This is the fourth video of four depicting the journey of an open field to a food forest. In this video the swales are shown after planting with bare root stock.
Food Forest – Video: After Planting with Bare Root Stock
1
Tag Archives: Ponds
Food Forest – Video: After the Digging
This video, the second of four, shows the swales just hours after they were dug. Of particular note is how the swales are already capturing ground water. The entire project is described in greater detail in previous written posts.
Food Forest – Part 2
We are getting close to actually breaking ground on this project and two parts of the design are still not completely decided; swale placement and planting density. I am posting this in the hope of getting feedback before we start digging.
Our original plan was to add seven swales at intervals of thirty to fifty feet moving from the wet area near the pond north to the drier area near the top of the field. As we have studied the field and planned further our thinking has changed. We now think we might be better served by adding a small holding pond near the top of the field (North End) which would enable us to catch water and use gravity to feed a watering system for the swales below it. At first this would simply be a hose but could be made more elaborate if needed in the future.
Field with food forest swales and holding pond
Below the holding pond we would build four swales about seventy feet in length, across the field, each overflowing into the one below with the final swale overflowing into the main pond at the south end of the field. We plan put the swales about thirty feet apart. This would allow us room to add additional swales, in the future, if more production is desired or to use the wetter area, near the pond, for some other type of planting like rice paddies, a cranberry bed or …
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. –Chinese Proverb”
Our thinking on swales is guided by several ideas. The first is dollars. Since we neither own nor know much about driving heavy equipment, our first consideration is the dollars necessary to hire the needed equipment and operator. We will only be able to build the number of swales that our budget allows. (We are hoping that there will be enough in the budget to do the holding pond and four swales in the food forest area and another project to catch runoff, that is currently a problem in another area of The Land, and divert it to a place where we might build “rice paddies” some day. More about that in the future, hopefully.) The second is the height of the plants. Thirty feet is about the height of some of our larger berry bushes and our smaller nut and fruit trees.
Our swale design
By setting the distance between the swales at thirty feet we hope to allow for maximum sunlight penetration. The larger nut trees will be planted on every other swale, accounting for their higher maximum height.
The picture to the right shows, in cross section, what we hope our finished swales will look like. They will follow the natural contour of the field and spillways on each end will keep the water from getting deep enough to wash out the berms on the lower side of each swale. The swale containing the water in our holding tank will be used for planting but will be built a bit stouter than the other swales, more of a dike.
As mentioned above, the original plan was to build seven swales. However, the budget does allow us to buy enough plant material to densely plant all seven swales. The budget would allow us to buy enough plants to densely plant four swales and at the same time allow us to plant with greater diversity. We believe this is important because The Land is in a place where deer pressure is high. We hope to “defeat” the deer, really limit deer 
damage, by using planting density and a seven foot fence made of T-posts wrapped with bailing wire at one foot intervals. Once again this is a plan that we believe will work without busting the budget with thousands spent of fencing. Researching on-line and at sites like Permies.com we found others with similar problems and are hoping what worked for them will work for us.
Long term we hope to create a natural deer barrier using selective plantings like Seabuckthorn, Maximilian Sunflowers, Black Locust and Black and Raspberries. When this barrier matures we hope that it, along with plant density on the swales, will allow us to remove the fencing and be in a position of sharing food with our furry and feathered friends while still harvesting a good crop of human food.
Mistakes and Other Regrets in the Design Process
As the new year begins, many people’s minds turn to the coulda, shoulda, wouldas of life. Like most people, my mind follows similar directions but when it comes to Landscape Design, I think my entire process is riddled with coulda, shoulda, wouldas. I find myself constantly saying if I had known this or that, I would have or I would not have. While there is absolutely no way to completely avoid the shouldas, learning, studying, observing and in depth planning can help to avoid some, if not most of them. Below are some of my thoughts for someone entering the design or redesign process today.
My first thought is PERMACULTURE. Back in the early 1990’s when I was making the initial plans for The Land, permacluture was in its infancy and I knew nothing about it. I learned about it, from a friend,
My Permaculture Guru
when discussing with him how I wanted to make a vacant field on my property more productive. Permaculture is a very large topic and encompasses many ideas from the designing of communities for efficiency and sustainability to using plants in combinations, called guilds in permaculture, to make them more productive, disease resistant and sustainable. If I had known more about permaculture principles and design:
- I would have thought more about the space where my barn was placed. While I had the equipment here to clear the spot, I would have cleared a larger area to create space for a future garden, chicken coop and composting area.
- I would have positioned the barn on a different axis to allow for better capture of sun and wind for renewable energy production.
- The pond nearest my barn would have included both the elevation and piping to filter and use water from this pond in my house and garden areas.
- When I prepared the barn for living, I would have plumbed it to separate grey water from sewage to better us this valuable resource.
My second thought is soil fertility and food production. When making my first decisions about meeting my goals for The Land, my efforts were focused on accessibility, timber production and recreation. In the process of meeting these goals, I paid very little attention to soil fertility and crop production. A big mistake. My excuse is that my dreams of living at the property and having the time to tend to crops were well off in the future. Looking back, there were many things I could have done to enhance soil fertility and food production while building roads and ponds.
What I could have done differently:
- I could have saved more of the top soil, moved to create roads and ponds, and moved it to locations I might want to plant in the future.
- I spent a great deal of money and time trying to get species of lumber trees absent from The Land to grow. Most of these planting failed because of environmental conditions and my lack of understanding of what different species need and experience. Looking back, I believe this money and effort might have been better spent developing hedge rows of fruit and berry producing shrubs that would today be feeding people and providing shelter and deer barriers for future plantings and gardens.
- I would have planted the fields and open areas, I created, with nitrogen fixers and mulch producing plants that would have built soil and stopped erosion.
I don’t believe that any plan is perfect, nor can all mistakes be avoided. Everything we do on our property and in life are functions of who we are at the time and the resources available to us (time, money, tools, etc.). However, a lot of mistakes can be avoided by taking more time in the planning process and taking the long view, considering what you might want to do in the future and allowing for those posibilities.
This is meant to encourage a new land owner or someone who owns land and is at a place where they want to develop it, to do the homework. Observation and education can be more productive in the early stages of development than perspiration.
The side bar of this website has a few links to websites I have found helpful and books that are good at getting the imagination started and talk about what is possible. Here is a fun TED talk that I think provides an introduction to the idea of Permaculture and its possibilities.
Continuing the Design Processs
In a previous post, I described the grid process I used to get to know my land and to locate specific features and identify areas for future projects. This post describes how I used that grid process to place roads and ponds.
Today there are many on-line tools to help with the process of making maps of your property. I mentioned this tutorial in a previous post as a good jumping off point for those who want to learn how to use those tools. It can also be done by going to your local soil and water district and making copies of the maps that show the features of your property. This is how I did it 20+ years ago.
From this information, I created soil type and topography overlays for my grid map of The Land. The first map pictured on the left is the grid map I created and used to begin to
The initial grid created to map the land. Each square is 200 feet by 200 feet.
understand and place particular features of The Land in their proper relationship to one another. Next, I created a topographical map of the The Land, which is shown on the right below. This map was very helpful in the placement of roads and ponds. I used a piece of overhead projector, remember those, film to make an overlay which could be placed over the grid map. I then did the
Topography of the land.
same with the soil map, below left, I made, again, from maps and information available from the soil and water district office. Using the grid, topography and soil overlay maps, I could now begin to see areas where the soil type and incline were favorable for pond sites and roads.
Soil Zones on The Land
The process I used for locating areas for ponds was to look at the topography map and find places where the slope of The Land and the topography lines indicated the potential for water pooling. Soil was not a great concern since most of The Land’s soil is deep clay under a foot or so of gravelly top soil, great for pond building, not so great for gardens and crops. I found three spots that looked the most promising, the south west corner, the south east corner and a third spot, kind of central west. Take a minute and study the topo map and you will see what I am describing.
Once these identified pond sites were located virtually, I went out and walked the sites. I ruled out the site in the south west corner for tree reasons. First, it was closer to the road than I wanted. Second, the general area was fairly flat, as indicated by the increasing distance between the topo lines, and would have required a lot of dozer work to make a good drain field, increasing costs. Third, a pond on this site would have required taking down a stand of red pine and some of the larger white pines on the property. The south east site had very good slope, some tree work would be involved to clear the site but no stands of quality saw timber or unique species would need to be sacrificed to create the pond and field. The distance to the road was acceptable. The third site in the central west area had a great slope for creating the field and pond area. It was centrally located, private, and best of all required very little tree work. The area was dominated by low shrubs, ferns, and hydrophytic (water loving) plants. It was a no brainer to utilize this site for my first pond.
Locating the sites for roads was a similar process but instead of looking for drainage areas I sought to follow the contour lines as much a possible to avoid, as much as possible, creating roads subject to wet spots and erosion. This was not completely possible because I also wanted the roads to give me access to all areas of the land to make logging, forest improvement and walking easier. Again, once the sites were identified virtually, I walked the “roads” and routed them around significant trees and features I wanted to preserve. I used flagging tape to mark the roads so the dozer operator would have a path to follow when building the roads.
The map on the left shows the end product of the site selection and flagging. All the roads shown on the map are large enough to drive with a pick-up truck or tractor. This gave me general access to all areas of The Land with the equipment necessary to do forestry projects, like forest improvement and firewood collection, and to maintain the roads.
I then located and hired a construction company with experience in road and pond construction to come in and build the pond and roads. This was not cheap, but very important because I wanted my roads and ponds built correctly so they would last and be built to the specifications necessary to meet local ordinances.
A couple thoughts on ponds. In some areas, there are size limitations on ponds. Most of these deal with the amount of water that can be retained behind the dike. Some local ordinances require that architectural drawing be made to ensure a dike of sufficient strength to hold back the water. Your local government and soil and water district can be very helpful with this. Before the pond was dug, I had a representative of my soil and water district do a site visit. This was very helpful.
A couple thoughts on roads. Roads need to follow contour lines as much as possible to avoid erosion problems and boggy, impassable roads in spring and wet times. Roads should also be dozed down to the hard pan which requires taking off all the top soil. This creates roads that are “hard” and therefore less susceptible to ruts and erosion. However, it does create a great deal of brush. A skilled dozer operator will be able to mitigate the “mess” by using techniques like burying some brush and creating contoured piles that over time will become less visible as they are covered with grasses. Because of the woody nature of these piles, they become fertile ground for berry bushes, a nice treat when out for a walk. A skilled road builder will also pitch the roads for better drainage. Except for the main road on The Land, the road from the county road to the circle at the head of the field that drains into the pond, I did not add any gravel or surface topping to my roads. Over twenty years later my roads remain solid, drive-able and the piles and scars, caused by building them, are only noticeable to those who know what to look for.
Planning takes a lot of work. It took us most of the first year of ownership to make this plan and, as I will discus in a future post, I wish I had done more.
Helpful Resources
The theme of the current season is thankfulness and I would like to carry that theme into this blog post.
I am thankful for many things but perhaps the top of the list is being able to “own” this piece of property, live in the midst of its beauty and diversity and share it with others. It would take many pages to even begin to describe the richness and depth this has added to my life and The Land. If you own a piece of property, I encourage you to share it and its bounty with others.
I am thankful for the labor, presence and advice given by all those who have come to The Land and shared their time, energy and wisdom with me. They have enhanced this place
Workers helping to clear brush. greatly and in many ways it would not be the place that it is without their input.
greatly.
I am also thankful for the following organizations and agencies, and their employees and volunteers, who have been very helpful in developing The Land and teaching me to be a better landowner. Each one has had an impact on my thinking and the way I have managed The Land and projects. One of the great blessings of the internet is that it makes the information of all government agencies and many educational institutions available to users worldwide. One caveat is to be careful to filter information to be sure it is applicable in your climate and growing zone.
My local, state and federal government have all made contributions. I know it is more popular to complain about the government but the wealth of information available from government agencies is boundless. Granted it often takes a lot of searching through departments, articles and links because our governments are not very good at building efficient, easy to use web sites. However, the information is usually free, well written and helpful. I have also found government employees and volunteers at agencies like the Soil and Water Conservation
Soil Zones on The Land
and the Department of Environmental Conservation extremely helpful. Sadly, many of these programs are strapped for resources and have suffered staff cut backs, so be patient when scheduling an appointment. Employees of these agencies have marked my woods for forest improvement, helped me select pond sites, and produce maps of my land, like the one on the right showing soil zones. All for free.
Similar to the above, local and state educational institutions can be very helpful. Many of these resources are free. Some on-line courses may charge a nominal fee for use. One that helped me was called the Master Forest Owner Program which is an outreach program of Cornell University. It was inexpensive and filled with useful information for anyone who owns a piece of forest land. It also gave me an opportunity to volunteer and help other landowners.
A local organization that was very helpful to me is The New York State Forest Owner’s Association. Their locally sponsored woods walks gave me the opportunity to meet other landowners, see their property and projects, and hear first hand about their successes and failures. I invited them to have a woods walk on my property and they came and gave me a wealth of ideas and suggestions. I think the value of finding and joining an organization of people with similar interests can be priceless.
Community Breakfast
By nature, I think most rural landowners tend toward independence and self-sufficiency. I know I can be a bit of an isolationist but over the last 20+ years, I have learned that being open to the contributions and knowledge of others can be very helpful. Opening my mind and property to others has had great benefits.
Beginning the Design Process
When I purchased The Land, the parcel was a 1400 X 2100 foot rectangle of unimproved land. By unimproved, I mean there were no structures, no ponds, a small game/RV trail, that divided the land unevenly, was the only path and no signs of agricultural use or forest improvement could be found.
Beyond knowing, from my pre-purchase and subsequent walks, that the property had my desired features of easy access, potential pond site(s) and an old field succession forest, I knew very little about the property and very little about the exact location of the various features on the property. I knew I wanted to build roads and trails to give general access to the property. I knew I wanted a pond and I knew I wanted to build a barn/cabin space. In other words, I knew what I wanted but I was very short on knowledge like where and how.
I tried walking around with a compass to locate myself and some of the features, but quickly became frustrated by obstacles to my line of sight, measurement and simply finding my way back to the same spot on a different day. I needed a way of placing myself and certain desirable features in an exact location on the property. My solution was to map the property by putting stakes in the ground. This is 20+years ago, before GPS, and Google maps.
Josh
The first thing I did was to mark the boundary lines of my property clearly with blazes on three sides, the county road marked the 4th, as described in the previous post. Next, with the help of my son, who like my other children, has always been willing to indulge my obsessive nature, I created a grid layout for the property. To do this, we first made about 150 stakes out of 2 X 2’s. Each stake was about 4 feet long, sharpened on one end and painted orange on the other. The orange end was marked with 2 numbers after it was placed; the distance
The initial grid created to map the land. Each square is 200 feet by 200 feet.
into the land on a south north access and under that number the distance across the land on the east west axis. So a stake labeled 400/600 was 400 feet north of the southern boundary (the county road) and 600 feet west of the eastern boundary (my neighbor’s field). Then using a rented surveyor’s wheel, Josh and I, walked the entire east boundary putting a stake at 200 foot intervals. We then walked each 200 foot increment east to west putting a stake every 200 feet. Each stake was numbered as above. On the picture to the right, the first intersection in the lower right corner was 200/200. The last intersection in the upper left corner is 1800/1000. Once this was done, we could easily locate any spot on the property and begin to
Sample of Initial Noyes
draw a map of the property and its features.
The map at the left is similar to one of the first maps I made showing the location of the marshy area with low lying shrubs, reeds, and ferns that became the field that drained into the first pond we dug and proposed locations for the first structure. You can see, I noted points of interest like the location of trees of particular interest or value and stands of a particular variety. You will note those things of interest to you and those features that get you closer to your goals.
Today, there are many different tools that are available to you on the internet like Google Maps and there are some shareware products that help with creating the types of maps that I did by hand. I like, use and see great value in technology but I am far from an expert so I am not going to offer any recommendations just one suggestion since I found these articles helpful in understanding what is possible. If you are interested you can find the articles here.
One final thought. I understand that my stake and grid method of mapping my property is labor intensive compared to computer generated maps. However, in the process of doing the mapping, I really got to know my property on a very intimate level. To this day Josh, who likes to walk the property barefoot, says he can tell where he is on the property by the feel of the ground under his feet. I believe him.
Finding the Piece of Property you want.
The perfect property does not exist but planning can help you buy the best piece for your needs. Below are a few suggestions on how to choose and evaluate properties before and during your search. It is not a complete list. It is some of the things that I learned in my looking process. Your process will be unique to you, your locality and your needs, but I highly recommend you do the planning and research. It will help to find a piece of property that meets your needs.
One of the most important aspects of managing a piece of property is to find the right parcel, meaning one that has the features that will enable you to do what you want. Not all pieces of property have the features necessary to accomplish all goals. For instance, I cannot grow clementines outdoors on my property; it is in the wrong growing zone. That
Clementine Orchard
may seem obvious, but it is important to make a list of what you would like to do with your property before you go searching. A list similar to what many people make when buying a house. It helps you get what you want. More importantly, it helps avoid nasty surprises later because some deficiencies can be overcome with money and work, some cannot. I could build a huge greenhouse and grow those clementines, but money, time and energy are quickly stretched when you own and manage a piece of property. Do your homework and conserve those resources.
When I began the search for the property that would become “The Land”, I knew I wanted a few things. I wanted a house, cabin or barn, a pond, a woods for saw timber production, a place close enough to where I lived and worked to visit regularly and a place that was a rectangular to square shape. Cabins, ponds and fields can be built, dug and dozed, but the shape and location of your property cannot be changed. Additionally, if you are wanting a product like saw timber, it is best to start with a forest, even a young one than a field. During the process of searching for The Land, I found many beautiful pieces of property that for one reason or another didn’t fit my needs.
This is how I thought about my needs.
My first deal breaker was any property more than three hours from where I lived was out. I don’t like to drive or commute, and I wanted a place I could get to relatively quickly. My second was oddly shaped property, long and narrow, triangles and trapezoids that made boundaries hard to find or made a house site with seclusion hard to come by were out. Third, any property without a least a young forest area was out.
For an item that could be built or dug, I looked for the necessary requirements to make it possible.
A dwelling or barn needs three things. Access to utilities, a flat spot to build on and a way to get to it. Access to utilities is simple to assess by looking on the road for electrical wires and talking with a realtor or neighbor to find out what is available in the area. In my area, the only utility available is electric. That was Okay with me, but some may want access to natural gas, cable TV and internet. Even in the early 21st century, these are not available everywhere especially in rural areas. A flat spot to build on can be found on the
A multipurpose structure can be a home for the tractor and people.
property or made with a bulldozer,but to be usable you need to get to that flat spot. In the area where I was looking, there were a lot of properties that had great views and even flat spots that would have required a mountain goat or a very expensive, hard to maintain road to get to it. If you are looking in a cold climate, remember snow makes steep roads hard to maintain and navigate. I choose a property with easy grades and road access. Ravines and steep hills can be picturesque but make everything from logging to taking a walk harder.
A pond can be scenic, a food source and soul of diverse life for observation year around.
A pond requires two things that are important to consider even if there is an existing pond on the property you are looking at; a slope to feed it rain water and/or springs and a nonporous bottom. A pond without one of these will either never fill after it is dug or be subject to large fluctuations in depth during hot weather and drought. If the pond or site has a good clay bottom, it will hold water well but still needs to be fed with fresh water on regular intervals to maintain depth, aeration and overall health. If you want a pond, look for these features before you buy. My ponds have all of these and still lose 1 to 2 feet in depth during prolonged hot weather and drought.
Some other general considerations I took seriously before making an offer.
- Taxes: What is the tax structure of the town/county/state where the property is located? You’ll pay this every year so it is best to know ahead and taxes can vary widely even within a county. Talk to the town assessor, they are usually very willing to help.
- Mineral rights: Personally, I would not buy a property where I did not own the mineral rights and after purchase I would be very careful about signing any contracts with oil, gas and utility companies. The money sounds good until they put a well right where you were planning an orchard or a high power transfer line down the center of your property.
- Local regulations: What is permissible and what requires town board approval. Some towns have regulations about the amount of trees that can be cut in a year and some even require permission before a tree is cut, others have regulations about the type and size of an agribusiness.
- Realtors: I have found that looking for rural property, especially vacant land, is a niche market best served by realtors that deal with forest lands and farms. They are a little harder to find, but tend to value land for its timber or agricultural value where conventional realtors tend to value larger pieces of land as development sites which raises the price. Good for the seller, not so much for you.
- Leg work: Get out and walk the properties you find interesting, with landowner permission of course. I think I drove my very patient and professional realtor crazy, looking at over 100 properties and walking a significant percentage of those. As a result, I have never suffered buyers remorse.
Happy searching. Enjoy the process. It gets you outdoors and with each property you look at, you learn something new that will help you know the right parcel when you see it.