Permaculture swale - Construction

Welcome to another episode of the Be Prepared Channel. In this episode I show you how I dug my permaculture swale, cardboard sheet mulched, wood chip mulched, layered on thick layer of manure, sprinkled on a layer of peat moss, leaf litter and mulched wood and turned it into the bed/swale. Then topped it off with some finished compost. I hope you find these videos helpful. I appologize up front for the sound quality. The wind was howling here for the last couple of days and made recording as I went kinda tough.

The swale was dug across the hill of my yard so that we capture all the rainwater as it flows down hill. The objective is to dig out a depression that retains the water as it comes down the hill. We have layered on like a lasagna multiple layers of biomass to absorb all of that moisture possible. I live in a high plains desert and the soil is hard as a rock with no biomass or organic matter in the soil. A pick axe just bounces off of this stuff so hand digging it with a shovel and pick axe takes a lot of time and effort. Hopefully this first completed swale works as planned. I will probably put a layer of straw on top of it to suppress weeds and other growth until it is finally warm enough here to put seed and plants into these beds.

We will be working with several raised beds and a hugelkultur bed this year that I will show you as we construct them in the next few weeks. So we have lots of projects to share with you. I hope you find these videos informative and helpful.