Baruch Kogan

Hi, all,

I live in the Samarian Highlands of Israel. I started a permaculture nursery last year and it's gone well so far. Because I don't have a ton of cash, I just got a truckload of soil from a dry riverbed, which was full of terra rossa with lots of organic matter. I used that to fill growbags and put them in beds I bordered with limestone I split, and ran irrigation lines with sprayers through them. I grew several hundred black locust, tagasaste, moringa, loquat, Asian apple pear, acacia nilotica and faidherbia ana seedlings in them from seed.

This year, I am looking at planting several thousand seedlings, mostly black locust and oak, with some more of the above on the edges. With that said, I have two questions:

1. Would hamra, our local sandy loam, be a good growing medium for seedlings? At least as good as the terra rossa? I will be transplanting them to a permanent planting site by next winter, so they will only be there for one growing season.

2. What are options for filling lots of bags quickly? The low tech solution would be to make something like an EZ-Bagger, which is a sort of handheld shovel scoop you put the bag over the back of, so that you can fill bags with a single motion. The high tech solution would be something mechanical. I am seeing bag filling machines on Ali Express for about $5000 US, before import taxes, which is quite high for me. Anything in the middle?

I have lots of porous rocks and terra rossa.

Hello,

I'm doing a land restoration project in the Samarian highlands and am thinking about putting in a pond. There is a flat-ish ledge of land that is about 10m across that would be okay. However, our terrain is very porous (there is zero above-ground water, unless it rains for several days, and then the water is gone quickly.) I am wondering what the appropriate way to build a pond in such conditions is. I have access to used billboards, and can also bring in bentonite clay. Thoughts?

To go from the highest terrace to my project would mean building about 400 meters worth of terrace.

Boars will bite through irrigation pipe and roll in the mud produced (we are on limestone here, there is no standing or running water anywhere unless there's a rainstorm, and then at most for a day or two.)

Pipe is surface laid, not dug in.

I really don't want to build a 600m long fence.

My situation is that I want to do most of my growing on the slopes above the wadi, not in the wadi itself. The area gets decent rainfall half the year, and those slopes are overgrown with thorns and briars. Because of the steepness of the wadi, significant portions of those slopes sit below its upper/mid portions. So while I will probably use gabion check dams to spread out the flow and catch silt (and maybe grow vegetables on the silt in the rainless half of the year,) I need to think about how to get that water that runs off collected and piped across the slope (building hundreds of meters of terraces/swales is not currently an option because of manpower and budget restrictions.) I can see lots of ruined Second Temple period terraces, and some of them do seem like they once served this function, but rebuilding them is outside my grasp right now...

The area I'm working is right below snow line (we get snow up top almost every winter.) Will vetiver grass do well there?

I live in the Samarian Highlands of Israel and am doing a reforestation project. I've got 600 meters of HDPE 25mm hose running down the mountain, then connecting to 16mm irrigation line with drippers.

We have a huge wild hog problem, and I'm thinking of ways to protect the hose. Burying it is impractical and the pigs dig it up anyway. What if I wrap the main line with barbed wire-would that work? Would it work for the irrigation line, or would that just puncture it?

Thank you, great answer. Will research and implement.

>single layer rock checkdams

Just dry rock?

> wire-fence checkdam

What is the difference between this and gabions?

>Springs are likely to show up downhill anyway. Especially if a bit of bedrock is exposed.

What's a good way to capture this water and move it across the slope, do you think?

With gabions, they will fail eventually with the wire eroding. What happens then?