Establishing orchard - to swale or not to swale?

Discussion in 'Designing, building, making and powering your life' started by nchattaway, Jul 25, 2011.

  1. matto

    matto Junior Member

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    Im working with Cam now at the Mulloon Insitute and we were talking about David Holmgren's place. He decided not to swale Melliadora because the main rains there come in the winter time when the majority of his trees are dormant and will not utilise the water.
    This could be offset as has been mentioned with keyline ripping toward the ridge and putting hardier species out on these areas.
    Soil type will determine the amount of water that will be held in the ground and creating good soil structure with the keyline ripping and groundcover will help in establishing your orchard.
    Sounds an interesting project. Is the area under the Keyline plan too far for practicality, essentially trees are a major part of the plan and are designed well into the whole.
    Keep us posted!
     
  2. barefootrim

    barefootrim Junior Member

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    Dear nchattaway,

    this has been one of the best questions posted on the forum for some time,

    as with permaculture, and land management, its in choosing the most appropriate technique for the given ground and climate conditions.

    to build a swale for the sake that it is popular or a permie thing to do,,, is not a good enough reason to build one. Its a dryland technique, its a technique that works but not the best technique for every given situation. However, since you have a tractor with a grader plough, and it cheap and convenient for you,,,then why not do a few of them as part of your plan.

    Experiment. you cant really loose. But for me, particularly with clay ground then keyline has many benefits. the problem with keyline is not enough people do it really.

    As a further experiment, you say you have potted nut and fruit trees that may have to stay over until next season,,,,why not put a half dozen in to your new swale that is holding water to see how they go? If it gets too dry over Dec / Jan ,,then you have to do a few buckets of water,,,, but it would be interesting to see if this new swale and the recent rain is holding enough water for them in the first year. The whole universe is an experiement.

    What ever it is you do,,,, just aim for 100% water infiltration,,, and 100% vegetation cover of bare earth.

    All the best,
    Barefootrim
     
  3. nchattaway

    nchattaway Junior Member

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    Hello again,
    I thought I'd resurrect this post from two years ago. I've been busy adding to our family since I first posted (2 new daughters!) and so it has taken me this long to get this orchard properly underway. I did plant 6 fruit trees along the first swale back in 2011, but even with regular buckets of water through summer, we lost 4 of them and the other 2 were very sick looking. So, we definitely needed additional irrigation.

    Since my first post, we've got the windmill pumping from the dam to the header tank, I've dug all the swales on contour and tidied up the mounds on the low side where I have now finished planting our first batch of around 60 assorted fruit trees. I managed to get David Holmgren to come and do a full property design consult for me in 2012, which gave me confidence. He was happy with the location and layout of this orchard area, thought the swales would be fine and recommended tagasaste interplant and raised dripper poly lines along each swale.

    I've almost finished installing these dripper lines now. It took a while because we had to put 3 x 40mm poly main pipe runs into a central trench of around 160m length, between the header tanks (one for irrigation, one for our house water) and a new main storage tank at the bottom of the orchard. It is a lovely spacious trench, all dug by hand. Filling it back in will be hard work. I have copied David Holmgren's irrigation design from his Melliodora eBook, using 25mm low pressure poly for sub main lines and 19mm poly with 4L per hour emitters (2 per tree) along each swale. I don't really know if I will need air bleed valves or any of that high tech stuff to make it all flow properly.

    After grading the swales, I hand broadcast a mix of barley and vetch seeds to try and stabilise the earthworks and outcompete the phalaris pasture grass and daisies that pop up everywhere in disturbed soil around my place. This seems to have worked fairly well. And the chooks have taken a liking to free ranging around in the lush new growth. Luckily we only have 10 chooks so far, or they'd probably wreck our young trees.
     
  4. eco4560

    eco4560 New Member

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    Sounds great! There's definitely a reason why my PDC said that water is always the first thing to plan for in your design. Sounds like you've got that sorted now so it should be onwards and upwards.
     
  5. nchattaway

    nchattaway Junior Member

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    Hi all, a further update for any who might be interested. I lost nearly half of my first winter's bare root tree planting. They just never blossomed in the spring. Last winter 2014 I replaced these trees with new ones, and found that the ground was waterlogged not too far below the mound on the low side of each swale. It seems I had planted my trees too deeply the first time around, and the standing water while the trees were dormant must have rotted the roots and killed them.

    I planted the replacement trees in a larger mound on the low side of the swale, and this spring we've had a far better survival rate. I lost just 1 tree compared to 29 last year.

    The swales are a tremendous benefit whenever we receive a deluge rain event during the growing season. This doesn't happen all that often in the Adelaide Hills, but I would say it's increasingly happening, and probably even more likely in the future.

    But, in winter, when most of our trees are dormant, this water is not useful at all, and may prevent our Tagasaste interplant nurse trees from getting established. I also suspect that the swales are causing more groundwater further down the ridge, where we've recently constructed a root cellar at huge cost. Last winter, we had about 1500mm of groundwater flood into the cellar from the open sump. So, I'm either going to need to dig a drainage trench (3m down!) along the high side of the cellar, or rely on an electric sump pump through the winter.

    I may need to open the ends of each swale, to divert winter water away from our cellar, and invent some form of valve to close them during the fruit growing season.

    There seems to be many more variables and cause/effect relationships than the textbooks cover. Experimentation for fine tuning in your own place is the only way forward!
     
  6. eco4560

    eco4560 New Member

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    Nothing like a bit of trial and error to sort it out!
     
  7. S.O.P

    S.O.P Moderator

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    Didn't Holmgren advocate against swales in wet Winter climates for that very reason? Either he or one of the other bigger Permaculture names...
     

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