Thank you for this video! It was good to see the plant succession, and also to know how long it took the backhoe to dig. Do the bottom of the swales generally stay free of plants? They looked pretty clear. Thank you!
Thanks for watching! The bottom of the swales do not stay free of plants. However, its hard for anything to get going strong because when they fill up it usually drowns the plants. There is some things growing permanently there now though it seems. A persimmon tree sprang up in one. Persimmons don't mind wet feet, it boggles my mind. Some grasses are going in some of them as well that seems to be able to cope with being underwater for a week or more. It's definitely not bare anymore, in most spots. There are some spots still just clay in the bottoms. Great question!
That is absolutely amazing. I have been playing around with the idea of swales on our property. I love that you shared all this info and showed the progression.
This is a nice beginning to see shaping up for additional trees like in acreage on a scale of this size, and larger. Trees as you are doing is so necessary. Swales too., as these invite normal wild carrots, with successive other seasonal good weeds. This is good to have to recreate what everyone ultimately takes away. Trees. Willows will solve some of this, as well as Pumpkin Ash, and White Ash.
Tasmania Australia.. South West of Geeveston Tasmania.. If you have the legs to carry you? Go check out the trees. I have also travelled the world and found Tasmania.
@1:27 a rooting hormone like indolebutyric acid (IBA) added before/during planting could have improved tree survival. of course, quick planting would have improved survival rates too.
Good stuff mister. At the end of video: I thought that was a weird drone with long tail. It's a camera on a long pole? Well that's one way to do it.. lol
If you had seeded the swales and berms with cover crops (preferably nitrogen fixers) the weeds would have had competition. At least mulching the berms would have prevented some of the weeds. The wild carrot came because the uncovered soil compacted and the wild carrot came to fix that. Mulching or cover cropping could have prevented the compaction.
The berms were cover cropped and mulched. I talked about what we used to do that with. The Queen Anne's lace gives the appearance that the berms are compacted, but they aren't. So why do they appear? Well, the pasture itself IS compacted from years of haying probably or overgrazing. So the Queen Annes' Lace seeds are lying there already, waiting to germinate and if that pasture is not mowed they will grow, doing their job to de-compact. I have not mowed that pasture this season and it is full of QAL. So the QAL seed that was there was able to grow to maturity in our berms along with the other dormant seeds that were able to also grow due to the disturbance. It's all groundcover and it's all biomass so it benefits the system. We have also observed that the woody remnants of the tall weeds actually insulated the young trees during the winter from wind, cold and deer browse, performing a beneficial role which we had not expected. Thanks for the comment!
I did do a chop and drop early in the progression while the weeds were small but after time went by I could not keep up with them and they got way ahead of me and I had to surrender to them. What I learned from the process was to let nature dictate what she wants to do instead of trying to micro-manage the entire evolution and although I couldn't see it, in the beginning the natural succession was better than what my own thoughts were telling me to do. I was trying to be "tidy" but the weeds were not harmful in any way to what we had planted. All the cover crops came through unadulterated and the weeds even benefitted the trees. Great question!
I wish people would learn what a weed is. We use the term 'weeds' for different types of plants. The definition of a weed is "a plant growing where it isn't wanted". I didn't see any weeds in this video.
@@PerimeterPermaculture I have a habit of saying weeds a lot too. I wish we could break the habit as a society. Americans spend $ billions annually to get rid of plants simply because others call them weeds. Its the same thing with growing a garden. People think they need to kill the "weeds" and add fertilizers and other chemicals. Plants grow the healthiest when they grow among other plants and no fertilizers added. Commercial farmers need fertilizers because they kill the life in the soil. Potted plants need fertilizers because potting soil is sterile. But if you are growing vegetables in the ground, its best just to leave the soil and other plants alone. Everyone complains about my garden because I don't till, mow, fertilize or weed it. But my vegetables come out better better tasting and more nutritious than any other locally grown vegetables.
I would have sprayed the berms with compost teas so I would have good soil biology. (See Dr Elaine Ingham.) If you had time to raise them, worm castings at every tree transplant would have helped. And also a reduction in the time delayed transplanting of trees would lowered stress dramatically. Curious, no ponds for overflow. Not sure of the length of your tree roots. You need to plant cover crops and berm vegetation with deep roots to break up soil compaction. If you have a cover crop with deep roots and then kill it, you will have tremendous amounts of Organic Matter (OM) in your soil. Every 1% increase in OM allows your soil to hold an extra 20,000 gallons or so of rainfall per acre. 2/3rds of all OM comes from roots so cover crops are great. And deep roots aerate the soil to allow your soil biology the space it needs to thrive. A weed patch usually has almost no biology apart from bacteria. Then along comes the protozoa and nematodes and earthworms which feed on the lower forms of life.Their castings make nutrients available to your plants. The bacteria ate all the soil nutrients so there was nothing left for your plants to eat until the rest of the soil biology showed up through compost, compost tea and worm castings. I am now living one state over from you. I want to move out into the country and to start a garden. Best of luck. Think I will subscribe to see how things turn out. Bye.
Berms aren't compacted that's pretty much the point in making them. There wasn't any soil, really, in this pasture, mostly just clay. Fescue seems to grow in any conditions and is probably the reason why it has supplanted the native prairie grasses. It's easy to say that doing A will lead to B but in reality it doesn't ever work out like you see in a book or a video. Every site is specific, with slope, sun angle, prior usage, wind, etc... The roots of the fescue were always 4 - 6 inches, then compacted clay. The soil here is alkaline. I don't know how much experience you have with fescue range land but it is a tenacious grass and "deep roots" and "aeration" sounds like a good plan but it isn't as simple as that when dealing with fescue. The only thing I have seen here that seems to do those jobs you speak of is Honey Locust. But typically they are loathed here because the gigantic thorns will flatten tractor tires, so people poison them most of the time. The nitrogen fixers we put in, false indigo, have done immensely well even in a severe drought. If you've ever been in cattle country, or grazing country, you realize very quickly that you are in a bacteria dominated environment, you can smell it. There were some worms in the ground where we dug but very few. Most of what you see here is night crawlers. All of the plants we used for cover crops grew as well as to be expected, we did not irrigate, it all came up and still remains in the berms. They did their job. Weed seeds were in the pasture dormant and it's an impossibility to remove them from your berms, if you've figured out how to let me know. In this year's videos, you can see the bit of soil that has already been built on the berms. And there is a TON of insects out there in the "weeds" so I know the microscopic life is abundant now already. I didn't plan on nor do I plan on composting the berms, thats the job of the trees and the "weeds" and microorganisms. The point here is zero maintenance, zero, it is zone 3. Many of the other treatments that you mentioned we do in our zone 1 and 2 areas. There is an existing pond in this field, I don't remember if it's shown or not, they are expensive to build. Thanks for the comment and the sub!
@@PerimeterPermaculture I saw you got some great coverage from later videos. To increase diversity I've had to plant out some more mature perennials into the banks. And reseeded some areas. Excellent quality videos by the way.
![Swales: Earthworks for Conservation and Storage [PDC Preview]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/W-f2genlUZI/mqdefault.jpg)
![Swales: Earthworks for Conservation and Storage [PDC Preview]](/img/tr.png)
Thank you for this video! It was good to see the plant succession, and also to know how long it took the backhoe to dig. Do the bottom of the swales generally stay free of plants? They looked pretty clear. Thank you!
Thanks for watching! The bottom of the swales do not stay free of plants. However, its hard for anything to get going
strong because when they fill up it usually drowns the plants. There is some things growing permanently there now though it seems. A persimmon tree sprang up in one. Persimmons don't mind wet feet, it boggles my mind. Some grasses are going in some of them as well that seems to be able to cope with being underwater for a week or more. It's definitely not bare anymore, in most spots. There are some spots still just clay in the bottoms. Great question!
@@PerimeterPermaculture Thank you, so much
that helped a lot. I appreciate your reply!
@Suburban Stone Age no worries!🙏
instablaster...
That is absolutely amazing. I have been playing around with the idea of swales on our property. I love that you shared all this info and showed the progression.
Glad you enjoyed it!
This is a nice beginning to see shaping up for additional trees like in acreage on a scale of this size, and larger. Trees as you are doing is so necessary. Swales too., as these invite normal wild carrots, with successive other seasonal good weeds. This is good to have to recreate what everyone ultimately takes away. Trees. Willows will solve some of this, as well as Pumpkin Ash, and White Ash.
I love that this compilation. I hope you continue to post more updtaes.
Thanks!
Wow very well designed swale! Goodjob!
Appreciate it!
Nice no nonsense approach. i will watch for your Spring videos..Good Luck
+Michael Augustine Thankyou!
Loved this experiment!
Love trees!
Love enchinacia and Queen Annes
thank you for sharing your experience !
My pleasure!
Hello my dear I'm watching you full I enjoying a lot when you work your land have a wonderful day to you
Thank you so much
My wife and I travel the world looking for interesting trees! We even lived in the Amazon Jungle for a month.
Tasmania Australia.. South West of Geeveston Tasmania.. If you have the legs to carry you? Go check out the trees. I have also travelled the world and found Tasmania.
Greetings from the LooseNatural farm in Andalusia Spain
Hola, mucho gusto!
Nice change in the scenery, good job.
Try to deepen the channel with a dirty water motor pump and a Bagermaster suction nozzle. You can even clean the lake, remove bottom sediments
Did you notice any additional moisture in soil after the swales? Was there additional green growth after the swales and did ground water level go up?
Yes. Later on in the series that is mentioned.
It would be really good to see the results like now. Very interesting video
very soon now. Things still have yet to wake up out there. Thanks for watching!
I was wondering about the placement of the trees on top of the Swale, advice I've seen elsewhere is to put them on the down hill slope of the Swale.
It's up to you.
@1:27 a rooting hormone like indolebutyric acid (IBA) added before/during planting could have improved tree survival. of course, quick planting would have improved survival rates too.
did you really have to bother removing the rocks from the berm????
Up to a certain size, yes. I'd say anything 5 pounds and up we removed.
Perimeter Permaculture love t.
I’ve done similar but my swales are only 35m
Would you think of putting manure in the trench? It help for your trees and it'll help break up the clay. Look good though nice work.
Sometimes geese use the swales and manure them for us. Thanks for watching!
Very informative channel. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for watching!
thank you
Good stuff mister.
At the end of video: I thought that was a weird drone with long tail. It's a camera on a long pole?
Well that's one way to do it.. lol
Thankyou sir!
Please anymore videos? Thanks
The yellow flowers with the brown centers are Rudbeckia, not Echinacea.
yep
This is a lot of work but so cool in the end!
Thankyou!
If you had seeded the swales and berms with cover crops (preferably nitrogen fixers) the weeds would have had competition. At least mulching the berms would have prevented some of the weeds. The wild carrot came because the uncovered soil compacted and the wild carrot came to fix that. Mulching or cover cropping could have prevented the compaction.
The berms were cover cropped and mulched. I talked about what we used to do that with.
The Queen Anne's lace gives the appearance that the berms are compacted, but they aren't. So why do they appear?
Well, the pasture itself IS compacted from years of haying probably or overgrazing. So the Queen Annes' Lace seeds are lying there already, waiting to germinate and if that pasture is not mowed they will grow, doing their job to de-compact. I have not mowed that pasture this season and it is full of QAL.
So the QAL seed that was there was able to grow to maturity in our berms along with the other dormant seeds that were able to also grow due to the disturbance.
It's all groundcover and it's all biomass so it benefits the system. We have also observed that the woody remnants of the tall weeds actually insulated the young trees during the winter from wind, cold and deer browse, performing a beneficial role which we had not expected.
Thanks for the comment!
Land looks fairly level. I don't see it necessary to dig swales.
Gorgeous
Did you have any mosquitoes problems because of the water?
No. The swales don't hold water they only slow it down. It seeps into the ground fairly quickly. Thanks for the question!
@@PerimeterPermaculture Thanks for your answer!
Did you go a chop and drop session with your weeds and ground cover crops at some point during the year?
I did do a chop and drop early in the progression while the weeds were small but after time went by I could not keep up with them and they got way ahead of me and I had to surrender to them. What I learned from the process was to let nature dictate what she wants to do instead of trying to micro-manage the entire evolution and although I couldn't see it, in the beginning the natural succession was better than what my own thoughts were telling me to do. I was trying to be "tidy" but the weeds were not harmful in any way to what we had planted. All the cover crops came through unadulterated and the weeds even benefitted the trees. Great question!
Very cool. Good job
Thanks!
Any video update? And did you get your saplings from conservation dept?
Yes I did!
Where do you order your bare root trees from?
I got them from the State of Missouri.
Thanks for this, it was very useful.
Thankyou!
Update on this swale please...
Where did you get your trees?
Mostly from the Missouri State Forest.
Nice
I wish people would learn what a weed is. We use the term 'weeds' for different types of plants. The definition of a weed is "a plant growing where it isn't wanted". I didn't see any weeds in this video.
If I said weed, it was with quotation marks around it. There are no "weeds".
@@PerimeterPermaculture I have a habit of saying weeds a lot too. I wish we could break the habit as a society. Americans spend $ billions annually to get rid of plants simply because others call them weeds.
Its the same thing with growing a garden. People think they need to kill the "weeds" and add fertilizers and other chemicals. Plants grow the healthiest when they grow among other plants and no fertilizers added.
Commercial farmers need fertilizers because they kill the life in the soil. Potted plants need fertilizers because potting soil is sterile. But if you are growing vegetables in the ground, its best just to leave the soil and other plants alone.
Everyone complains about my garden because I don't till, mow, fertilize or weed it. But my vegetables come out better better tasting and more nutritious than any other locally grown vegetables.
I would have sprayed the berms with compost teas so I would have good soil biology. (See Dr Elaine Ingham.) If you had time to raise them, worm castings at every tree transplant would have helped. And also a reduction in the time delayed transplanting of trees would lowered stress dramatically. Curious, no ponds for overflow. Not sure of the length of your tree roots. You need to plant cover crops and berm vegetation with deep roots to break up soil compaction. If you have a cover crop with deep roots and then kill it, you will have tremendous amounts of Organic Matter (OM) in your soil. Every 1% increase in OM allows your soil to hold an extra 20,000 gallons or so of rainfall per acre. 2/3rds of all OM comes from roots so cover crops are great. And deep roots aerate the soil to allow your soil biology the space it needs to thrive. A weed patch usually has almost no biology apart from bacteria. Then along comes the protozoa and nematodes and earthworms which feed on the lower forms of life.Their castings make nutrients available to your plants. The bacteria ate all the soil nutrients so there was nothing left for your plants to eat until the rest of the soil biology showed up through compost, compost tea and worm castings. I am now living one state over from you. I want to move out into the country and to start a garden. Best of luck. Think I will subscribe to see how things turn out.
Bye.
Berms aren't compacted that's pretty much the point in making them. There wasn't any soil, really, in this pasture, mostly just clay. Fescue seems to grow in any conditions and is probably the reason why it has supplanted the native prairie grasses. It's easy to say that doing A will lead to B but in reality it doesn't ever work out like you see in a book or a video. Every site is specific, with slope, sun angle, prior usage, wind, etc... The roots of the fescue were always 4 - 6 inches, then compacted clay. The soil here is alkaline. I don't know how much experience you have with fescue range land but it is a tenacious grass and "deep roots" and "aeration" sounds like a good plan but it isn't as simple as that when dealing with fescue. The only thing I have seen here that seems to do those jobs you speak of is Honey Locust. But typically they are loathed here because the gigantic thorns will flatten tractor tires, so people poison them most of the time. The nitrogen fixers we put in, false indigo, have done immensely well even in a severe drought. If you've ever been in cattle country, or grazing country, you realize very quickly that you are in a bacteria dominated environment, you can smell it. There were some worms in the ground where we dug but very few. Most of what you see here is night crawlers. All of the plants we used for cover crops grew as well as to be expected, we did not irrigate, it all came up and still remains in the berms. They did their job. Weed seeds were in the pasture dormant and it's an impossibility to remove them from your berms, if you've figured out how to let me know. In this year's videos, you can see the bit of soil that has already been built on the berms. And there is a TON of insects out there in the "weeds" so I know the microscopic life is abundant now already. I didn't plan on nor do I plan on composting the berms, thats the job of the trees and the "weeds" and microorganisms. The point here is zero maintenance, zero, it is zone 3. Many of the other treatments that you mentioned we do in our zone 1 and 2 areas. There is an existing pond in this field, I don't remember if it's shown or not, they are expensive to build. Thanks for the comment and the sub!
Year long effort to make one video.......Good job
Thanks!
I found I had a lot better success if I seeded a mix on the berms then put old straw on top, and we have heavy clay and sand soils.
@nick sherrington Yes that's a good method. I may not have mentioned it but we did use straw too. Thanks for the comment!
@@PerimeterPermaculture I saw you got some great coverage from later videos. To increase diversity I've had to plant out some more mature perennials into the banks. And reseeded some areas. Excellent quality videos by the way.
Podem traduzir em portugues ou Italiano?
Yo puedo tratar. Yo decir espanol solomente.
Si puede.
Non so quanto sia bello ma ho caricato una traduzione italiana.
😎👍
wow hard working, keep rocking. new friend here.. ! sub just done. keep rocking. ple stay connect.
Not a fan of swales.