Adventures in Remuddling

After taking notes on water conservation and permaculture, I convinced Tig to take a chance and put in fish scale swales by the nectarine and peach trees. Below is a picture of a semi circle-trench dug around the tree. We dug about 1 foot down and made sure the bottom was level all around. This nectarine tree isn’t doing so great. We have a 50-50 chance of either improving the situation or killing the poor tree.

The materials used to fill the swale were gravel and straw mulch.

Here’s Tig putting in a 1-2 inch layer of gravel. (By the way, I insisted that he cover his neck with a bandana due to a severe nano-farmer’s tan developing, so his goofy getup is my fault.)

Next comes the straw mulch, which we filled almost to the top.

Then the swale was covered with topsoil, about 1-2 inches and finally topped with woodchip mulch. You can’t really tell a swale is there.

In theory, rainwater will run across the soil and into the swale, where it will slowly soak down and form an underground reservoir. We hope the roots will eventually grow below the 1 foot deep trench and access the water. Otherwise, we just wasted a whole morning.

Above ground, we removed a circle of wood chips around the tree trunk and sprinkled alternating layers of compost and straw. Then we shaped the wood chips to form a raised berm around the straw and watered the center heavily so that the nutrients from the compost will percolate down to the roots.

This was the first time in a month that we’ve had to use municipal water. Our rainbarrels have finally run out. Now we wait, fingers crossed, for the next rain.