jill giegerich wrote:One of the problems is that I put this first swale at the bottom of my land instead of starting at the top.
I would say that you've identified one of the key problems right there. There's nothing along almost all of your property to stop any sediment that already has been picked up so you are overloading that one swale with everything coming down the hill. If you do decide to go forward with putting in the two other swales I would highly recommend putting the first one pretty close to the high point on your land and then put the third in the middle. Is the land suitable for Yeoman style keyline ripping? If it is you might consider doing that in between the swales to help increase infiltration and slow down that runoff. Get that water to infiltrate instead of sheet runoff and you will greatly diminish how much sediment gets deposited in your swales.
Depending on what the watershed looks like coming into your property you're probably going to have to deal with regular sediment buildup at the
top of your property wherever you first slow down the incoming flow of water. You can design with this in mind and make a settling
pond or similar area that's easily accessible for when you do have to clean out the built up sediment. Seems to me that one of the more difficult things to deal with in desert areas isn't so much the water that falls on your land but the the water (and what it brings) that comes onto your land from your neighbor's land and beyond.
Another difficult thing that I've found is dealing with that beginning time when I don't have very many systems in place so there's not even that many elements working together yet, everything seems a lot harder than how they show them working in the
books and videos. The thing I try to keep in mind when all that starts getting me down is the fact that books and videos are showing
functioning systems and I'm dealing with
beginning systems, a lot of them without the network of support systems around them that are present in the functioning designs that I'm patterning my designs after. So I guess what I'm trying to get at in my long-winded way is: Yeah, it kind of sucks that your getting sediment buildup and that's making more work for you but don't give up hope yet, you still have a lot of room for building up those support systems that will start to give you more and more chances to stack functions and reduce effort.
Oh, and by the way, where's the pictures? We looove pictures of swales around here!