Annual avg. 1600mm per year

Thanks for the feedback. I changed the image as I can see how it may have been confusing.

Interesting, thanks for the comment. The dry outside is perfectly fine. It's the core that's important, the core is where all the heat and moisture is. The thick dry sides act as insulation, it's actually what keeps the biology contained, moist and healthy.

Thanks! appreciate your feedback.

Plenty of water up your way right now! Catch and store energy - that's the game right. Your plants will convert that water you catch into sugars, then leaf tissue, converting that water into stored energy. Try QLD Arrowroot, it's a great mop when there is excess water around, it'll convert water to bio mass (green mulch) to feed back (chop & drop) very quickly into the system. Also, sweet potato, pumpkin and comfrey all do well in wet times. Northern Rivers.

Thanks! Appreciate your feedback.

Hi, thanks for your lovely comment and detailed question. It may be a longer answer than I can cover here (maybe I can film an answer for you). If you look at my youtube 'simplest composting' this will help some what. The 3 bays we have are to process humanure using the Joseph Jenkins method. You should get his book if you want to understand and master composting. It will open your mind to the potential of compost that you would be unaware of. There is nothing we cannot compost through our system, period. One rule: if it lived, it will live again. Which means anything of organic substance i.e. not plastic, steel, tyres etc. You can compost, meat, humanure, animals, animal feces, kitchen scraps, garden scraps you name it. We have wild, rats, possums, bandicoots, mice, foxes, wild dogs etc. non of them have ever been evidenced in our compost system, not once!....you know what, I'll just make a film for this question, it will be easier for us both. Look out for it shortly. Tera Preta looks great but compost with course sand (maybe some bio-char) would be hard to beat for qaulity and least effort. Also, it may help if you stop using the word 'waste'. That's why we say humanure (not human waste) or kitchen scraps (not kitchen waste). Because in a closed loop Permaculture home economy we dont produce waste! Permaculture Principle - 6 Produce no waste

Thanks John, maybe you could photograph it one day!

It would make a nice fish pond! However for now it will be a hard surface to place a trampoline for our son. It will also be able to be used to place a large bell tent or just place a fire pit for gatherings. It has many possibilities but for now it's just some enjoyment for our son. A pond would be the ultimate evolution of this space but it can be adapted at any time...

@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047 Love and prayers for your son. And we hope you update more often and that your son carries the legacy and my 4 years old son can leave a positive comment on this channel if fate has it. Keep it up.

@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047 An adaptable space🎯. The trampoline itself is a wonderful space and so enjoyable for a child and adults alike.

Thanks for your detailed comment and your flood story of the 2022 floods. That was a rain event that will never be forgotten! We had 770ml fall in 24hrs and a total of 2000ml+ in just 7days! Our annual avg. is 1600mm. We have alot of wildlife here on our 2acre site. They all benifit from the water bodies, specifically - frogs (thousands!), huge amount of insect life in the water its self. We get wild ducks visiting, lots of native birds and wallabys too. But most of all the plants and gardens benifit the most from the micro climate they create and the stable moisture levels in the subsoils (especially the grasses around and below the ponds. You can easily build above ground ponds on rocky ground with liners. Bentonite impregnated geo-fabric I think is the best semi natural liner for these situations as the bentonite is self healing if damaged. I will eventually turn the small soakage ponds (1000-2000lts) in the orchard into permanent wildlife/micro climate ponds.

@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047 see, so much engagement if you just post updates.

@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047 thank you for your reply. All of those wildlife visitors and residents of your ponds would be amazing to experience each day. Thank you for your detailed walk through s ….I have researched bentonite (and saw it was used for pool leaks)and successfully used bentonite for my hydrophobic sandy “soil” ….back in from the top of the cliff part- the cliff is the edge of a sandstone plateau starting 5 houses up the plateau from me. My block is 10 meters wide and 40 long…..with a 3 meter cliff down the middle of it front to back. I would have to figure any pond to be smallish (as high on the block as I can to use gravity seeping….) Thank you, will look up your suggestion with geo textile impregnated with bentonite. I already have GRUNT 1 x 10m Non Woven Geotextile Membrane Drain Mat Fabric if that is suitable? I would really love something just like the way you have sculpted your land to make use of every conceivable resource🔥🔥🔥………so beautifully with it flowing (water and nutrients) into a multitude of tiers. Finding your steep site channel and what you have done with your site specific swales and infrastructure on a steep block has been really enthralling. Hopefully all was well and no roof leaks with 2,000mls in one week ,yeeks (I used to live and work in Borneo and monsoons were always meters and meters of rain…each raindrop splash as big as a diner plate)……had you finished your infrastructure and swales and overflows in March last year? Have you ever made biochar to “set” your compost and orchard soils from leeching in the wets?

Thank you! Cheers!

Thanks 👍

@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047 You really update very, very rarely. You have no idea how hungry KZfaq audience is for your content. Make a video like this every time it rains and you become a millionaire (if not already blessed) within a year. This kind of content has hungry Audience and you are starving us. Just keep recording. Amen and Namaste from India 🇮🇳.

@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047 Rain plus earthworks plus recording while it’s raining. That’s the “essence” of your channel. Keep at it. It can’t ever get repetitive. It’s always inspiring. Look at your views on your videos.

Good on you! It's black gold, it really is! Turning it 3-4 times once full over 3-4wks will accelerate the development.

I believe it could. But watch the tomatoes more carefully and make sure that doing it everyday isn't making them too wet (maybe every 2nd day for tomatoes). The reason spot watering works on the trees is because it is done everyday even though you just use a little water (which makes it very quick to do many trees). What is happening is the wicking action of the soil starts working after just a few days. Now what started out as a little moisture at the base of the stem (trunk) is now everyday spreading out further and deeper. So you actually are wetting a larger area than you think if you do it over a number of days or even weeks if things are really dry. I emphasise though that spot watering only works where there is a heavily mulched bowl shaped area around the base of the plant or tree, with out this evaporation would counter the effects. Also for trees you should use a fungal based mulch such as forest mulch and for vegetables like tomatoes use a bacterial based mulch like straw. Either way the mulch should be 100-150mm for vegetables and 200-250mm for trees.

Wow! This is intense what you are describing and some serious observations. This is a classic case of "the solution becomes the problem". Wet soils cause poor harvest which leads to putting in excessive drainage - excessive drainage leads to - water table receding, water table receding and soils drying out lead back to poor harvest. If we lived in a 95% wet humid climate we would apply wet climate strategies. Likewise, if we lived in a 95% dry climate, we would apply dry climate strategies. But when it is 50% dry 50% wet humid the complexity of design elements becomes very apparent, you have to have nuanced approach now. Thorough and slow observation will prevail in the end, we must apply action and then accept the feedback. Done thoroughly enough over time a pattern of design elements will emerge and become the signature of that sight. This then becomes a model for other sites nearby or with very similar elements to apply. This sites biggest challenge has always been catching and storing large rainfalls that have huge potential to get us through the hot dry cycles and prolonged droughts but reduce the risk from damage of that excessive water flow in peak flooding that can cause errosion, landslides and wash out fertility. The balance that we've found is like this - We like to be a little bit wet when it's wet and a little bit dry when its dry. This way we mitigate the extremes. If we just went for maximum water to combat the dry we would be too wet in the wet. If we just went for maximum dryness in the wet we would way to dry in the dry...

@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047 Great descriptions of our problems and approach you have for your piece of land. Proves the point, that probably the most important thing is to identify problems that we have and then come up with a good plan to mitigate as much of them as we can. Cheers, and keep the videos coming!

@@deXXXXter2 When I think more about your problems in Poland, I wonder if it was a case of misdiagnosis of seeing the excess water as the problem. By this I mean, when we look at the chinampas of south America we see that too much water is not an issue - they have some of the most fertile and productive feilds on the planet. However, they have huge amount of sun hours to convert that water into plant tissue. My point is that maybe in Poland it wasn't a case of too much water that was causing reduced harvest but rather not enough sun hours to convert that water into plant tissue. In this case they would have maybe been better off adapting to the too much water by using plants and trees suitable to those conditions, then the eco-system would be better balanced to suit it's condition, climate and environmental limits. The point being, if we identify and adapt to a problem rather than try to erase it we may look to ways to enhance and compound the problem into a solution or multiple solutions. Having too much of something could be arguably a better problem than not having enough of something, but the sweet spot is landing somewhere in the middle and maintaining that postion ideally...

@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047 Thats a good point, but you also have to consider other aspects of climate. South america as you say has generally more sunlight, milder climate in winters, longer growing season. We are limited in Poland in terms of what can be grown here. So if we assume we are stuck with what we have because of those other aspects of climate, there is not much room for variability and we go back to the issue of having too much water in spring in our specific plants scenario, which shortens growing season and supports rot, etc. I don't know how much you are aware of conditions in continental climates, but variability between summer and winter in soil water levels are huge - in spring, when there is a lot of water from melting snow, you have mud everyhere, grasses and plants are dead, so nothing holds soil together. This is probably even worse then monsoon peroids in tropics. You have to wait it out, planting starts generally in late march and early april, which is 4th month after new year - pretty late. No drainage in wet springs would shorten that even more. And then first frosts come early, often in late summer, early spring and whole thing is done at this point. I'm not a farmer, so this is not a field I feel very confident in, but what i know is that in this climate you have very short growing season, very big year-to year variability, generally low temepratures, so there is very little room for error.

@@deXXXXter2 I would have look at the endemic environment. This would be adapted to these extreme climate factors. Then I would work the edge or fringe, manipulating as far as is permissable without destabilizing the endemic protective buffer. If somethings out of balance and not working it's best to let the endemic code for that position reset so it is secure and stable agian.

Thank you, I will.

Glad you enjoyed it

I'm not sure I understand your question but I think your saying, are the swales causing too much water in the soil and are we getting dry periods to help the soil dry out? Swales catch and slow water down to wet the soil (mostly subsoil). If it dosn't rain much swales don't work much, if it rains alot, swales work very well. We are in the sub-tropics, so we can get very wet and very dry sometimes. The swales as they mature and as plant growths reaches maturity tend to regulate and smooth out the inbetween wet dry cycles. A virgin swale with young plants is quite useless in the first 12mths or so and can require lots of artificial watering to get it established. In very dry time's swales tend to hinder things a little as the raised berm dries out very quickly with it's increased sun angle (terraces are the ultimate evolution of landscape design in my opinion). Also, because most of our plants are subtropical species they suffer most from being dry never too wet and don't forget that the swale berm is actually well draining as it is a mound.

You have answered the question - i was wondering if you have enough dry peroids for swales to even have an impact.@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047

...furthermore, in most cases as long as your subsoils are suitable, the slopes aren't too steep and you choose the right plants, you really can't have too much moisture. The thing to understand with sub-tropics, is you can be in a wet tropical climate one year with 3000mm+ anual precipitation to mediterranean another year with less than 800mm. I haven't posted a dry time film yet but don't worry, it can get plenty dry here. Because of this, sub-tropics can be challenging to strike a balance in good design. We've had 770mm of rain fall in less than 24hrs here and then this year that figure will be close to our total annual amount! These kind of event's will test any design element. Dry time design and strategies are harder to implement in the sub-tropics because you have to allow and manage the extreme flood cycles as the priority because it's the flood cycle that will do the most damage.

@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047 That's very interesting, and that's something almost noone talks about... I mean, general thinking is that in 'wet' climates swales are pointless, as you say, it depend how much variability you have. If you get mosisture from fog year-round it might be actually pointless, but in your case it seems it couldn't be further away from truth. I think we would love to see dry peroid video and see how nature is coping with that, together with your system.

@@deXXXXter2 I see where your coming from but we don't see too wet as a problem ever (unless you get zero sun hours which stunts plant growth). There is just not one size fits all. We're on a 15 degree north facing slope here, so we free drain and evaportate even when wet. We could have 200mm of rain saturate the soil and then followed by a sunny windy day and be dry on the surface 48hrs later! We've found that swales alone just amplifie the conditions of either dry or wet until 5-7 years pass, then you start to reach tree maturity and shade and all kinds of other factors kick in. At this 7yr stage alot of swales (on steeper slopes) could then evole into a terrace. But swales are only working at half potential if there is no ponds connected. Connect some large and or small ponds and now you have some serious resilience and dependability in the system...

I started with a spirit level A frame and a shovel. I dug all the swales and ponds by hand except the 3 large ones. One was dug in 6hrs with a 24tonne excavator and the other with a 5 tonne machine over 3 days, which was the one that we incorporated bentonite into and sealed it properly - its a great pond that one. If you start with small swales and observe and interact when they're functioning, you'll learn a lot! If you do this honestly you will see clearly the limitations of swales also in dry times. In most cases I believe that swales are an early part of the succession process that will ultimately reach its full potential as level terraces. Hope it goes well for you.

We are in a dry cycle now. It is getting harder to rely on consistent rainfall. We must apply methods to store enough water to get through these long dry cycles. I hear you...

They could be - yes...Permaculture is a design system that incorporates and stacks multiple functions and features through the execution of intentional design to benefit the system as a whole (integration rather then segregation) to increase productivity while reducing land degradation and soil depletion. You could possibly NOT reach the full potential of these systems if you were NOT using Permacultre principles and pathways, absolutely!

No pond liners. Just pure bentonite clay dug in 300mm then compacted.

Gleying method it's callled. Sounds good in theory...it would take 100yrs - your pond will dry out before then and the ducks would leave. I've seen a highly regarded Permacultre teacher try and recommend this method, 2yrs later they bought in truck loads of clay to seal it. Compacted clay is the only way to naturally seal a pond or dam...

Yes, A frame, but not those ones you see often with a plumb weight. The best way to build an accurate quick A frame is with 3x 1800mm 40mm x 16mm dry stable timbers with a spirit level on the horizontal brace. This horizontal brace has to be calibrated on a level reference surface though. I'll do a film to demonstrate I think would be best....

@@bedurveghardwoodgardenbeds7047 that would be awesome to watch, thanks for the response I used a weight on a string and probably didn’t have a level reference surface when building it so that’s probably where I went wrong

Thank you for your kind feedback. I've enjoyed observing and interacting with the process of installing and utilising swales on slopes. As a result I've learnt alot about their benefits and limitations. Soon I will be installing permanent irrigation and in the long run will evolve the swales into level terraces (decreasing sun angle exposure for less evaporation). The limitations of swales becomes evident more so on steep country like mine that is north facing (SthH) and prone to dry cycles (SubTrop). With younger less established trees the berm actually dries out quick and the front of the berm angle increases proximity to sun exposure causing further evaporation. Lots to consider but they definitely play a part in the process of rehabilitation and building fertility. In my opinion level terraces are the ultimate evolution of landscape design for fertility maintenance and longevity on steep slopes...