Forests and ponds

Rene Nijstad wrote:
The main important thing is to never build anything other than gabions in the areas where the waterflow is concentrated

We're actually trying some brush dams to see what happens. We've built these as far up the channels as possible so they have the largest chance of hanging up on trees instead of going downstream.

https://permies.com/t/51421/earthworks/Creek-repair-brush-dams

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I looked at the brushdam topic. I think during lighter rain events they might be of help. Hopefully they get anchored by sufficient sediment build up before you get a serious flood, because the amount of water that has to pass through probably washes them away.

You could try more brushdams in smaller creeks that don't have that much flow, their advantage is that they're still pretty open, so water can get through. It just traps more and more debris over time and when there's enough, soil will build up behind it.

Thank you. Do you have any suggestions about where specifically we could put swales if we happened to get a windfall of $?

Otherwise I will be building a gazillion small brush and rock berms.

You're welcome Tyler, I hope it's all helpful.

I cannot really point to locations for swales because I would need a very detailed contour map to even start guessing. But observation which you can do yourself might give the answer.

Most water volume will concentrate in gullies and creek beds, those you can see in the landscape. With periodic flooding coming out of a catchment area of 100 acres or more, you cannot block those gullies with a swale, no matter how big you would make it. It's just too much water. But you could look at the spaces between the gullies which will have more of a sheetflow of water. Maybe swales could be installed there? To be sure you do need sufficiently big overflows, so that excess water can flow away.

Another thought, if the water brings too much sediment a swale might not be the best answer anyway, because it will fill up. If that is the case brushdams, rockdams everywhere and gabions in the gullies will be much more helpful. They will create a more terraced landscape and actually help build soil back up instead of eroding it away.

Thank you!

Hello, recently purchased 13 acres and I'm looking to install some contour swales on hillside. This property is fully wooded with pine and hardwood. My dilemma is after I clear this hillside, what to do with the stumps/roots?.... If I leave them to rot, I assume they will leave uneven holes and maybe even compromise my berms. If I remove the stumps, how will this affect my contour lines. Thank you so much for any suggestions! This is my first post! Love this forum thanks!

Brad Huston wrote:Hello, recently purchased 13 acres and I'm looking to install some contour swales on hillside. This property is fully wooded with pine and hardwood. My dilemma is after I clear this hillside, what to do with the stumps/roots?

First.... don't. If it's an actual hillside and not just a gentle slope on relatively flattish ground, do not clear it. Clear a swath for your swale, get the trees going in that, then do the same for the next swale after that, leaving a fair amount of woodland between. Trees hold hillsides together, and the baby trees put into a swale won't cut it at first. You need to keep your forest to avoid heavy erosion or worse.

I'll leave the meat of your question to others more experienced in swale construction.

Tyler Ludens wrote:How about in a wet climate? Anybody here on permies building a forest and ponds system in any kind of climate?

Looks like you're starting to get some feedback already but will chime in, too. Would have sooner but, well, it's planting season here

I'm doing a ponds and forests type of system, though a big part of what I'm doing here is trying to actually "dry out" our topsoils in many areas. See, we have a lot of heavy clay with little topsoil (eroded badly due to poor logging practices) so generally, if we dig a hole, it fills with water and that water doesn't drain...just evaporates slowly. A lot of slash from the logging on this property is sitting just under the surface, pretty much as "fresh" as the day it was cut, due to the anaerobic conditions. Some of it was buried by erosion while much was purposely buried in to keep the skidders from sinking in the mud. The landscape is overall WAY over hydrated, causing the ecosystem to go into a sort of protective, repairative "swamp" mode. Even our red maples, which are supposed to be tolerant of seasonal flooding, are rotting out and falling over in many areas!

Our soil profile in most areas I've worked so far looks roughly like this: highly organic topsoil on top, generally less than 1" thick and usually saturated, followed by nearly pure blue/gray clay between 2" and 4" thick, followed by a layer of organic topsoil buried by the last logging event anywhere between 1" and 3" thick, often barely damp, followed by a layer of brown/red clay that's usually dry and upwards of 4" thick, followed by ANOTHER layer of organic topsoil, this one upwards of 6" thick and usually bone dry, which I figure was buried by erosion from the logging event between 30 and 50 years ago, followed finally by more brown/red clay going down as far as I've made it so far (about 4.5ft).

Our goals are to 1) increase evaporation over the short term, using relatively shallow ponds with a larger surface area, to allow for more biological activity in the soil and 2) increase deep infiltration of water so it's not just sitting on the surface, making for mosquito/deerfly breeding grounds

See my project thread if you haven't already for an overview of our plans and some of the work that's been done so far ("The Camp" in my signature). The specifics are, of course, always up in the air, depending on the boots-on-the-ground conditions, but I had laid out a lot of the general patterning before we ever stuck a shovel in the ground...before we even bought the property! Even though our goals are slightly different than yours will be (draining/drying overly wet soils vs wetting/hydrating overly dry soils), most of the same methodology will apply. Water is funny that way - whether dealing with overly dry conditions or overly wet conditions, most of the techniques are very similar.

If others in your area are able to hold water in their ponds, you almost certainly will have success as well. You mentioned a high clay content in your soil, which is a big plus. Two things to keep in mind, though, is 1) you will definitely need to seal your pond, even if you're interested in deep infiltration and 2) provide A LOT of surface shading and protection to prevent high water temperature and evaporation.

For the shading, water hyacinth, duckweed, azolla fern, water lilies, lotus, etc will go a long way toward keeping the water temperature down and reducing the evaporation. If they've overtaking your pond, just skim it to clear 50-75% of the cover and compost it all - think of it as a compostable material production system Large, dense deciduous trees casting shade over the pond will help hugely as well - oaks, pines, etc. Maybe use the trick from old China and plant a mulberry hanging over the pond from the south to cast a dense shadow and provide fruit drop to/draw insects for fish production

The biggest issues will be direct sun and hot, dry winds, so planting a dense windbreak around the pond to help keep the winds from whipping over the surface will help as well.

On sealing a pond, Geoff Lawton's trick of using ducks really does work. We have several small ponds already dug and when we get droughty (usually august/september) the one the our muscovy ducks use the most NEVER dries out, even when the others are completely bone-dry. Two other things you can look at are bentonite clay (they use it in the oil industry and it should be available if you call around) and organic matter. That dense deciduous trees shading the ponds will have a lot of leaf drop - ponds are notorious leaf traps and will accumulate literally tons of leaves each season. All that organic matter lining the bottom will form a living film of bacteria and microbes that helps seal the pond as well. Between ducks and enough leaf drop, you could probably seal a pond built on pure sand.

Remember, too, that when you change the hydrology of a site, it does take time for the water to catch up to the changes. Expect it to take a few years for things to even out

Thank you, Tristan!

I'm being encouraged enough by the idea of ducks sealing a pond to rethink the possibility of a small pond, but changing the location to further down slope for more opportunity to collect water:

Here's a photo of the north basin full of water. This may stay for only a day or two before soaking in:

Kyrt Ryder wrote:

Brad Huston wrote:Hello, recently purchased 13 acres and I'm looking to install some contour swales on hillside. This property is fully wooded with pine and hardwood. My dilemma is after I clear this hillside, what to do with the stumps/roots?

First.... don't. If it's an actual hillside and not just a gentle slope on relatively flattish ground, do not clear it. Clear a swath for your swale, get the trees going in that, then do the same for the next swale after that, leaving a fair amount of woodland between. Trees hold hillsides together, and the baby trees put into a swale won't cut it at first. You need to keep your forest to avoid heavy erosion or worse.

I'll leave the meat of your question to others more experienced in swale clancastersn.

Thank u.... I plan on starting at the top of hillside and working down slowly over time.....thanks for the advice!.....sorry if I butted in on someone else's topic, still learning to use this site....any advise on the stump situation? I plan to follow brad lancasters formula for swale construction....thanks Kurt Ryder!

Personally I would just leave the stumps in place and work around them. We have a lot of trees so we've been using basins instead of swales. I'm also making brush berms where some people might use swales: https://permies.com/t/56013/earthworks/Brush-berms

Tyler Ludens wrote:Personally I would just leave the stumps in place and work around them. We have a lot of trees so we've been using basins instead of swales. I'm also making brush berms where some people might use swales: https://permies.com/t/56013/earthworks/Brush-berms

Thanks for the response Tyler, much appreciated!....i will definitely check out that link....thanks!

Tyler Ludens wrote:How about in a wet climate? Anybody here on permies building a forest and ponds system in any kind of climate?

A small forest and ponds design: http://geofflawton.com/videos/5-acre-abundance-on-a-budget/

I can't say I built it, or that it's really made correctly, but we do have a pond on our property that was dug by the previous land owner. He used and excavator, and I think might have thrown some concrete down there? Knowing him, though, it's not in anyway sealed, as he couldn't do anything right construction-wise. But, the pond does stay wet all year round. It's probably somewhere around 1000sqft in size and the depth ranges from (at it's fullest) 8 feet deep to four feet deep. During last year's "drought" (a drought for us is nothing like a drought for the rest of the US) and record hottest summer, the pond got down to about 2-4 feet deep, which is a bit shallow for many fish, but fine for ducks.

The pond is fed by a ditch he dug, that's probably 3-4 feet deep and 1-2 feet wide, with no curves, and I don't quite know/remember how many feet it goes. I also have no pictures of it. We also have a tiny, natural stream (2 feet wide at it's widest, and only 2 feet deep during a rainstorm) that flows from about September/October-May, depending on the weather. Pretty much, we're so soggy that the ground water is high enough that if you dig down 3-4 feet, you make a puddle. During our big rains (nothing like your big rains. We might get maybe 3 inches of rain on ), our little stream barely overflowed, but the pond filled up fast.

I don't know if any of that info helps you, but I would think that by making it deeper and closer to your water table, you're more likely to maintain a pond. Also with a deeper pond you could retain more water with less evaporation than a shallow pond. Shading it with trees would help with evaporation, but the trees and plants will also suck up the water from the pond by their roots. So, it really matter more on if you want the water there all year for ducks, etc, or if you want the water to help with your plants.

Here's an old mock up of our property. The stream and pond are on the right. The weird blue water line south of the pond is the ditch that feeds the pond. The pond flows into the stream, and there doesn't seem to be overflowing where it flows into the stream.

Here's some pictures of our pond and stream. I have no idea if this will help at all, as our climate and weather are so different. But, if nothing else, it's a case study!

Thank you, Nicole!

During wet periods I can pretend our big basin is a pond!

Tyler,
I saw a question, basically if anyone had had success with getting a pond to hold water.  My place had a small 'pond' that would hold water for a few days after a rain, and then dry up.  I put some ducks out there and, of course, they found and loved the pond when there was water in it.  After a few months I noticed the pond was full of water most of the time.  By the next year it was holding water continuously.  We got ducks because my wife is really allergic to all things chicken, especially eggs.  Eventually she found she reacted to duck eggs also, although not nearly as bad, so we stopped keeping ducks.  After a couple of duckless years, the pond has reverted to a seasonal only thing.

We get about 36 inches of rain/year here and the ground is silty, so we may have only needed a nudge.  I think that is what permaculture does, it allows us to 'nudge' things.  We can't make a louisiana bayoo in west texas, but we can 'nudge" things to provide the best solution for the current environment.

We really enjoyed the ducks.  They have a lot more personality that chickens, and are a lot easier to herd (ducks bunch up, chickens scatter).  We lost lots of ducks until we got a male.  After that, we never lost a duck because he was real watchful and would herd them up into the duckhouse when there was a threat.

I recall a video I saw one time where Geoff Lawton mentioned an old central european practice two pond system where they would graze cattle in a dried out pond.  As the cattle grazed they worked their poop into the soil.  Eventually they would divert their water into that area, making a pond and move the cattle over into the depression that had been a pond until they diverted the water.  Carp in the pond would fatten up on the cow deposits and the cattle would graze in the now dry pond that had been enriched by the pond deposits.  From this I gather that cattle can work for gleying a bottom.  They would transfer from pond to grassy depression, back and forth every few years.

Apologies for being late to the thread. The recent post brought it to visibility.

I am in east tn, where the clay soil is reasonably good at holding water and where rain varies from 24" to 48" per year (ish).

I bought 6.5 acres of neglected, hilly, pasture and forest. It had no ponds. It had a creek bed which was dry most of the year, but which occasionally ran with water overflowing/seeping from a neighbor's pond which was constructed decades ago.

We bought paul's video and then rented an excavator and bobcat. (Travis is right, bulldozer would have been better.)

Having never built a pond or operated any heavy equipment before, we installed three ponds in a weeks time. All still hold water.

My goal is to get an old spring running again. Not there yet but am only 24 months in. Will follow up with photos when not on a mobile device.

Ponds and drylands?

The Natural Farmer is going to try in Sicily which is pretty dry in my book.

Here's a youtube link -- https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RKjg073XsNY/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEZCNACELwBSFXyq4qpAwsIARUAAIhCGAFwAQ==&rs=AOn4CLC6qija5z-ZI2f444LjKiWhZKgiUQ

Hi Tyler

How is this project going?

I can say that Geoff Lawton's farm is in an incredibly lush, high-rainfall area. It also has (rare for Australia) deep volcanic soils. The area was settled in the 60s and 70s by hippies, no doubt because it is one of the places where you can provide quite a lot for yourself if you are trying to be self-sufficient. It is one of the most beautiful areas in Australia. (The interior of Australia is arid/semi-arid, usually with very poor soils.)

I live about an hour and a half north of Geoff's area (closer to the Equator), and my climate sounds like it is more like yours, particularly as it is getting drier with climate change. Our rainfall sounds good, until you look at the fact that a large amount of it comes over a one or two-day flood event, so it just flows over the dry ground and away.

Luckily my husband has a skid steer and has made some swales for me. But it is still too dry for a lot of things, and I spend a lot of time watering using our dam water, and only really keeping things alive.

Hi, Tyler! Hopefully we can get this thread going again, as I'm eager to hear how your projects are going!

Like Nicola, our climate is similar to yours (in fact we're really not all that far from you over in southeast AZ). We have quite a bit less land than you (7.5 acres currently at the main homestead site -- we may buy more of it) and it's pretty flat right here. We're about half a mile north of a seasonal creek flowing down out of two of our nearby mountain ranges that used to flow year-round. Our aquifers have all been depleted by decades of ranching and more recent nut orchards and large-scale crop farming, our landscape changed by overgrazing, and in general the land has been treated like garbage by land grabbers and others.

Nevertheless, it's breathtakingly beautiful here if you've got the taste for this kind of harsh landscape, and it looks beautiful by you as well (it looks less harsh from those aerials and sounds like it has many more tall trees than we can support here in the valley).

On our little bit of this land, we're just barely starting to dig a small pond by hand, as -- like you said about your situation three years ago -- funds are limited. We dig a little each time the soil is saturated enough to make that easier and haul the soil away to use in earthworks elsewhere. We currently have berms and channels diverting the water that rushes down our road and driveway during monsoon floods out into the deep mulch-filled sunken beds of our two gardens. The pond is started at the end of a diversion just a bit up the road from the driveway. It's in an area that obviously has quite a bit of clay, which is why we chose it. Our hope is to enlarge it to a small deep pond around which we can plant a small food forest of mostly local native trees and shrubs like Emory oaks, palo verde, wolf berries, and Opuntia, but with a few non-natives like jujubes, pecans, maybe even pomegranates and olives. I'd love to have ducks there, and the post up-thread about a male duck helping to protect from predators is really helpful, thank you!

Some of the dirt that comes out of the future pond site we'll use to build up the banks into a nice berm, and another use we hope to make of it is cob/adobe-type bricks to dry in the sun and use for the house.

I'm eager to read of yours and others' experiences making a lush water-filled landscape in a dry land, and I'll share what we discover as we continue! Thank you, Tyler!

Thank you for your interest!  We recently acquired a new challenge to our water management situation - a small housing development upstream which is dumping more run-off into our place.  I have a plan to slow and divert it with new brush dams, but have not started that project.

In regards to the 3 year old question on creating ponds in the humid NE, I guess my response would be depends, mostly depending on what lies below the surface. Our place in the humid NE is almost entirely on sand that goes down to eventually gravel then bedrock. Despite that we have a line down the center of the property that is traditionally wet, I.e. vernal woodland ponds that currently, or recently had standing water. We have watched these low, wet areas for a long time and have observed years where they are full all year around and have seen years where there is no water at all. We recently observed due to the exceptional amount of rain the last year not only are all the low areas full, some low areas of our field were also full of water and we realized that these areas of the field extend in a line from the traditional areas. Recent dry weeks have allowed most of the wet areas to drain out (nothing flows, just drains into the ground).

Looking at old 1948 aerial photo (below) that have been annotated with blue pen to denote water, we have puzzled over the markings until recently when we observed wet areas corresponding with the annotations. Also interestingly, we have found trenches radiating out from the wet areas that obviously were intentioned to drain the water away into a ravine. We can get a fairly good idea as to when this was done because trees have grown up in the unattended trenches that provide proof of the age of the trenches.

My suspicion is if we went into these traditional wet areas did any digging that would be the end of any water retention (that I believe results from the decomposition of leaf litter over the millennia into a form of gray muck ), at least until we took extraordinary measures. There could be a dome of water under the area that raises and lowers as the water exfiltrates to adjacent areas and eventually to the many weeps we have in the ravines surrounding the area.

That said, we have no intention of doing anything with these vernal woodland ponds and have been protecting them and the upland approach to them to encourage the frogs and salamanders who make them their home. Honestly, even if it is legal, I think if you have a natural water feature on your land such as ours, inhabited by amphibians I would think long and hard about going in with a bulldozer and messing around with it, given the way they are disappearing from our landscape.

It begs the question, other than for flood control, recreation or for visual landscapes, or to create a natural aquatic environment where there is none, are there good reasons to come in with equipment to try to create ponds when you have 40-50 inches of rain coming down annually and have a huge shallow aquifer 25 foot under the ground and otherwise few issues with erosion.