J Campbell

We have a Moringa farm where we grow Moringa commercially between Cuero and Victoria Texas. Sunny Huang of Moringa Garden is in the Bastrop Texas area and she sales Moringa Products and has a nursery.
  The reason I wanted to point these two locations out is that even those these locations are not that far apart distance wise, the micro-climate difference between the locations are significant because of the geography and we both have businesses based on the Moringa tree.  
Depending on the position of the Bermuda High, Southern Ridge, and the ENSO cycle for any given year our location close to the Texas coastline puts us in 9b. Bastrop will fluctuate between a 8b and 9a.  Because of the 8b to 9a possibility of a hard freeze killing Moringa down to the ground, Sunny imports almost all of her moringa from India to have a reliable source. Sunny has one of the greenest thumbs I have even seen.. and she does grow some Moringa herself.. but there is a reason she imports the majority of her Moringa... that 8b to 9a makes it too risky for her to make a business out of local grown Moringa.
Our farm in my opinion has the opposite problem. We rarely get freezes, but do get light frosts. So we do take action to winterize our Moringa trees as best we can. We can expect to lose some branches/ limbs to frost and light freezes but have not experienced any root kill from freezing where we are.  We have lost Moringa trees because of the extreme heat. Most people will tell you that Moringa trees are both heat and drought tolerant.. and I am here to tell you they are only to a certain point. Having visited Moringa tree farms in the Philippines where these trees thrive, I can tell you they do well in tropic and sub-tropic temperatures where the heat index does not exceed about 103'F.  In Cebu the last two years they had heat waves that reached 118'F and they experienced a lot of tree loss. Down here in South Texas this close to the coastline we regularly experience 105'F to 119'F heat indexes for more than 90 days out of the summer with very little rain. This combination of heat and humidity with low rainfall kills Moringa.  What ends up happening is that the leaf curls itself closed to avoid sun scorch and protect itself against evaporative water loss. When the leaves spend a majority of their time closed during the day time.. the tree stops growing. A young Moringa tree that cuts itself off like this, will eventually die.  Mature Moringa trees can usually survive our summer heat indexes without loss, but they also almost completely stop growing between late June and October.
 So my recommendation is that if you want to grow one or two Moringa trees for your own personal use/ enjoyment put them in containers that you upsize and repot every year. Protect them from hard freezes by bringing them in in the winter, and if you are south of Waco but east of I35 .. in the summer place the pots in sunny spots that get shade between 4:00pm and 7:00pm.  I would not recommend anyone attempt to grow large quantities of Moringa trees unless they can put them in a high tunnel controlled environment OR have a unique micro-climate like we do on our farm.. even then expect to have to do a lot of work to protect the tree from possible extremes from year to year.

@Joseph Lofthouse
I like the idea of coble stones, in the vein of something like an ancient french drain. The only issue that would bring up is that bunching stones around here tend to act like a mulch and produce huge patches of weeds which are then hard to control in rocks without spraying.
Any thoughts on making that in a way that would prevent weeks from taking root?

We recently completed a series of newly installed swales on our property. The swales are each between 150 ft to 300 ft long, 4 feet wide, and 18 inches deep. Each swale has an overflow spillway that directs overflow into the next swale, down slope. The swales are all spaced 40 feet apart. We estimated these new swales can hold a combine total of about 40,000 to 50,000 gallons of water if completley full. Our average rainfall amount is around 40 inches a year, so we never imagined the swales would ever be full. Less than a week after completing the swales we had a monsoon rain event over a two week period that dropped 20 inches of rain. That is half our annual rain fall, in just two weeks. While this is somewhat a rather extreme event, the swales held beautifully and did their job of capturing, slowing, and soaking.... until the overflow went over the spillway lips. At each sill point there was so much water rushing over the spillway and flowing down into the next swale that it cut deep revines in the landscape and dumped a lot of sediment into the next down slope swale.
Even though this is somewhat of an extreme event, can anyone think of something I could do to cut down  on the soil erosion and slowdown overflow from the  spillway before the water flow dumps into the next swale?

Thanks for any advise.
Jason