A new home and yard for me means a lot of new experiences and experiments. 

We moved the little chickens in with the big chickens. It involved letting them free range together, moving the brooder box close by the coop, and ultimately just throwing them all together. It was relatively peaceful actually…they still maintain two separate flocks, but they are pretty nice to each other and I never had any injuries. I think I worried more than I needed too.

I also moved the compost pile into the chicken coop. They are excellent compost turners. Although I don’t really enough material to make lots of compost the chickens are great at making branches, chicken scraps, grass clippings and even a dead bird disappear. The chickens have also turned out to be the best puncture vine control. We move our coop around, and when it is over a puncture vine patch they will eat it gone in a couple of days and it stays gone.

In the spring, I bought a bag of clover seed and inoculum. One day as I was turning on the flood irrigation, I thought why not just throw down the seed and inocolum right now, while the water was flowing, and see what happens. So I hand broadcast the clover seed pretty densely and just basically dumped the inoclum into the start of the irrigation water. The area was a pretty bare patch of mown weeds, mostly winter annuals. All I did to help the clover germinate was turn on the flood irrigation when we had our turn, twice a week. Because it was irrigated, plenty of plants grew, and happily much of the clover. After mowing it once, the clover has become even more vigorous and I think by next year it will have completely taken over. Fifteen minutes was all it took to establish a small patch of clover, and I think I will replicated the process over a broader area next year.

In our side area, we had a bunch of Bridal Wreath Spireas. I mentioned before that we had cut them back to the ground. I was unsure if they would come back. But they’ve come back just fine, even without consistent irrigation. They look so much better than they did, I’m glad we went for it and hacked them back.

The last little experiment was moving our dryer. It was inside and had a long vent line. The dryer worked horribly, and I was pretty sure it was because of the vent line, even after I cleaned it out. My bright idea was to just move the dryer outside on our back patio. My husband wired up a new plug and we moved it. It now takes about half the time it did to dry clothes. In the winter we plan to move it back inside, but also vent inside.

The unattractive but functional back patio complete with dryer.

We are still in the thick of many projects in our garden, and our front yard might look a bit like a construction zone right now. A few things haven’t worked so well–free ranging the chickens in the evening has meant of decrease of of tomato crop and no melons this year. Most of my squash died from an unknown cause. There are weeds everywhere. But we’ve had plenty of things go right as well.

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.