Creating Food Forest with this Technique on my Desert farm

Welcome. Today we are talking swales. How to kick back the desert from taking over, how to spread water, making an abundance on your farm, homestead, or wherever you find yourself. This technique isn't for every farm, but most farms can benefit. In a place like here where I have 9 to 13 inches, it is key to having this system. Today we're going to go over the installation, the management, and the cost of such a system, and how you can actually do it. Very simple and very cost effective. Let's go. What is a swale and why are we doing one? So we have here a hillside like we do. Normally when it rains, water will come down and very little water can infiltrate the ground. And so in order to allow more time to infiltrate, what we do is build a ditch and that material we excavate from the hill, we put on top. When we get big rain events, it has to fill up the swale before water can continue going downhill. And then we keep building more of these and so we keep collecting water. What that does, water will infiltrate slowly and it'll create a lens of water underneath. And when we plant our trees, they'll be able to send roots into this lens. And so they will be drought-proof year-round even if it doesn't rain. We get 9 to 13 inches of rain and in order for trees to survive, a system like this is crucial because we'll get a lot of rain at one event. We can have a thunderstorm drop an inch or two at one time and instead of that mostly going away, it's able to infiltrate into the ground and restore it for use later. So we are here starting our food forest. We're with Bob and we are taking level for our swales. So we're going to put these swales on contour. This is the first start and then I'm going to plant my fruit trees at 15 feet spacing on top of that and then we'll plant much more. I got the game fencing going up so deer cannot get to these hopefully here soon. I'm super excited this is the start of a major permaculture project here on the farm. So what are we doing here Bob? Okay so every 15 feet I put a flag on contour. See the shape this swale will take. The first step with swales is setting your grade and you can choose to either have an angled swale so that the water runs at a one two percent slope or you can have them on contour. With these ones I decided to just put them on contour. I don't have to move water that great of a distance. To measure the swales we used a simple laser level. That's all that's needed and every 15 feet or so we put a flag into the ground. Since these swales weren't that long it wasn't worth bringing in a bulldozer for this job so I was able to rent an excavator for the weekend. Bob and I measured five swales and just even in that small section we had over a thousand feet of swales and I ended up planting over 150 fruit trees into these swales. When using an excavator it's really important to be on contour the entire time and it's easy as you're moving the tracks to lose your bearing and so to get a more accurate swale what I did was running spray paint between each flag so then I could remove the flags and not have them get damaged and then I was able to line it up perfectly as I went with the excavator. So just a little bit of planning on that made a big difference and is able to dig these fairly quickly. Overall to dig over a thousand feet of swale I used the excavator for about five hours so not not too bad this is just one day's worth of rental get all this done. So here I am digging the swales I am almost done going a lot faster than I thought with this mini excavator so we're gonna plant 80 fruit trees today with an auger it's gonna be pretty quick it's the fastest way to plant as many trees and you need equipment if you want to do it quick enough and these swales I mean they could have been dug by hand it would have taken a lifetime so you know we got to bless the fossil fuel energy while we have it. So I'm going to finish spray painting my swales because I am doing this by myself and I don't have somebody to guide me I need to go where all the flags that we stake the level are and then connect them with a line and once we do that then it's easy for me to dig by myself and I know exactly where the level is. I am giving for the first time a $1,500 permaculture course completely free what you learn in this course how to do homesteading how to plan your homestead how to utilize resources all completely free we'll have a link down below in the school community we will see you there. Here is a swale I dug and what I'll do is I'll come back with the excavator and trample over what I've dug and it just gives it a nice bedding and protection as water fills up into the swale and then we're going to plant the trees into basically where the tire marks are on the downside so as this swale fills up with water it'll percolate down in here and then this I'm going to plant with seed cover crop maybe I'm going to do like a cover crop actually this year and within the trees and here on my swale this one has is one I have yet to finish so it needs to be compacted up here and once I do that then it'll get smoothed out strengthening the swale and we got the flags they're hard to see but you got the flag so I have to connect to the flag each flag to each other with a marker so I know where to dig properly when I'm by myself. As my Mexican friends say a trabajar muchachos time to work let's go what saved me is I was able to borrow a skid steer with an auger that really helped to speed things up because we had so many trees to plant and originally I didn't even intend to do this swale project but I had ordered trees the year before and they never confirmed the order until they were about to ship it so I thought I wasn't going to be able to plant them this year so the owner of the nursery called me a week before he shipped it and then I went into overdrive so it goes to show you can get a swale project done in a weekend if you know what you're doing and you the right equipment having that skid steer we're able to make all 150 holes within an hour and then with two three people we were able to get it all planted out within four hours so basically a swale project definitely recommend this is something not very hard to do and if you can do it yourself because if somebody's charging you this could be a ten thousand dollar project versus if you piecemeal it and do it all together it really saves you on that all right so we are ready to start planting the food forest the swales are done it's been a massive undertaking I have two really good friends Michael and Julia gonna help me plant I'm gonna keep running the skid steer and keep digging because we're gonna run out of daylight and we got a lot of trees to plant over probably a hundred at this point so yeah let's get to it so this is what it's gonna look like here this peach is already blooming this is why I had to get these into the ground this swale project turned out better than I hoped we were able to keep pretty much all the trees alive and was able to irrigate even more grass as the water filled up was able to create channels this was a drought year and the water ran out around mid-summer and all the grass was able to cut twice after that without irrigating and which never happens really so all the water is underground being stored accessible to the trees and the grass this was a test project for the bigger scale the farm the 20 acres that I have under game fencing now so I will be working with this exact same model probably on grade just like I did here but increases spacing between the swales as we do the larger farm this coming fall spring and as I get ready to plant hundreds if not thousands of trees in these swales swales are magic tool for farms like mine where water is an issue and you have to store it and having a nice grade and slope means I can move and store the water as I need swales are the way to fight off the desert all right let's talk about cost how much did these swales cost me we're looking at $600 I spent on the excavator rental for the weekend with an eight hour cost and I really only ended up using five hours I also have a lot of excavator experience so I can go pretty quickly and then I put in $1,500 worth of trees that I ordered bulk but here's the thing I ordered double and then sold those so I was able to have a zero cost in my fruit trees so with that being said I wanted to make sure even though the sales system works I knew this was a drought year and my irrigation was going to get shut off and I didn't have full faith in the root system of the trees this year one going down so I put in drip tape and all that expense was less than I want to say 200 bucks but so for under a thousand dollars I was able to put in this whole entire swale system over 150 different fruit trees and I got a lot of bushes that I was able to get from neighbors and things like that for free so over a thousand feet of swale for under a dollar per linear foot great deal all right so we are here at fall time I'm going to show you the swales I'm super impressed with how everything turned out this season super intense hot summer the trees survived I did add a drip system to these trees so a little drip emitter and I was able to tap water from one of my springs to keep the moisture I honestly don't think that was necessary but it was just redundancy throughout the season I dug around below the swales and they're full of moisture so it did do its job here this is such a good technique I'm going to do it for the rest of the farm we're about to do thousands and thousands of feet over in the main part of the farm now copying this exact same model the only difference we're going to do is increase the space in between the swales so we can run livestock in between with electric fencing and here you have it this is a baby apricot I planted from seed a year ago and I transplanted when I did the swales 15 feet spacing is what I put my trees on here you have a peach a little hazelnut down here hybrid from Mark Shepard via Jake Tekif at Cedar Springs Farms we did a farm tour of his place so yeah I have apricots and peaches up on the top rows and then down below I have my pears and apples back there's all going to be at 20 acres of game fencing that's all going to be swelled out with fruit trees so we're getting ready for that that project should be starting here in the next couple weeks and we'll do a separate video on that and here you have an apricot with comfrey with a swale behind it and here I did elderberry I planted more on this top row a lot of mixing I got comfrey for chop and drop got a named variety of blackberry here that is self-erect so you keep it on trellis and it works great you get a lot of food out of here more peaches plum no plums actually I got to work on that I have a section for plums but we have here you can see comfrey these are cover crop of peas adding nitrogen another blackberry more peas everywhere intermixed here and then an apricot with peas growing the side of it overall this is a great project one weekend to set up and not that much maintenance to keep going I'm excited to do this for the rest of the farm it's really fantastic it's going to be able to kick the desert back stop the desertification happening here and spread the water I do have water and it's about managing it correctly to where we can revert back the desert produce food out of this with just quick and effective system known as a swale hope you guys enjoyed today's video don't forget to like and subscribe and we'll see you on the next one BAM!