Sepp Holzer uses no irrigation

You are leaving out water harvesting. rose

What are you leaving out?  Well, everything is connected...

You mentioned an individual plant becoming less responsive to drought. As important, perhaps more, is that the population of plants in your saved seeds will be less well-adapted to drought. This could be as drastic as losing some species from your seed bank due to lack of adaptation to your climate, or as subtle as the bushel of wheat you intend to plant having more kernels from deep-rooted, small-leaved parents (or parents with subtle quirks of metabolism, or heritable traits still a mystery to science...) than from water-prodigal parents.


P. A. Yeomans would probably stress the importance of berms that direct runoff from moister parts of the property to nearby, dryer ones, and might add cultivating narrow, deep and unevenly to your comment on OM, as a way to expand soil moisture capacity.

In conjunction with a careful choice of variety, changing annuals' planting date might help a lot. If you plan it right, maybe there's an extensive root network when the rains come, and the plant passes through a less-thirsty stage of development as that reservoir is depleted.

Grape farmers sometimes till living cover crops into the soil over the course of the dry season, as a way to time-shift rainfall.

And I'm sure we've only scratched the surface.

You did not leave out water harvesting as i said you did in another post, you mention swales and berms. You missed out collection ponds though. Ha! That is silly of me, you were not writing a whole list of all the ins and outs of the water preservation strategies.

Stomata.
The stomata pores of trees shut down at midday in hot countries. How do the trees  keep cool after shutting down, i don't know .
      The article i found some years ago on "hydraulic redistribution of soil water by neotropical savanna trees" about how tap roots feed shallow roots with water in dry seasons when the soil is dry and the shallow roots suffer from reverse water pressure, they lose water instead of taking it up, talks about trees shutting down their stomata at midday in hot countries.
      The article i found a few years ago is a longer version of the one i found when i looked it up recently and more interesting, more of a nuiscance to read and a greater satisfaction afterwards because of all the thigns you then understand, The article comes from Tree Physiology 22,603-612 2002.  Heron Publishing __Victoria ,Canada. It is by Fabian G. Scholz, Sandra J. Bucci, Guillermo Godlstein, Frederick C. Menzer.
          I have read that the stomata, pores of trees shut down at midday in hot countries as a response to too much hydraulic stress in another books too reading something in various places tends to make it seem more plausible, the seriousness of the article made it plausible too.
   Stomata close because the guard cells at either side of the pores swell shutting the space between them that leads under the skin of the leaf. I don't want to check all this out as I should.
       Turning down the leaf may be another strategy it would stop the leaf receiving too much sun or something, lessen the exposure of the stomata too heat.
  Stomata are mostly found on the underside of a leaf, i am not sure but i think that in some plants it you can find them in other places.

1) Plants transpire an equivalent of sweating.

  2) They breath, like we do they take in carbon dioxide so as to access the oxygen di two oxide, oxygen, of the carbon dioxide in the air. Take up the oxygen in the lungs or leaf and breath out the carbon that some living organisms’ mammals and plants don't want for breathing. Not all organisms have this method of breathing, some breath anaerobically.

  3)Plants also photosynthesize.
when plants photosynthasize they take up carbon dioxide but this time to acces the carbon and they realease the oxygen . a hot country strategy of some plants that prevents water loss is that they take up carbon at night so the plant does not loose humidity doing it and then use it when there is sun, during the day.
     
ABOUT PHOTOSYNTHESIS.
  Photo, things that are described as photo this or that indicates the use of light as an energy force. In photos, they used to use silver on the negative, silver  goes black when exposed to light there was a thin film of silver on the  negative in the case of old fashioned black and white negatives and it was exposed to light when you took the photo light energy changed the film of silver painted on the negative.
   In plants the energy of the sun is used to make foods and foods are largely made of carbohydrates. Molecules in which there are a lot of carbon and hydrogen atoms. and so plants take up carbon dioxide gas, air to access the carbon in it that they want to use and they release the two oxygen’s  the dioxide back into the air. They must take the hydrogen from the water they take up and it is sunlight that allows them to move the atoms around and get them not new alignments I suppose.
  They don't actually make oxygen they just separate it from the carbon and release it, so it can link up with more carbon i suppose but this increases the oxygen in the air for us to benefit from.
They release more oxygen  from photo synthesize than they take up to breath with, net result they oxygenate our air but don't keep them in your room at night when they are breathing and if they are breathing without photosynthesizing they will be using your oxygen rather than releasing more oxygen. It is photosynthesizing that leaves you with more oxygen rather than less, when plants photosynthesize they are not holding on to oxygen.

  My sister had a book of rules for how to keep yourself continually on edge and one of the rules was that as plants humidify the air and so are good for you don’t have any in your house or even maybe in your garden.  So plants humidify as well as oxygenating all principaally through their stomata. Agri rose macaskie.
   

    What about lots of humus in the soil because humus absorbs and retains more rain water.

  Also fully broken down humus, scientists humus, look up humus in wikipedia. When it is fully broken down into peices so small that it wont break down more it is in a state called the humus of scientists and in this state it behaves like a jelly and jelly absorbes various times its own weight in water. It also is a good medium that helps hte roots of plants absorb nutrients. This type of humus is  as Darren Doherty says capable of remaining in the soil for thousands of years in this state keeping all the carbon in it locked in it so the bigger the depth of top soil you have the more carbon you have secuestered managed to get into and keep in your soil. 

  Also, you can buy jelly in big quantities oor agricultural purposes i have heard. agri rose macaskie.

  i used to think that a bump was a bad thing becasue Colbert gave his Colbert bump and I thought it was sort of blow. My attitude to paul mcartney is maybe different from Colberts.  COlbert said he would give Paul Mcartney a bump and as i think paul mcartney has gone soft and they said he hit his second wife, soft in what should be hard and hard where he should not be so hard  i thought letting him sing was putting him in evidince for his croney  qualities and so a blow not a i agree with you bump.
    I like beatlye songs that are like a novel, a bow to the complexities of love complexities that are draaaawn in the song "she's leaving home", i liked "lovely Rita Meter Maid and "Sergeant Peppers Lonley Heart Club Band" and "Bang Bang Maxwells Silver Hammer" and "I Read the News Today Oh Boy" which talks of the progressions the mind takes from thinkking of how terrible a shooting was to more frivoulous themes, the after yoko onos songs, ones about how nice it woudl be if it where all easy if love were easy  worry me a bit. You often have to mess up one lot to help another in real life.
  if a bump is good, great as i afterwards began to suspect, great and how much criticism we get as adults so great thanks. I suppose it is more thanks for having a site that allows me to get all my ecological worries and findings of my chest.  I cannot tell you how happy i have been writting all this, it suprises me that i just want a place to sick it all up in. I thought i wanted friends who where congenial.

    Have you heard of gelatine they sell to farmers? I heard of it when soneone was talking of gelatine that they sold so you coudl have a bath in gelatine , not an idea that really grabs me. My daughter gave me skin mask stuff, dead sea mud and i coveredd myself in it and lay a good twenty minutes in the bath it leaves you covered in black mud and i enjoyed that,my body seemed much better black but black people doon't think they are beautiful, i told a black friend i thought black coloured was beatifull, once, and he looked like he didn't like his own black skin as if thathe idea that black skin was beautiful was new to him . you start talking like tha and any white acquaintance  standing around decides you have an affair. It is terrible. it is the real seperatism if you talk to africans every one decides you want thenm phisically so you have to be brave to include africans in your diet bbecause if you do its you like the exotic everyway of making your friendship look silly psyuchological seperatism it should be denouced it is difficult to pin point but it is as deadly as other sorts .
  . The dead sea mud left you all beautifully shiney evenly black, i suyppose real black is not alway so even and includes pimples instead of covering things the owner does not like. agri rose macaskie.

This is a video of a farm in bellingham washington where there was zero irrigation used that year, and it was filmed in august.

yes he used no irrigation but the man did buy water rights from many of his neighbors land to fill his ponds.

Somewhere back a while there was a question as to what to do in rain forest where the water table is too high.  When I lived near the Olympic Peninsula, WA., and we went up into the forest to search for our Sacred Medicine, I noted that much of the area we scoured would soak your shoes just walking on it.  The most profuse areas of growth were up on the fallen logs which had become, essentially, BERMS. 

There's lots of info here about swales, and some on berms as they associate with swales, but I'ld like to suggest Hugukultur Berms where the water table is high, but there is still the August drought, like in the Olympic Rainforest.

I have 46 to 62 inches of rain each year (depending on whether the supercells track right over me) and there are areas that seem like a swamp for most of the growing season.  In August, those areas can be dry as a bone.  Huguls store the water for later use.  The higher ground of the berm allows plants to grow where down in the soggy soil they might languish, or die.  I have put this to the test and the results have been very satisfactory.  I get to start much sooner on these berms with succession annuals, and my perennials are not suffering.  The same plantings lower down do not do as well.  This might be a solution.

Getting back to the rock piles...

There is a concept known as an air well that was researched for a while back in the day.  Check out the wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_well_(condenser) . There are also dew condensers that can create larger volumes of water thanks to an increased amount of surface area (this is also why wooded areas have more stable climates, the trees release moisture, buffering temps but also the leaves have a large cumulative surface area for dew).

In general, from what I have read, the air wells didn't produce "enough" for towns to make use of, but the concept (thermal mass / surface area / air flow /condensation) is still a powerful example of how elements within our designs can help to create beneficial microclimates.

I had mentioned on an earlier thread about the function of rocks as energy syphons and expanded that to a blog on my website: http://pittsburghpermaculture.org/general-thoughts/ideas/rocks-in-the-garden

-Troy
http://pittsburghpermaculture.org

Doesn't Sepp harness mountain streams and run them back and forth across his property? He works to keep the water in the string of ponds but it cannot be done with 100% control. I would call it irrigation.

In one of his videos he made the statement that there was no water on his property, that when he first got there he ran pipes from a neighboring property to bring water in. That's part of the reason he referred to it as being a desert. But all I know is what I have been seeing and reading, obviously have never been there.


Are the mountain streams of his creation running from/between his ponds?

Shows a mountain spring and talks about how Sepp bought up all the wells on the neighboring land (which might be enough to raise the water table to a level where he can use a pond as one large shallow well. My fathers well on Kodiak is a scant 10 feet deep and gives him enough water (even in a dry summer) for 8 families. If you have ground water coming up from below you are irrigating with a well, but I was pretty sure I heard something about a stream.

I'll keep looking.

I've heard again and again from permaculture resources that evaporation (and transpiration) can create a wet climate. However evaporation cannot lead to more water, that would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, unless it is enough to lead already wet air to dump out water. But in general warm moist air is pulled up mountain slopes and precipitates out. If you haven't got a stream, a well, or a source of cooling wet moist air then you will not have Sepp's good fortune.

Groan... still having problems with quotes in messages (sorry)

Emerson, you are so right about Sepp buying up the wells. I guess my question would be, how much of that water is he still utilizing? Also, does he really have a raging mountain stream on his property.

I had to re-think my definition of "irrigation". I grew up in SE Idaho, somewhere between a bunch of rivers, the Snake, the Teton and the Salmon (more centralish) to name some of my favorites. Much of the area is farmland and is ACTIVELY irrigated. When I think of irrigation, I've considered it to be an active process. For example, as I was growing up, my mom used to water our lawn by flood irrigation. Which involved putting a headgate into a ditch to backup the water onto our lawn. All of our neighbors watered in the same manner. It was a blast for us kids and made for great night crawler collecting that night. The surrounding farmland was irrigated in a variety of fashions ranging from big movable irrigation pipes, to flooding to smaller gravity feed pipes for flat fields. I've hadn't thought of "passive" irrigation from the physical presence and environmental influences of ponds/rivers/streams as actual irrigation. I guess part of the reason why is that we always talked about irrigation as something we had to do, or made happen and believe me.. it can be a lot of work!

There are some excellent examples of the types of irrigation I am familiar with on this website: http://aspenranchrealestate.com/irrigation-systems.html

A bit more reminiscing... the ditch that my mom irrigated our yard with ran through many properties. It came out of a natural creek, wound around and eventually dumped back into that same creek. The areas surrounding it were lush and green (although that was with flood irrigation). Through the years, people put in artificial sprinkles, piped in underground water systems (city and county water-public water projects) and gradually let their water rights go unused, properties changed hands, without the water rights being passed along and eventually many of the rights were extinguised. Children and pets sometimes drowned in the creek and the ditch, occasionally there was flooding. As of five years ago, no one had retained water rights through the ditch, where the input was controlled at the canal was partially blocked, it gradually filled in with soil/plants/debris, the water got sluggish and then people deliberately filled it it. It is totally gone and with the exception of a few remnants of cement gates, or culverts there are no indications it was ever there. The areas left behind which are not maintained are totally dried out. In addition, people were no longer needing the canal and the water allowed to flow into it has also diminished to a trickle. It used to be a rapidly running, twisting winding habitat full of wildlife, trout, etc. Now, when there is water in it (rarely) it is an area where an accidental carp sometimes swims into it. Basically, the waterworks in that area used to be like a circulatory system, with big arteries, arterioles, veins and capillaries. All of the "peripheral" circulation has been destroyed, leaving only the major arteries and veins, with few, if any of the arterioles and veins. There is artificial irrigation, but in the even that should fail... we have really done some tremendous damage to the sustainability of the environment.

Anyway, I guess I had always considered passive irrigation more as "hydration" than irrigation. So I wouldn't consider what little I know about Sepp's property as being irrigated. Having said all of that, the work he has put into setting things up sure wasn't passive.... and although it mimics nature, it really was artificial based on nature. So irrigation vs hydration?

I'm confused by all of this.  I have watched the Sepp Holzer video Aquaculture: The Synergy of Land & Water.  An old film I came across on Google.

In the film he talks about how he connects and has connected all his ponds via irrigation pipes & repumps the water from below all the way back up to the top.  No matter how you slice it, the water movement alone is irrigating his property, be it on top of the earth, or in a pipe.  The fact of the water moving, and transpring in order to bring ryhtmic moisture to the land is as old as the notes of Schauberger or the use of a Shaduf by the Egyptians.

Thus I am confused as to how this thread can be around no irrigation done by Sepp Holzer.

It depends on your definition of irrigation.

I consider irrigation to be a task that requires some active input from a human being.

I consider hydration to be a passive act.

Because Sepps property was a "pine desert" with not a lot of passive hydration going on, he apparently designed a quasi natural hydration system.

I would have to agree that he doesn't (to my way of thinking and my personal interpretation of the definition) irrigate.

From what I know:
he doesn't go out and move hoses or water pipes around, he doesn't regularly flood sections of his property during growing seasons, he's not out moving sprinklers around, or establishing drip irrigation that needs water to be turned on/off, parts replaced.

It appears that he has established a man-made, but yet natural water collection system that hydrates the land, with the benefit of producing his power.

I want one too!

Quite honestly, I don't care if the semantics and use of the word "irrigation" is correct. I'm more interested in the concept/doability/sustainability. That's the big picture for me.

Feral wrote:


It appears that he has established a man-made, but yet natural water collection system that hydrates the land,

Much like the Yeomans system from "Water for Every Farm" by PA Yeomans, except on steeper ground. 

Though I don't know if Yeomans produced power on any of his properties....

I understand that Feral, but the man goes on to talk about how he made his own streams in addition to using pipes between ponds.  He shoots water on the plants to protect from frost, so, in some places he is spraying water onto the ground and plants.

he bought the water rights on neighboring properties as well.

I'd like to point out also that conifers, though often drought resistant, will create a local desert. We have spruce planted all over town here, and had pines where I was in Colorado (I think Sepp has fir), with the exception of mosses which trap rain water coming down and keep it out of the reach of the trees it's pretty much a universal experience that nothing really grows under the trees. and it's not because of a lack of light either, not with the way they are pruned. If you went into the forest here it and simply killed a bunch of trees and left them standing I'll bet that you would alleviate the spruce desert effect. Sepp has something like 25% tree cover, instead of 100%.

So he bought ground water, he pumps water into his system, and up hill, he removed a bunch of water hungry plants, he uses sprinklets to spray water from his system onto plants and dirt, and he may or may not also be diverting a mountain stream. It seems like there is no meaningful and true way to say that he uses no irrigation.

I'm so disappointed! I (obviously) had a different vision of Sepp's water use.  Ok, I was wrong.

That sounds like pretty active irrigation to me. 

My property has much in common with the way Sepp's property originally appeared. So seeing what he has done with his was/is positively inspiring to me.  So Sepp's watering system needs some improvement and I need better/more water on my property.

Who is the best, most awe inspiring permaculture guru when it comes to water and water usage to maintain land?

The great thing about water is that, so long as the person down stream doesn't miss it, it doesn't run out. Sepp isn't pulling from a deep and ancient aquifer. If he stopped farming and tore down his ponds it would be less than a decade until the water returned to its historic patterns.  The hydrological cycle ensures that water that he evapotranspires away will come back to earth before too long.

Edit: I feel bad, like I've slain one of your idles, , sad day.

I wouldn't say Sepp's place needs improvement; then again, I am sure he would just to be contrary. 

Seriously though, the Kramerterhof is, and has been doing wonderful under Sepp's setwardship of the land.  Personally, I think he is still one of the few humans in the world that found / returned to his niche in the world.

Feral wrote:
Who is the best, most awe inspiring permaculture guru when it comes to water and water usage to maintain land?

Brad Lancaster! 

Emerson White wrote:

So he bought ground water, he pumps water into his system, and up hill, he removed a bunch of water hungry plants, he uses sprinklets to spray water from his system onto plants and dirt, and he may or may not also be diverting a mountain stream. It seems like there is no meaningful and true way to say that he uses no irrigation.

I think I'm still missing the part in the videos where he is irrigating the crops.  The video in the link (farming with nature) talks about him buying up the wells on the neighbors property and "putting them to good use" in creating the ponds, but I didn't see/hear anything about him spraying that water on the plants.  Did I miss it, or is there another video?

When I first watched the Sepp videos, my first impression when they mentioned that he piped in water from a neighbor, was that it did not seem ideal, but I wondered if it was an artesian or something along those lines.

Either way, I'd like to know if he is applying water to maintain the raised beds with the fruit tree/veggies.

@ roughly 15:45 in Aquaculture: The Synergy of Land & Water; he spraying large amounts of water onto plants in order to protect them from frost damage.

So before making any more water plans, I should check into both Yeomans and Brad Lancaster? Anyone else?

That is an excellent question about Sepps raised beds...

Does anyone know if he is applying water to his raised beds?

Thanks Pakanohida - I had missed that part

SouthEastFarmer wrote:
Thanks Pakanohida - I had missed that part

Your welcome, we are all here to learn from one another. 

This is me at the Missoula public library answering questions after we watched a Sepp Holzer movie. The question is how do you raise water sensitive garden plants without irrigation.

Techniques listed in this video include: polyculture, more humidity leads to more morning dew, hugelkultur, and tap roots.

discussed in this podcast: http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/340-podcast-047-gaias-garden-chapter-5/

I have recently become enamored with Sepp Holzer's ideas and am trying to disengage a little from the hype in order to get at what is really going on and what kind of realistic expectations we can have from adapting his work to other contexts. The bottom line on whether he is or isn't irrigating should start with the climate in his region, which is also the first factor that Yeomans discusses in keyline planning. Sepp is working with a temperate alpine climate with a considerable amount of constant summertime rainfall. His major factor to deal with is the spring foehn winds and retaining topsoil on his erosion-prone slopes. Berms, ditches, terraces and ponds are very effective for retaining topsoil and water, but they are not the magic antidote to a complete lack of rainfall! I wonder how effectively one could adapt his system to the maritime climate of the pacific northwest (where I live) with summertime desert conditions and/or land that has a single, seepy spring as a primary water source. Seeing the numbers on how much flow he requires on top of his regional rainfall climate advantage would be quite interesting!

I think the Pacific Northwest also enjoys low evaporation compared to points farther south!

Bill Kearns wrote:Here's the article written by my friend Kyle published on the PRI site.  Kyle's article includes his visit to my place and he talks about the talus garland rock wall we built!

http://permaculture.org.au/2009/11/02/rethinking-water-a-permaculture-tour-of-the-inland-northwest/#comments

Kyle's also been very busy crafting a new website.  Fascinating stuff.  Especially read his "About the author" section.

https://sites.google.com/site/humanhabitatproject/home


Bill

Hi Bill,
Can you give us an update on the talus garland you built in 2009? What worked and what didn't?
Sue

Bill Kearns wrote:Here's the article written by my friend Kyle published on the PRI site.  Kyle's article includes his visit to my place and he talks about the talus garland rock wall we built!
Kyle's also been very busy crafting a new website.  Fascinating stuff.

A comment under that post led me to Peter Andrews' work in Australia. He talks about natural sequence farming
and that points to an Australian program that featured his decades of work in 2009: Right As Rain

bump

Thanks for the apple (and bringing this ancient post to my attention again)!

Thought I'd post some update pics to the original rock wall:


and what it looks like today from the same angle:


And the opposite side:


Not only did the little wild cherry plums (from Utah, thanks Kyle!) sprout and grow, but this year they've put out some fruits!!!


Over the past six years we've mulched our entire zone 2 (and topped off the mulch yearly), but we've also constructed four more of the talus garland type rock walls:




I can say that we owe this abundance of biomass to mulches and selective chop-n-drop to protect the soil from direct sunlight and wind.

Bill,

Since the time we talked about this many years ago, I would say that the rock pile acts as a good mulch and might bring in a tiny amount of dew - but would need to be much bigger to make much change in the dew collecting department.

What has been your experience? I don't see the grasses getting larger as they get closer to the pile. Do you see difference near the rocks at certain times of the year?

Question: What is more sustainable/permacultural and cost/time effective in my situation?

I have a lot more wood available than rocks, though both are attainable locally for nothing more than transport costs. The wood could be attained in almost infinite. It would come in spite of my protests to keep the trees whenever I can reach the property owners before felling (this is redwood country, with lots of doug fir, spruce, redwood, alder, madrone, tanoak and fruit trees).  The rock would ultimately come from river beds where, while within 10 miles, it plays an integral role in salmonid habitat as far as I understand. I instead, I now harvest river sand from these areas where it seems to be a product of logging caused erosion, and do so on trips where I am primarily going to walk my dog and swim as well. This goes to my bird coop which becomes mulch along with fir needles and straw. What would rocks do that 24" logs couldn't? Should I not feel so bad about grabbing some rocks along the way? Do they not stabilize the riverbed and allow for infiltration rather than erosion, reducing water temp increases? Is it only fair to feel bad because I am the ultimate invasive species, a white straight male? Damn