I was so stoked with my water catchments that I made a video for a friend, whose also a Fleck/Thile fan haha
https://vimeo.com/370541690
apologies for the mud and muddy waters. Those cuts were still fresh when the paddyponds flooded for the first time in early march of this year. All the ugly mud slopes were healed and green 3 months later (I sow weed seed!) but there was no standing water in the big paddy 4 days after that downpour. Lots of sealing to do on that one yet, whereas I cheated and brushed 25 lbs of sodium bentonite dust into the deep cracks of the dry dry summer clay in the upper paddy and it seems to hardly seep at all now
Also, if a person is going to do the somewhat illegal/dreamy thing and have 2 or more sizable water surfaces within about 10 horizontal feet of eachother and with about 10 feet of elevation difference between them on nothing but earthworks, they should probably be sure to make paddies and not ponds (or maximum water depth of like 3 feet I think?)
I observed the catchment wasn't big enough to flood anything more than the neighbor's yard for like a minute or 2 with a 1 or 2 inches of water in the event of a failure, so fu@% it let's experiment. Upon becoming thoroughly wet and holding back its full capacity of water, the embankment didn't melt. Hurray
I fastened a madrone log to the end of a 6 foot beaked hazel stick and exhausted myself repeatedly mauling the clay when it was properly damp after rains. Also bunny hops on the catwalk. The thing's you'll do in the absence of heavy equipment.
Now I just need to make $$$ for an excavator to do a natural swimming pool, not gonna dig that by hand...and to make the tiny paddies as big as the big paddies (and add like 10 more, after removing more stumps by hand derp) and then seal them so well they hold water all summer and get that upper spillway to feed into a big piece of bamboo, which keeps its elevation and extends into the middle of the larger lower paddy. Waterfalls! Then when things fill up again its gonna get real dreamy