Bill J Price

I have both a normal square box calendar and the 2015 round calendar I downloaded from here last year on the wall by my desk at work. The round calendar starts a lot of conversations. I have noted folks in my cube stating that they feel it is easier to follow the year in the round. I have been crossing out the weeks as they go by. This has created a spiral effect thus making it look the the calendar is in motion. All in all, I like it much better. I suppose it will depend on your alignment with the Wheel of the Year. You could have one just because it looks cool We could make it a Permie thing. "Oh look, they have a round calendar on the wall. They must be Permies."

Luke, I am no expert in swale design, so I will tell you what I have learned and observed. There is no perfect set of rules for designing swales. You will need to observe your land and its contours. How does the water/rain you are getting move across the land? Are you getting runoff from an adjacent piece of property? How close or how far apart may very well depend on how much land you have to work with and what you would like to do with it. I put in about 1600 linear feet of swales on my place. Image a piece of land about 300 feet wide and 600 feet long. Due to lay of the land my swlaes kind of run diagonally across this portion of the property following the contour of the land. I put in 3 swales and each is a bit different in running length. They very in width here and there and each one is a bit different in depth. We calculate when full, all three are holding roughly a total of 640,000 gallons of water. The locations I set the three swlaes was based somewhat on where the old conservation terraces had been. I drew out what I was wanting to see and then having a good conversation with my Permaculture Mentor I plotted them out. The middle swale is about 70 feet downhill from the first swale and the third swale is between 40 and 50 feet from the middle one. Here again, no magic formula. I just observed what the land was telling me what it wanted to do. I have a good deal of clay in the soil. At first it took a long time for the water to seep into the ground. Now after almost fours years the water seeps a little be better each time we get a rain event. I think your seepage is going to depend on what type of soil you have to work with. I hope this helps. Good luck with your project. I bet you will do a great job designing yours

A swale on a 1 % slope will allow you to move water further, perhaps to places that are in need of water. It is not necessarily a catch system anymore putting water into the ground.

June works for me except June 27 and 28. I will be doing solar cooking demos at the Quindaro Gardens, 3027 N 11th Street, Kansas City, Kansas, during the Cultivate Kansas City Urban Grown Tour.

If we can put together a group we might get a better price.

Maysville is about 1.5 hours from our part of town Ryan. I have his video. I may consider going.

Ryan, That is looking really good. I hear the folks at MO Organic are pretty nice to work with.

Here is my thought on the invasive Russian and Autumn Olive. Do you intend to keep the area mowed or grazed by livestock? Plants become invasive when we forgot about them or put them in a place on the property that we are not going to tend to on a regular basis. The Russian and Autumn Olive can be good for the soil and can be part of some pretty good food products. So you can decide this one just by deciding if you are going to keep the area where they are growing mowed to limit or stop all suckers from getting a firm hold on the land and then earning that title of "Invasive". If you let them know you have a plan to keep them under control you should be OK. I have had some of that Autumn Olive Jam from Autumn Berry Inspired. Perhaps the DoF needs a jar of this so they know the value this tree can have.

from Facebook - shameless plug for my friends there.
https://www.facebook.com/AutumnBerryInspired

We will be collecting rainwater from the roof of our Earthship. In our part of Kansas we typically get 35+ inches of moisture a year. We are going to try and collect as much as we can to store in under ground cisterns. I think we still need to run the overflow out to the swales and eventually into a pond. Using the grey water for the toilet is part of the way the Earthship grey water system is designed to work. We will plumb the toilet to be able to run on either the grey water or pull from the the rain water in the cisterns. There is still some concern as to how clean the grey water is to be bringing into the house to use in the toilet. Some particulates and a bit of odor. Time will tell. It is amazing how much water one can collect from the roof. We will have a metal pro-panel roof so we can actually use the rain water for everyday use after it has been filtered. There are a lot of roofing materials that do not lend themselves to using the rain water from your roof for anything other than outside irrigation. Sicne all of our water will come from the roof we will probably even run some of it out to water the livestock, but that is a couple of years down the lane yet.

So most of us are familiar with the Earthship design of Michael Reynolds. Yes, there are those that like his ideas and those that don't. He has a pretty good grey water setup in the solarium, front part of the Earthship design. Simple yet effective. Reuses the water from this system to flush the toilet. Since this works so well why do municipalities work so hard to keep us from using this type of technology? There are few moving parts. It is all on site. We move no waste products off the property through miles n miles of drain pipe. There is no billion dollar infrastructure using up our tax dollar. The Earthship does send out the black water to the septic, from the toilets and the kitchen sink. But here again, Mike Reynolds has demonstrated that even this water can be cleaned through a grey water type cell. Granted this water is then kept outside. It is used to water non-edible food bearing plants. This concept might not work well for apartment type structures or places where there are large masses of people, or maybe with some good engineering it might.

So those of you out there already in an Earthship style home or others who are processing your own grey water onsite... What do you see as the pros and cons?