running down the hill it goes in here and then it sinks down underneath the mound and because you have these trees on top of the mound the roots are just going down feeding on all that water is slowly going past the roots and another good thing with the swales is that it's also can stop your nutrients flowing away down the hill and what i mean by that is every year or so i feed my swales i feed my plants and like i said before i feed them with wood chips or cow manure or chicken manure or even if it's a chop and drop situation what i mean by chop and drop is like chop and drop means when you you've got see i've got a mango tree here all right it's a little thai mango tree a thai dwarf species and this one here this is a pigeon pea pigeon pea is a nitrogen fixer it's a a tree that grows really quickly it grows so quickly i chop it like i've just chopped it you can see all these little new shoots coming out here that's the new shoots that are coming from from what i've chopped off earlier which is all this and so instead of instead of putting wood chips on i use the natural system so i've got my pigeon pea producing my wood chips and i don't have a wood chipper but i've got the fungus and the fungus is breaking down my my my wood here so that's called chop and drop and so this tree here is really only here to feed this tree while it's growing up and to shade it from the harsh sun in the summertime when it was little but also its roots grow down into the swales and the roots will grow down deep into the soil looking for that water and when that one is chopped out and dies then the roots of that one will decompose and this little one will find a nice little cavity a nice already made path down to the water so there's a few reasons why you have the support trees that's why they're called support trees but anything chopping and dropping is like weeds and just these weeds i can't eat any of this some of this in a lot of swales i've got i've got food in the swales everywhere but this is a weed so if i'm ever just weeding in the weeder garden i put it around my fruit trees and eventually that'll be what the fruit tree is gonna eat and eventually that's what i'll eat when i eat the mango from my mango tree what i think is really cool is that not so long ago this was just a bare hill full of weeds and full of grass and with a little bit of human care and nurturing i've turned this into a little micro ecosystem full of micro ecosystems and each one's a little delight especially like this one here i was just talking about chopping and dropping and i noticed i've got some yummy mint growing over there in my swales i've got some mangoes coming on i've got them protected because the bush turkey and other birds like to eat them and i like to eat them and so i've done that and i've got my beehive right beside so any day now i'm gonna have a mango salad with a little bit of mint on top and some honey on top and i sit under the shade and i'm gonna eat that and it's just gonna bring me so much joy because it's something that i created from a dream that i had and the dream is wanting to live a nice life where you're living more in harmony with with the cycles of life the cycles of nature eating food that's grown organically knowing that it's good for your body it's good for your mind and when your body and your mind's all working well you've got souls spirits good all that so when i feed the tree and it's important to note when i feed the tree or in other words put nutrients or chop and drop on the swales i put it on the uphill side of the swale so when it rains the nutrients they're all kind of falling down in and they're going to sink down underneath the swale i don't put anything on the back end of the swale because when it rains the only good that's going to do is the swale down there it's going to catch the it's going to catch that you see so when i'm feeding with cow manure or wood chips or chicken manure i just put it on this side of the tree so the swale is going to help you retain a lot more of the water that's falling from the sky okay so for those of you who still don't understand the concept of chopping and dropping watch this and what you'll need is a pair of these okay they're good for the new ones and then you'll need a bit bigger ones for the bigger ones and then you'll need a bigger bigger one for the bigger bigger ones right i'm sure you understand i was lucky to find these on theweedygarden.com by the way and they've got lots more as well so let's start with this i like to do a little bit by a little bit you know kind of just work into what's going on i don't want to chop the whole tree because i kind of like this like shady area that it's creating on the back end of the swales but i'm having to bend down every time i walk through now so i'll just take off this side see that's a chop and that's the drop so we're getting towards the end here and what i do is just work my way in oh time for the big one see this will just be the fungus is there down there going hey guys look what's come in front door it's almost like when you order pizza or something so someone knocks on the door that's just what happened to the mycelium down there okay that one looks a bit funny sticking up by itself so i'll tell you that okay chop it up a little bit the more you chop it up the better but the fungus will take care of it eventually just pick it up put it down underneath the avocado tree so that's better so now that is supporting my avocado tree and i'll pull out a bit of grass here from the avocado tree and i'll give it to that little support tree just as a little thank you okay so it's kind of like learning by doing not being afraid to make mistakes so i hope you watch the next video thanks for watching this one and um we'll take a little tour a little further up the swale shall we on the next video hope you enjoyed this one have a nice day and i'll catch you later