So if you haven’t studied permaculture, and even if you have a little bit, you probably don’t know what a swale is. And what I’m about to describe isn’t necessarily a true swale, it’s more like a ditch mixed with a swale. If you want to learn more about swales, go ahead a follow this link. If you just care about how I dealt with the flood irrigation problem in my landscape, keep reading. 

Our side yard grass is flood irrigated with a water turn. We turned it on this year and noticed that with all the dips and hills in area, the flood irrigation would only water a portion of the grass. Water doesn’t move uphill. If the area was almost flat and the water came from the high point, it would have worked out a lot better. That’s how rice patties work–perfectly flat land, and then it all gets irrigated the same way. Our grass was on a downhill slope with plenty of dips and low spots that meant that originally only 1/3 of the grass was irrigated.

We noticed that at some point there was probably a ditch going to a downhill portion of grass that wasn’t getting any water, so we re-dug the ditch. But then all the water simply went down the ditch and wasn’t watering the uphill part of the grass where it started. We tried putting up little rock dams, and it helped a little but not a lot. I had been in my permaculture class and knew that we needed to build a swale: or in other words, we needed to level the ditch so that the middle and both sides were neither uphill or downhill from each other.

We marked it out with an A-frame and re-dug the ditch.

We were not quite successful at actually making it level, but with only one little rock dam, it finally worked. The swale would fill up with water, and because it was relatively level, it would spill over across the length of the swale instead of at just the low point. We ended up watering about 3/4 of the grass. The other quarter is simply being converted to planting beds.

Because landscaping is moving toward automated irrigation sprinklers, and we use big machinery to level everything, very few people care about contours, or level lines across a slope. But after studying permaculture, I’m learning the benefit of using contours: they create beautiful and highly functional curves. Because I’m still using flood irrigation, it is essential that I know about the contours in my landscape, because if I understand them, I also understand how the water is going to travel. And I can fix things like the flood irrigation of my lawn so I don’t have to start using culinary water.

*I realize that portions of this post might not make a whole lot of sense. If you are interested leave a comment and I can either respond and clarify, or add a video.