This is Brad's presentation from the Eat Your Dirt summit. To get all the presentations, click Here
About Brad
Brad Lancaster is the author of the award-winning Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond and co-founder of DesertHarvesters.org. Since 1993 Brad has run a successful permaculture education, design, and consultation business focused on integrated regenerative approaches to landscape design, planning, and living. In the Sonoran Desert, with just 11 inches of annual rainfall, he and his brother harvest about 100,000 gallons of rainwater a year on an eighth-acre urban lot and adjoining right-of-way.
This harvested water is then turned into living air conditioners of food-bearing shade trees, abundant gardens, and a thriving landscape incorporating wildlife habitat, beauty, medicinal plants, and more. The goal of his book series and overall work is to empower his clients and community to make positive change in their own lives and neighborhoods—by harvesting and enhancing free on-site resources such as water, sun, wind, shade, community, and more. It’s catching on, as evidenced by tens of thousands of practitioners and demand for Brad’s work around the world.
Fun Fact: He drinks and cooks and washes dishes with rainwater harvested from his 400 sq ft roof, and plants the resulting gold- and greywater in the soil to irrigate multi-use vegetation.
I watched the long and detailed presentation--it was fantastic! I'm working with several organizations to try to create a "community garden" in a rocky wasteland underneath power lines and below some railroad tracks. The idea is to create an edible-landscape, food-forest that captures rain from a brand new street/bike path above the tracks. But there are 4 months of no appreciable rain here...
So we're pondering deep hugelkulturwood reservoirs in the pits to stretch out the water retention might almost cover the dry spell. trees have grown without irrigation in this land on a part of it that once had a house, But the half mile plot is also just above a river that was carved by the ice-age floods, so river rock is about half the "soil".
When we get the books, "everything" should be clear. But we wonder if sealing the bottom of the non-tree-containing hugelkultur pits would help conserve water? Where trees are, of course the pits wouldn't be sealed.
Meanwhile, we'll read the books...
Thanks.
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