Canyon Cassidy

Sure, what is your climate?

If you can, trap all run off into a sunken hugel/s that is on contour and then add another hugel down slope also on contour-not necessarily sunken. The goal is to ensure that no runoff every escapes down slope. If the grade coming into the area is steep you may need to slow it all down with stone, like contour bunds or one rock dams.

A great guide for the low profile stone structures is the Quivira Coalition Erosion Control Field Guide

Once the flow is slower it is much easier to control, Hugels can be incorporated with stone features like filters, situated down slope from the stone features where the water flow is slow.

Coconut milk has a ton of uses, you can cook your oats in them, like risotto oats. Or you can make a coconut curry. Basil, lime leaves, various peppers and a mix of spice is my usual goto. Coconut naturally mixes well with chocolate, so it goes well in baking anything chocolate in place of water or cow milk. Cooking polenta with coconut milk can be good as well. If on the sweet side date syrup, chocolate and coconut milk or cream is a pretty good mix.

Weeds! All those fast growing pioneers can be the best compost material you can find and it's local.

I had an accidental success with pumpkins using sheet mulch. In fall I started to revive an old garden by adding a large swath of card board over food scraps placed over the old dried out garden bed and added stick mulch over the top (3x30 ft or so). In Spring there were volunteer squash plants sprouting from the edge of the sheet mulch. The roots fanned out through the season while being protected by the sheet and stick mulch. That squash was so productive I ate squash about everyday into the next year. I took this on as an intended method the next season, placing pumpkins at the edge of sheet mulch. Very productive healthy plants that seem to need less watering!

Braided Canes:

In early Spring, or anytime cane shoots are soft and movable begin to weave them into a braid.
The braid of canes later shades the fruiting branches and as you braid through the seasons the fruit gets better and better. The whole weave becomes a structure so it can bear larger fruit in bigger numbers. Because you are pulling all the cane shoots into a controlled shaped it is also easier to maintenance and harvest. After a few seasons when the braid gets heavier it can slump, especially in snow country. The braid can be to pulled from the ends, allowing you to reshape the entire braid when needed. For example: after the fruit sets, in Spring when cane shoots get lanky, or in early Spring if the braid has been smushed by a snow load.

I wrote a blog post that describes Braided Canes in detail here =>  https://nomadgardens.com/wp/braided-canes/

*You will save yourself a lot of labor and plenty scratches if you use the right tools like a Japanese sickle(or something similar) and a rock rake to grab canes or vines. Japanese sickles are built to make precise cuts with ease, the serrated sickle curve does all the work. Hold onto a bunch of a canes/vines in one hand then pull then over the blade and hold pressure up against them with the blade hand. It makes easy work and you can sculpt and shape most woody plants and hedges etc. good tool to have on hand.

Sometimes, and almost always before the heat in Spring. Typically this coincides with a yearly worm-tower harvest, the tower provides an annual surplus of worm castings and effluent. When thinned out that rich effluent is very good at providing a boost to Spring plants with a protective barrier and colloidal mineral feed while temperatures are lower and the sun is out.

If one is managing a border, when a weedy season comes it is also a great biomass boost so if you can catch it before it goes fully brown you just gained a ton of compost potential. Finding the simplest chopping method can suite the situation when you are against the clock and the days are warming fast. One concept is to look at where the fire threat overlaps with weedy patches. Then position the summer watering(gardens) and water features(ponds or other smaller features) between that spot (the most prominent sector zone-threats overlap  points). Like the windy and hot side where weedy seeds blow in and hit a fence or some other obstacle. One might look to manage outside the fence to chop it all and bury all of it. How it gets buried it could be as simple as in a small pit or a series of vermitrenches or in swale bottoms. Any way you can get it all plugged in before it gets hot. You will safe yourself a ton of toil if you get it before it goes brown and you would also be eliminating a sh-ton of invasive seed. As a bonus all that packed in nutrient and energy gets put back into the ground before the growing season is fully hot. Bury don't burn!

Has anyone tested how much carbon is in the soil before they ran the EM tests? As a baseline?
Cheers!

Fascinating project to work on! The Columbia Gorge host a bunch of a rare micro climates and has an of enormous size, the marine effect travels inland quite far and encompasses the river valley and a portion of it's adjacent hills and peaks.  There is literally a small place above the river by Klickitat named "Swale, WA". The peaks above the river have stands of oak, those peaks only a get small amount of snow in the winter. There are species along the river corridor that only exists there!

I had heard some good advice about range lands some years back that stuck with me, and that is to focus the presentation around fire and flood protection.
Then stack functions for wildlife access into that fire and flood mainframe. The concept is simple, but can be complex depending on land use and topology.
For example, on the south side of the Columbia in Oregon, there is ongoing year to year fire scar progression in those hills, the trend is likely encouraged by previous land uses(Ag and grazing). But is is getting worse in a fast pace, climate warming is accelerating the fire threat on both sides of the Columbia. Repeated wildfire causes more erosion and pollution directly into the river.

Planting regimes might also include fire-resistant species, so one can centralize the fire/flood mitigation effort and simplify presentation to land managers.
That means annual management includes reduction of fire-ignition prone places-targeting species like invasive habit species like canary grass, then the biomass can be added to  hugelkultured in place.  So that maintenance task could be a annual chop n drop into hugels and seeding of native replacement species. Activities like this would be generally simple to track, report to land managers as well.

Lovely progress so far!