Oh, okay. Something new to me again.
Love that. I planted out onions and comfrey in the new bed today - comfrey in the corner of
the berm and bed where they meet. I will just keep planting out - my garage is full of things I brought from the old place -
asparagus, rhubarb, and a zillion perennial herbs flowers and shrubs all in pots from being dug up for the move...
So you inoculate with this stuff as you plant... Hmmm. Will have to find that thread. I have never done that.
But I have to decide on the trees soon. They really should have gone in already. I just hadn't got the sweale and hugels
done so I was waiting. Now I am really uncertain whether to put them above the swale or in between the hugel beds. *sigh*
The berm (buried in the straw along the back end of the hugels) is solid
clay under that layer of straw.
It was like shoveling glue to get it out but it turned to rock once it was out of the swale for a couple of weeks.
I covered it with straw in hopes it would soften up in the wet again. Holy cow, it's FULL of worms. I have no idea how they live in this stuff.
Doesn't seem to have any air in it at all - so thick and like GLUE to the touch (or under foot - steals the boots right
off your feet).
I want to put in a pond at the far end of the whole thing, where it slopes off downhill a bit and maybe figure out how to
pull it up for irrigation in the summer. I know it would be better to put it above it all but in this location I have a fenced
pasture above and don't think it will work out well to put the pond in there. Either way,I think I will have to put in a french drain
above the swale across the lower pasture, as the garage area is being completely inundated with mud and water as it is now.
Maybe drain into the swale and then out at the far end...
The water is MUCH worse on the other side of the property where I am planning to put in the food forest.
But over there I think I CAN put a pond in up above and another down below with a rock channel for run-off from the top to the bottom as
needed - I have to get the water from just slashing down the hillsides - I have gullies everywhere and one end of my chicken/duck
paddocking area is a veritable swamp when the rains come - the gullies all dump right there - so another swale will be needed
and probably another french drain as well.
Trying to go slow enough to learn the property before I do too much - it's our first year here - and we've already learned
plenty...
(Yeah, like that upper field on the other side of the property is knee deep in water in February... And was bone dry
and hard as rock last September... Extremes which need dealing with, clearly.)
We are starting by running the chickens and ducks through all of it on rotation to tear it up and get some organic
matter into it. Unfortunately it was all just weedy grasses and no diversity at all - and not enough animal traffic to keep it healthy.
Not so great for them this winter, but it will be by later in spring when all the seeding I've done in each of their previous
paddock areas since December start to come up for real.
I laid down all their old straw from the place in town we moved from, then oak leaves and whatever I could scrounge and seeded it all
in clovers and vetch and peas and about a half dozen other legumes and grasses - then I threw some old row covers over top to keep
the wild birds from eating it all before it could come up - just starting to see some new green now.

YAY!