Pebblespring Farm (Port Elizabeth South Africa - 34 deg South)

Is it time for us to start re-ruralizing?

(this Opinion Piece first appeared in THE HERALD on 16 June 2022 - but I thought my Permies friends my enjoy it too)



It’s a grey and dreary winter’s day. My thoughts go to Youth Day as I drive down Buffelsfontein road toward my regular Walmer coffee spot. My mind dwells on the sad truth that the passenger seats in my car are all empty. My children have now grown and left this town for a brighter future. No youth in my car this youth day.
My gloomy sadness is interrupted though, by an unfamiliar sight by the side of the road. A makeshift water station on the verge with a number of emergency taps on light blue plastic standpipes. Our answer to “Day Zero,” I am told, has been to drill boreholes in strategic spots and allow people to fill containers of water enough to drink and cook and clean with. Later, over coffee, I can’t help but think, that if ever there was a monument built to mark the failure of government in this town of ours, then these blue standpipes are it. No political argument, no beaming Politian’s picture in the press or free pop concert for the masses can argue away these pipes. They are there standing boldly as monumental evidence of our inability to manage the affairs of this city region. The unavoidable truth is that government is failing at the most basic and fundamental level. Running water and flushing toilets are not rocket science. Running water is the most fundamental and non-negotiable starting point of what we have come to expect from urban living.
I am sorry to tell you though that I really don’t have any answer to the water problem. I’m simply using this very visible failure as an excuse to talk about a question that’s interesting to me right now:
Is it not time we begin to re-ruralise?
Is it not time that we accept that our current system, just does not have what it takes to effectively manage towns and cities? I mean, have you driven down the main road in Humansdorp lately? It’s one continuous pothole. Makhanda has had water problems for years. Mthata is chaos!!
Is it corruption? Is it white monopoly capital? Is it the construction mafia? Is it lazy officials who earn fat salaries but don’t deliver? I’m not interested in those questions right now. I am interested rather to zoom out a bit and consider the slightly larger question of why it is that we, as a civilisation, have decided to build cities and towns in the first place and whether the conditions that seemed to make cities and towns a good idea way back then, still prevail.
I can completely understand why the first towns and cities must have sprung up all those thousands of years ago in Iraq and elsewhere. Back then it was so much easier to get all the cool stuff you needed by living in a city like Eridu. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker were all right there. By contrast, your rural cousin had to figure out how to make what ever cool stuff he wanted all by himself. Living in the countryside was a ball ache!
With time, through the growth of civilisation, the industrial revolution and right up to the 21st century, cities became increasingly sexy. The city meant, running water and electricity. It meant education for your kids. It meant music and entertainment. It meant fun church and religious activities. It meant access to more potential romantic partners. It meant access to better health care. City living though (for all but the very rich) came at a huge price. City dwellers contend with crime, bad food, air pollution, overcrowding and worst of all; jobs to pay for all these conveniences and cool stuff. But perhaps the biggest price we paid was the loss of our connection with the land, the fresh smell of rain on the soil and the feeling of being part of the glorious living organism that is our mysterious planet.
What I see lately though is a glimmer of an exciting shift brought about by rapidly advancing technology. A discernible adjustment in focus from urban to rural. Thanks to solar and battery technology, we no longer need to live in a city to run a fridge or computer. Thanks to cheap electric pumps and plastic piping, rural homes can have running water and flush toilets. Very soon, even remote rural areas will have super-fast satellite internet. This will give rural people access to the highest quality education through apps like Udemy, the highest quality preaching for the religious-mined though apps like YouTube. It will give access to a huge pool of potential romantic partners through Tinder and Instagram. Sure, living in the city will still give you somethings that you just don’t get in the country, but I am open to the idea that the scales will begin to tip. As city living becomes increasingly less bearable, as we are no longer able to shower or water our tomato plant and as rural living becomes slightly less tedious, we make be shocked to see a landslide of people beginning to Re-ruralise. Of course, this trend will begin with the rich, but as we have seen with all technological change, these trends spread very, very fast to the poor. (Remember how cell phones were first just for millionaires and rock stars?)

I am very excited to see all this unfold in the very near future. Are you excited too?

Let me follow this thread, my wife and i are in the same boat, 22 KM from the city, just off Baywest. We live in PE, just have one structure and a guy that hasnt been reliable.

Good afternoon ,I would love to help you ,I have a Mechanical /Maintenance/Construction/Fabrication/Welding/ Home. Maintenance/some Carpentry built Decks Shopfitting PEP core and come with Tool and some equipment as there is no accommodation I do have a tent. I have many other skills HDPE Electro Fusion Welding/Plumbing and I have wanting to Work  live off grid  . I am Available. .My Cell : 0760245338            Kind Regards Justin Stark

Afikile Sikwebu wrote:Let me follow this thread, my wife and i are in the same boat, 22 KM from the city, just off Baywest. We live in PE, just have one structure and a guy that hasnt been reliable.

hey Neighbour - let meet up - I would love to see what you are doing at your place

Justin Stark wrote:Good afternoon ,I would love to help you ,I have a Mechanical /Maintenance/Construction/Fabrication/Welding/ Home. Maintenance/some Carpentry built Decks Shopfitting PEP core and come with Tool and some equipment as there is no accommodation I do have a tent. I have many other skills HDPE Electro Fusion Welding/Plumbing and I have wanting to Work  live off grid  . I am Available. .My Cell : 0760245338            Kind Regards Justin Stark

thanks very much for making contact Justin - Right now we are OK for help thanks - But I will keep your number handy

Letting the Land Lead: How We Build Swales at Pebble Spring Farm

If you spend any time in permaculture circles, you'll hear one word more than almost any other: swale. And for good reason. The swale is one of those quietly brilliant ideas that, once you understand it, changes how you see every hillside, every ditch, every rainstorm.

What Is a Swale?

At its simplest, a swale is an earthwork — a channel or berm — built on contour to capture and slow the movement of water across a landscape. The goal isn't to drain water away quickly; it's the opposite. A swale is designed to keep water as high up in the landscape as possible, for as long as possible. That single shift in thinking — from drainage to retention — is what makes it such a powerful tool.

The Pond and the Pope

Here at Pebble Spring Farm, the swale system begins at the pond. A dam wall runs along one edge, doubling as the driveway to the cottage, and the pond's water level is kept in permanent equilibrium by two "popes" — a local word for a standpipe: a 110 mm PVC pipe with an elbow joint that runs beneath the road and emerges on the other side.

The first pope maintains the dam at its ideal static level. The second handles the overflow during wetter periods. It's a beautifully simple, passive system — no valves, no pumps, no moving parts. The water finds its own level and spills when it needs to.

From that spillway, the water enters the swale channel, and the real work begins.

Reading the Water

One of the most common questions we get is: how do you find the contour? How do you know exactly where to dig?

The honest answer is that the best tool we have isn't a laser level or a surveying instrument — it's the water itself.

In wet times, we dig a narrow initial channel — roughly the width of a spade — and allow the water flowing from the pond to run through it. Then we watch. Where the water moves, we follow. Where it stills completely, we know we're level. Where we can perceive even a slight current, we know we've dipped too fast and need to correct.

This is the gold standard. No instrument can match the precision of water finding its own level in real time.

Wet Times and Dry Times

This approach does come with one significant constraint: you need water to work with.

Our region doesn't follow a predictable seasonal rhythm. Wet periods and dry periods can each last months or years, and they can arrive at any time of year — our wettest months have historically been mid-summer, mid-winter, and spring. There's no fixed calendar to plan around.

That means when the water is flowing, we move. We work quickly, extending the channel as far as the water will carry us, cutting through dense bush with a chainsaw, clearing with a hoe, and then trenching in 5 to 10 metre sections to see exactly how the water wants to run.

The Leveling Frame

For the sections we push ahead of the flowing water — scouting the path, marking the direction — we use a simple leveling device: a triangular timber frame with a spirit level fixed across it.

The frame is calibrated on a known-flat concrete floor, so when the bubble sits dead centre, we're on contour. It's low-tech, quick to use in dense bush, and accurate enough to guide the chainsaw cuts and earthworks that follow.

The combination of instrument-guided path-finding and water-verified channel-building is what makes the system work. The frame shows us where to go; the water confirms whether we got it right.

Why It Matters Beyond Water

There's something deeper happening in this process beyond water retention, though that alone would justify the effort. The swale — following the true contour of the land — sets the primary geometry of the whole farm.

Paths follow the swale. Driveways follow the swale. Fences follow the swale. Instead of imposing a grid or a straight line onto the landscape, the land's own hydrology becomes the ordering principle. The geometry that results is complex, winding, and responsive — because it's informed by the actual shape of the ground.

And the water held high in the landscape doesn't just sit there. It creates habitat. It feeds soil moisture across a broader area. It supports the kind of layered, biodiverse ecosystems that a rapidly drained landscape never can.

An Ongoing Practice

This is slow work, and it's seasonal work. We extend the swale network when conditions allow and wait when they don't. Each wet period gives us an opportunity to push a little further, to read a little more of the land's character, and to let the farm's geometry evolve in response.

It's one of those practices that rewards patience and attentiveness more than machinery or speed. The land will tell you what it wants — if you're willing to let it lead.

We'd love to hear how you approach swales and water management on your own land. Every landscape has its own logic, and there's always more to learn.