Nancy Hedberg

Love the fence idea!  I'm doing something with my fire mitigation slash as well.  Attached is the link to another premies page.  https://permies.com/t/40130/Southern-Colorado-permaculture

Hi all, Tate Smith, I knew I had heard your name before.  Saw your website sometime when I was researching my own project.  "Biomass Waddles" sounds so much more intellectual than my "Berm thingies" does.

Hi Yolanda, I'm in the Westcliffe area, if you have any questions!

I wanted to share with all of you my photos that I've FINALLY decided to post.  They are on another Permies discussion, so here is the link:  https://permies.com/t/40130/Southern-Colorado-permaculture

Another Google earth view of our pasture area with the sediment pond close to the road in upper left hand side.  Two buried slash berms radiate out.  We had started driving down the center of the is pasture when we first moved here and the two track caused horrible erosion.  Now we are trying to rectify that by filling in the tracks, diverting the water etc.  Lower picture is of how I built the hugelkulture berms.  Starting with longer branches, then with pine needles gathered from around large trees.  As we have livestock, covered that with composted manure.  The lower berm was in a soft soil area, so hand dug a swale as well.

You might have too many contour swales when you can see them from space.  To the left of the house, you can see some of the contour lines created by slash and duff.

Photos of my rock check dams in a small ravine.  The more on contour berms, rock check dams I create, the less sediment I see downhill and the more grass I see growing where it didn't grow before.

More pictures of some more of my on contour slash berm things.  Some are buried some are not.  They all seem to be filtering sediment.

We also have a pretty deep ravine possibly similar to Bob Becker 's, where he is attempting gabions.  I will not attempt to put anything like my slash berms or gab ions as I have seen how powerful the water can get going through there.  What I have experimented with is a small section of one rock dams and I think it looks promising as they didn't get washed away.  

I have recently starting creating large crescent shaped berms made of slash and duff.  My husband is standing in one I created below our house.  This area gets a lot of runoff from our house and our driveway.  You can see how high the water was and how deep the sediment captured is.