GREENING THE DESERT w/ RAINWATER? Off-Grid Family Builds Permaculture Berm & Swale, Plants Trees

[Music] hi i'm ashley and i'm jonathan and we are tiny shiny home our family of six is building an off-grid desert homestead from the ground up here in cochise county arizona and using permaculture inspired designs to fulfill our dream of greening the desert for us this journey started with installing our first sperm and swale here on our property it ended up being a two-month project that included planning excavating hand work planting native trees and grasses running drip irrigation and so much more so why are we doing this how do berms and swells even work we know you have a lot of questions and we're gonna do our best to answer them so let's get started [Music] because we live in the desert of southeast arizona where water tables are dropping and wells are a poor investment we're turning to permaculture inspired designs to catch rainwater not only off of roofs but with the ground on our property as well berms and swells are ancient techniques making a big comeback showing us the way forward to create a sustainable beautiful oasis in the desert that perfectly blends with the natural topography of the land these work by creating depressed trenches or swales on contour with your land that catch flowing water as well as mounds or berms on the opposite side that can be planted with trees and native grasses by planting native trees along these berms we can create wind and fire breaks privacy screens food forest and even mulch and firewood for long-term use their roots fortify the berms and allow us to catch store and most importantly divert water during heavy monsoons to safe areas on the property this means we're creating more organic matter which leads to the soil storing more water which leads to sequestering carbon and reducing greenhouse gases plus the concentration of trees leads to increased diversity of animals and habitats which creates a symbiotic relationship with the land so yeah berms and soils are pretty awesome and we are excited to get this project started if you've watched our permaculture plans video you know that we've already been working with rudy poe planning our entire property and he's used topo maps and sheetfill calculations to help us plan where these berms should go today we are focusing on our main berman soil the biggest one on our property that will go from one corner to another this will help us determine the exact placement of our house rudy's going to be here and help us mark this very important berman soil making sure we're on contour and helping us make any fine-tuned adjustments as we go [Music] what's up everybody here with rudy and we are marking our first berm and soil which is very exciting he is going to show us the process because we've never done this before um so just give us like a quick like how do we how do you put a bonus oil on contour like what does that mean well the answer is is you're holding it um we're gonna be using a laser level to help us find the contour line and the contour line is basically just all of the elevations that are the same so let's talk about contour lines yeah what does that mean when you say your berm and swell is on contour right because most swales that might be used for like drainage or even berms on a road they actually go with the flow of the water but we're going opposite of the flow of the water does that make sense right our whole point with these burns and swales is to catch that sheep flow and stop it and let it sink into the ground so it's perpendicular to the flow of the water on our property like we said earlier rudy used topographic data and he got the the sort of drops and elevation on our property and helped us plan where we thought everything should go we're about to mark out the swell where we want to critical part of that is we want to find our zero point and the zero point are just critical points of where we know where we want it or it needs to be zero in on all the points based off of this point to find the contour line [Music] now we are not going to be doing this by hand no uh we are bringing in a backhoe operator and they're going to cut the majority of this for us and we're going to try to instruct them in a few different ways to make this as easy for us as possible and also to preserve the land as much as possible we're making sure he stays on our contour line backing up as he goes to where we're not disrupting the natural grasses here and as many trees as possible now that doesn't mean that there won't be any hand work there still will be a lot of work that we've got to do with with rakes and shovels and stuff like that but based on this idea that rudy has we can minimize a lot of that and we'll let him explain it because if we have our swell here gonna be right here that's your berm what we're gonna instruct our operator do on the backhoe here's the backhoe he's gonna use his arm and scoop out here and then dump here scoop dump scoop top and then while he's doing that we're going to instruct him to smooth this out as much as he can with the arm to minimize their work and then once he's done with that the whole length he's going to take this backhoe and use the front loader part of it and just go through yeah and flatten and clear and make it look all nice it's gonna do that through the middle and then he's gonna do that also on the edge to kind of shape that edge real nicely it's seven foot wide inside the soil and then another probably six to seven feet of berm and it's that big because we do have extreme rain events here we need to be able to capture as much of that rain water as we can in the short amount of time it falls right and so rudy has done these calculations for us and this berm and swell are sized for a 100 year event which means that every 100-ish years we get a rain event that brings in so much water and we're trying to account for that so that we don't have flooding so hopefully it will be big enough just to stop that water during those crazy events we started actually walking that area where we thought that this birming soil would be and we started marking different locations and trying things [Applause] the first initial try had our swale you know this north side is fine that was fine but once we crossed over the driveway the swell really needed to go all the way to the far corner through the animal paddock we would have had to move all the animals rip up the fence we would have had to move the fence we would have had to do something different with our driveway and our entrance back there it was a no-go and also it would have been so far off we would have actually ended up with two swales that um here let's let's draw with our hands okay so there would have been one that came like this and then one that came like that and they would have gone they would feed into each other yeah it was it was not it was a pain and um and so we this is again where that creativity comes into play with designing these things is that we looked at the property and we're like okay what do we actually want this to do we decided number one that we wanted this swell to protect our driveway so instead of cutting right through the middle of it we moved that whole thing to the back side of the driveway so that the water wouldn't flow through it right that was the first step to fixing it now this did mess with our zero point and so we had to kind of go back and make a bunch of adjustments and decide what our new zero point was and then we had to decide if we were going down or up and then we even ended up making that part in front of the driveway more of a diversion swale just because of the way that the topography worked but that's okay because really it's still catching that water and it's protecting the driveway and then the big thing was that we really didn't want to go over our water line to the airstream we weren't ready to move all that and so that's another part the creativity and the um like being flexible we're just being flexible with this we just moved it up a little bit yeah and also it was going to push our house too far back as well and so we're we're thinking about all that stuff about ponds and the house and like because again we've already planned out this whole property and it's not exact but we're just trying to think ahead for all this stuff so instead of having the two swales that kind of overlapped and then fed into each other we just decided to connect them and so it went up and around that water tank up by the solar shed but then there's another problem a big tree it's a big beautiful tree that we loved and we didn't want to get rid of and also an electrical line so we had to do even more sort of adjustments there and and that is the one part where we're gonna have to come back and do a lot of hand work [Music] now once we got past the water tank and the big tree and all that it went smooth sailing from there like we got that done in no time yeah oh one more thing that was really important that we did have to figure out we spent a lot of time talking about was the overflow area the spillway right yeah this like we said before this berman soil is determining our house and even before it determines our house it determines where our pond goes because our pond will be right out the door and it's where all the overflow water will go yeah right and so eventually no matter how big we make a berm there is still a chance that it might overflow that and so all you have to do is you have to just you have to give that water an outlet and so that all like you said it played into the pond and where the house goes and also the topography of the land yeah we spent a lot of time out here with the laser level just like determining where that water would go if it were to overflow and yeah there's a lot to think about especially on a on this particular bermansville because again it goes right through the middle of our property it's the biggest one it's the longest one and it's going to catch the most water now that our flags have marked exactly where this well is going to go it's time to sit down with our backhoe operator and make a plan [Music] [Music] it's a big day things are changing here in the homestead exactly are never going to be the same that's true things are gonna happen we are literally cutting the first bourbon swale right through the center of our property going from corner to corn it's gonna be a huge project it's gonna take a while but today's the first day we're cutting that we're working with rudy's here and he's helping us make sure we get all the um grades right and we've got our neighbor here with his tractor so it's a big deal it's a huge infrastructure thing it's a huge deal for catching and diverting water and like protecting the property um and it's right before monsoon season starts so we're going to see it in action yeah yeah okay we gotta get over we got stuff to do [Music] so the first part went pretty good it was a straight shot in front of the driveway and then started to go up to the solar shed but then we had to pause because we got to a critical area right um maybe you remember when we built our solar shed we ran electrical lines from our solar shed to our water pump house that powers our rv yeah and thankfully all the other wires like to our solar panels and everything that was going to fall behind the vernon swell so that wasn't a problem but that one line we had to decide what we were going to do i have a fly in my face and really we had to find it because guys if you're gonna lay conduit you should really mark it a little better we didn't market great so we spent like 30 or 45 minutes digging around in the dirt trying to find it we finally found it and we marked it so that mark could not hit it when he got over to that area so actually that whole area near the conduit was pretty complicated right we have a huge tree we have a solar shed and we have a power line yes and we decided that the swale was going to actually go over the conduit up next to the solar shed it should have gone through the mesquite tree but we wanted to save it and then it had to go up the rest of the way so because it was so tight there our backhoe operator had to he could only get so close right without messing things up so he dug as much as he could there it was pretty shallow and then we're gonna have to go back by hand and kind of tweak that area now once we got past this tricky area near the solar shed and the mesquite tree everything was pretty smooth sailing from there on we just had to trim a few tricks back [Music] [Applause] [Music] you know that you got it no doubt about it they keep coming back coming there for you you're so hypnotic no one can top it they keep coming back coming [Music] you know what you gotta [Music] wild do a rocket to the moon [Music] show me how you do it the way you're moving they keep coming back coming back forward [Music] [Music] the final step was to install a culvert now usually culverts are put in so that water like lots of water can flow through them and not wash out like a road or a driveway in this case we were really just connecting both sides of the swale because we needed an area to drive over up near the solar shed to get up to this area behind us for a number of reasons and so we just got a 12 inch culvert we got it placed right and then mark filled it in and ran over and compacted it and got it ready i will say we did make one mistake with this culvert yeah we opted for the cheaper route of only getting a 10 foot culvert because on paper i'm like well everything that would drive over it would be eight foot should be fine right yeah yeah but that is very tight so we may need to come back and install some sleeves and make that a little bit wider um also another thing that we did wrong is that we didn't extend the berm in front of that culvert now not that you want like a two or three foot high berm there but by not putting any kind of mound there and by not building that area up high enough we've created another spillway which is not what we want we want to keep the one spillway in the one spot over this way so we're going to be transferring some dirt here in the near future yeah we got to build up that area to make sure that it doesn't overflow long term [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is our first big significant monsoon so i'm out here looking at the soil that we just put in a couple days ago and look at this the important thing to do at this point in time is go out while it's raining look and see what needs to be done see what is working let's not take lots of videos so that we can improve it and make it better in the days to come so this is just so exciting [Music] [Music] the more we looked at that north side of the swale it definitely wasn't filling up right so we called rudy he came back with his laser level and we had to do some tests so we cut in the burmesville the other day um but we're gonna go back and check a few areas to make sure everything's the right level um check our spillway and then we're gonna maybe investigate why part of it wasn't filling up during the rain he had to start with our zero point at the spillway since that's the lowest exit for any overflowing water [Music] we just want to find the relative difference between this point that your driveway crossing there i guess we want to make sure that that there's not a lower area right okay when we look at this stuff water follows the path of least resistance or gravity right and so that's why these laser levels are so effective is they tell us exactly where the gravity's at right where the lowest points are at and they tell us exactly where the water would be running it's just up to us to make sure we capture all the low points because if we miss one it's going to pull up there here yeah so we want to make sure when we inspect the site we walk each point of it and once we see every point you can figure out okay this is what this point is at is what this point [Music] the next step was to check the culvert near the solar shed okay so we came to this part where we've got the culvert where we drive over and it's actually like right at the same level as the spillway yeah so what that means is is that we just want to take our berm here and we want to extend it all the way across and build this area up just a little bit so that it doesn't become a second spillway you're you're going to want to protect this whole feature yeah um so when this thing fills up we also want to test this area here as well you can tell we're not hearing any sound right an easy way you can check those you see yeah you can tell it's a little higher so this whole area yeah we're going to want to rise this up from basically this point all the way to that point okay just so that you know if you get say a hundred year storm which we already know from data is about almost four inches of rain here right and depending on the intensity of that the intensity is what depicts oh well how much safety can it hold yeah i can't hold that much water back in talking to rudy we realized the reason our south swell was working so well was that the area up above it was very cleared from our building activities and running meet birds because of the contour of the swell there was also a very large surface area that was feeding into it rudy was pretty sure that our contour was correct so we took the laser level around and checked a bunch of different points to make sure we were on level that's the thing with the design process we hope to capture all of these little um nuances in the landscape as we do it right but that's where the long and thoughtful observation piece one of like the first sort of tenets of a sustainable regenerative design is the long thoughtful observation of the landscape so you can see how are things flowing we have these topo maps that show us at a certain scale what should be happening you have neighbors up above you who are trenching things in different ways or building up little mounds or redirecting drainage in different ways that we can't capture the topography sometimes won't capture either so this would be a good way for anybody else that's like trying to figure this stuff out if it's not working as expected we're gonna go investigate and hopefully it'll help you try to see like what might be stopping that flow from from going the direction or filling up in places that you would expect [Music] you know it's pretty much there so this point's the same as that that's impressive this is actually lower this is lower yeah you see this is where it's beeping [Music] one important thing that i learned today is that we actually don't want these swales to hold water for a long time we've gotten a lot of comments of people suggesting we like line the bottom of the swales or put some material down so that we can really catch that water but what we actually want to happen is we want it to soak in quickly when i first installed mine my property ours is the same length as yours it took one to three days to drain yeah and now after the last rain it looks way different because we have our seated berm on the top and the whole basin is filled with little plants as well and organic matter yeah it drains in 12 hours we want the organic matter we want the plants to help it drain faster because it'll still because we have such epic rain events that when we get them they flow and the soil just can't handle you can't absorb all that immediately that's why we even have these things because runoff is a huge right it's a real can't soak in faster so yeah but then when it fills up it will spill out and go over to the rest of the site yeah um but for this area it'll drain faster you don't have as much chance of getting breeding mosquito larvae organic matter will help infiltrate that water okay even more quickly yep so so now we know that our our swale is the right level basically yeah so that's not what's stopping the water from coming in up here yeah that means we've got to go up on the other property and see what's stopping it yeah [Music] at this point we explored a completely new idea a road diversion swale checking the water runoff on our adjoining road showed that it was running right next to our property and was naturally higher up on the contour so we talked through a few options for directing that flow into our south side soil believe it or not we were told that you don't need permits to do something like this even on a county maintained road as long as you aren't disrupting the natural flow of the water however we decided not to pursue this for a couple of reasons first this side of the swell is already doing great it was filling up perfectly secondly if we cut under that fence we would have to figure out a way to stop predators from coming underneath and third we felt like it was more important to focus our attention on why the other side of the swell wasn't filling up okay so we're gonna go investigate on the property of behind us [Music] and see if we can figure out why the swale from the solar shed up to that corner isn't really getting much water in it it's not really collecting what it should be because it is on contour and it's the right level so let's go figure it out we should play mission impossible so there's a road that runs behind our property and it's it's a road it's barely eroded you can see there's like trees in the middle of it but at some point 20 30 years ago when they cut this road in they burned each side of it to help with water flow and that didn't show up on our topo maps so so you can see well you may not be able to see but essentially there's a pretty big berm here that's going to stop anything from up above us from actually going to our berm which is right there so that that's part of the problem is that this is catching it and funneling it down that way instead of that way oh yeah um it's definitely coming down this way it's actually did you see that wow there we have it we kind of figured out that what was part of this drainage going this way is actually being funneled um from looks like the road grating and just this natural burn that was formed from that right to be pushed off this way right and because we're at the top corner of the property we don't have much of our property before we get to that swell yeah so we're losing a lot of this this surface area because of this burn it's slowing things down yeah this could be simple solution where um there was only a four inch difference between that bottom section and the top of the berm there right so you can just widen that out it's a really nice gentle channel that opens up that berm and kind of starts to move that water right so we don't have to take the whole berm out we we just want to see if we can grab off of it and redirect it [Music] now you would think that our next step would be to plant trees right not quite yet remember we need to do that hand work on the berms and swales and smooth out those slopes and when we do that we need to be planting our grass seed in those slopes and mixing it into the dirt so that they don't blow away and to hold the moisture in the soil so that that grass seed grows we need some sort of mulch to put on top of it mulch in the desert yeah it's not as easy as it sounds today we are chipping up a bunch of limbs that we have sitting around when we first moved to this property over two years ago many moons ago just two years ago it feels like many moons ago um we trimmed a bunch of trees that are nearby our airstream mesquite trees mostly yeah super big thorns too by the way yeah so we have piles all over these the six acres that's fenced in everywhere they're everywhere yeah so we invested in a wood chipper right there and we are going to be chipping up all these limbs and we're in the middle of monsoon season so every afternoon it seems we're getting storms and we can't chop this when it's wet so we're gonna be doing this as often as we can we haven't tried any of the large ones yet we're a little nervous to put the big limbs in little hole so all right you want to get started ain't done okay okay i'm gonna get started with this wood let's chip [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so after a couple hours of using this wood chipper there's a couple things i've learned goggles and ear protection is definitely a must you can't stuff a bunch of stuff in there you got to wait till it goes down and then keep adding if any part of a limb is sticking off the main limb it's incredibly hard to get to go through the chipper so hopefully jonathan has more luck with it than i did it's my turn let's do it [Music] so [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so go get some trees ready are you ready jet i am [Music] i'm here go get some trees so many trees so many treats ready [Music] how about that automatic gate opener closer he's right there he just got out [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Music] all right 65 trees in the bed of our pickup truck it's comical we're gonna drive real slow make sure we don't lose [Music] we made it back from parkland with all 65 trees huge shout out to the kind people at parkland for helping us stuff the bed of our truck so that things didn't fall out on the drive back anyway now we're going to take all these out and then we're going to take all the ones we already have and we're going to organize them into the same kinds this is very exciting [Music] and this is what we're left with our own tiny nursery of trees [Music] before we go any further we do have to give a shout out to our tiny shiny tree collective yeah when we started planning this berm and soil project we knew there would be a lot of tree planting involved and many of our viewers had said that they wanted to support us in some way so we created the tree collective as a way for people to sponsor individual trees now our original plan was how many 100. that was based on our calculations of a 600 foot bourbon swale right and when we put those up they sold out so fast we couldn't stop it before people got to 104 trees that's true but then we ran into a problem yeah all right we hit a small snag small okay our original plan for the berm as you might remember was supposed to go from corner to corner through the animal paddock right so we didn't do that and that shortened the length of the berm which we didn't realize how much it shortened yeah in the in our minds this whole time we've been talking about 600 foot berman swale and so we're we've got about a hundred trees and we're like doing the math and like every six feet ish uh we we got the measuring tape out and measured the berm and it's it's not even 400 feet um and i think it's because we took out a pretty good chunk for the culvert we've got this area over here near the solar shed that's not super usable the spillway the spillway and we didn't go all the way all the way to the corner so so now we have 100 trees and only 360 something feet of berman sweat so we're trying to figure out what to do also let's talk about the trees we got because yeah we definitely expanded our variety because we had like two pines in a eucalyptus yeah and that was it and now we have all these other ones yeah it's very can i read it yeah okay can i read the quantity yeah we have two male mulberries we have four red mulberries four white mulberries 12 cypress 10 hackberry 25 eucalyptus 15 honey locusts 26 elkadir pine five how did you say that one chest chase five why did i say chess five chaste and four desert willows okay so our problem now is we don't know whether we have some options we could tightly plant on the berm knowing that when they get too big and they need more room we could cut them down use them for mulch firewood whatever cut certain ones yeah like in between where the other ones need to grow and the further away they are from the watering source more difficult they are to water yeah we're it's going to be easy for us to irrigate this one because it's right next to the water pump we can hook it up easy and then just let it go but anything further down the line is going to be real tricky yeah so we have a few things we got to figure out tonight [Music] so we have a bunch of people coming over from our local community group they're volunteering to help us finish up the hand work on this berman swale and hopefully plant our trees we'll see if we have time my main thing that i want to have done is just the berm and the soil smoothed out and all that handwork done we do have this culvert area someone's coming by with a tractor and they're going to help fill in that extra five feet on each side that we added because we didn't do it right the first time and hopefully we're going to try to address that area in the back corner where because half of our soil isn't filling up during rains right so he's also going to use his tractor back there and we're going to cut in a small area to help hopefully let the water come out of where it's being held back and sheet flow into the back corner of that swivel so people are gonna start showing up here any minute we gotta get a few things ready and then we can get started [Music] this is rough excavation this is what the we had on one of the neighbors come by with his backhoe and he just you know chomped it all out it's pretty rough so our task today what we're gonna be focusing on this morning so we're gonna have a team raking and as that team moves forward we're gonna have a team um seating those are all species that do really well native to our specific area to help revegetate the whole berm and that's important because it'll help stabilize all the soil up there and then as those two teams move forward we're gonna have another team measuring and marking where plants go and also planting plants now at this point some of you may be wondering what kind of grass seeds we planted let's talk about that yeah so rudy sourced this mix um locally and this is what it includes it's a bunch of weird stuff i've never heard of i'm just going to read it off side grandma blue grandma roth rock grandma green sprinkle top sand drop seed plant to go little blue stem plains bristle grass and native fescue that's a lot of weird grasses it is but they've all been tried and tested to do well in our local climate [Music] three to one slope on the back ends because the water is gonna flow this way you see how steep it is here this is like one to one slope right here and that means as water flows through here it's gonna cut into it and as it cuts into it you could eventually form a head cut that forms back that way so that's all we're gonna do be doing is just moving this soil forward and you might need a pick but we're just going to kind of create that three to one slope so we want to start a little bit further back right in most cases yeah and this here's a good model to start off with because this is pretty much the three to one slope right there just on this side just on this back okay so if you're not working the backside you're working the front side you notice it's much steeper and that's okay because we don't have an active flow of water going down it causing a head cut erosion so we actually don't need to do anything in terms of the slope here and what we're trying to do is just widen this out and then once you're done with that whatever's left that needs to smooth in here smooth back but yeah so this whole top section we're going to flatten it and widen it and then focus on the sides [Music] [Music] you [Music] is [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hey [Music] things are moving so fast things are really happening so we've already got one section of the berm raked seated and marked where the trees are going to go so we're loading them up and deciding which tree goes where yeah yeah so we got mulberry and hackberry we're gonna go ahead and take those over there and decide where we want them okay and then we'll come back for another batch okay [Music] what we just use we actually just hit the sides right in you see this is ideal for digging the well as you go and then you have the person watered in [Music] nine come here now this makes sense that we made all these little piles around you could just move all this piles i want to create a little wells and just create the basin as you go but this gives you the depth of basin that would really be useful that's it any questions no lots of water lots we want it to sit really water this guy i just filled up our tank so use as much as you want [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it was at this point that our neighbors showed up with his tractor so we split teams some of us kept working on the burns and swells and the planting and then the rest of us came to help with the tractor project so the first big one was to cover over the newly extended culvert and to raise that whole area up but we were gonna drive over [Applause] [Music] [Applause] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] hey oh yeah [Music] after we took a break and ate i think everyone was pretty tired it had been a long hot day so we pretty much wrapped it up but our neighbor did stay with this tractor and cleared out some of that area back there where we want that water to flow into the north side of the berm [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh my goodness we've had a few minutes to decompress since people have left some of us may have gotten showers some of us haven't may have not you can see the sweat stain on my hat has grown by about one inch it was hot today but man we got so much done having a group of 20 to 30 people out here was like a total game-changer man they knocked out so much work we started around 7 30. everybody started coming in around 7. i think we started around 7 30 and until noon like well we we broke for lunch yeah like 11 and then wow so that's a huge chunk of time that everybody was able to stay out and get a lot of work done yeah everybody was so helpful i mean like i was kind of off doing weird little digging projects and stuff and like i would look around like oh they're like all planted now it's planted now the berm is all yeah i didn't even know they exceeded anything like awesome yeah so great thank you so much to the community and everybody who came out today we could not have done this project without you and we are so thankful for your help yeah yeah we're not done yet though no we're not done so on this south side of the berman swale we still have some trees on the west side that we need to plant you can kind of see in the pots back here but everything on the berm is planted can we say thank you anymore because i feel like thank you i feel like saying it isn't enough like i don't know if people understand how helpful that was yeah for us especially with i mean all the things we have going on like this would have taken us a couple of weeks probably to do this all by ourselves yeah and this mate i mean this just turbo charged everything yeah yeah turbo charger do you like that german i really don't want to try again no pick a new word jonathan [Music] we're back after planting a multitude of trees to plant even more trees we have a lot of work to do today we're not just planting trees we we do have probably i don't know i don't even know how many but we have some trees that we need to get in the ground a lot of cleanup work yeah and after we get the trees in the ground we need to water everything we still have some mulching yes that's the other thing we did have um some animal some i think it was a cat already one night just one night and it was only to the mulberry trees yeah so we have cages around our mulberry trees we still need to mulch we still need to water we have a lot to do so we're just gonna get started [Music] uh [Music] do [Music] do and the rain has gone [Music] we are nearly done putting the straw on all the way down on the berm and all the trees but i just had to get you for this sunset [Music] we're just a little wet and a little dirty but we've got almost all of this mulch to all the trees over here like we're so close to getting this done it was a perfect time to do it because it was just drizzling so that will kind of wake the straw down a little bit so hopefully it won't blow away too much [Music] so that's about all we could do for today the rain kind of put a wrinkle in our plants that's okay but we'll be back later and plant the rest of the trees mulch the rest and maybe wrap this up [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're back out early this morning we have a few more trees to get in the ground before today's rain comes we're gonna get them mulched watered and finish up this planting season planting time we're going to finish planting trees [Music] [Music] [Music] i've been watering plants for a little over an hour watering all these trees and i'm not even done with this part of the soil so can't wait for that drip irrigation to get here probably next week and this is going to take a long time i'm going to spare you from watching me do this all day we'll move on to the next part [Music] [Music] you may remember that we put a culvert in right here where we're gonna drive over and you also may remember that we got the 10 foot one and it was too short so we had to go get two couplers and two more five foot pieces so now we've extended it to 20 feet we've covered it over with a bunch of dirt so that it is higher than the spillway but to finish this out we need to put some rocks around the sides of it just to help support it as things drive over it and so that water doesn't erode that dirt away so we're gonna go find a bunch of rocks here on the property stack them up get this part finished [Music] all these rocks came out of our wash on our other parcel property so we're gonna take these and see how much we need after [Music] hold this back when you got it [Music] like that ain't nothing gonna hold [Music] oh no don't stop let it run [Music] ain't nothing [Music] you got it like that [Music] [Music] [Music] when you all right we got our culverts covered with some rock and some pea gravel and i think we're just gonna wait and see what the next big rain how it works and if we need to add more rock or pea gravel but one other thing we need to do for the trees that we've planted there are like about 10 or 12 trees that need staked because they're just a little floppy so i'm gonna go grab some steaks and then we'll get those tied up and hopefully they won't fall over [Music] so [Music] well we finished just in time we got the rocks around the culvert yeah we got our trees staked uh-huh a tree stick like a cheesecake sure yeah that's what we're doing but that sound good doesn't it cheesesteak yeah anyway anyway we got a bunch of stuff done just in time it looks like we're gonna get a little bit of rain here hopefully a whole lot of rain [Music] so this is the last phase of our first bourbon swell project and this is an exciting one because we've been watering these trees by hand for a few days and it sucks how how is the strip irrigation even gonna work well we've never drip irrigated before so initially when we planned this we were only going to have trees on our burn right and so you're talking about two three hundred feet we thought it was going to be 300 feet now it's 200 feet 100 feet one way 200 feet the other way so that's about 400 feet we're running this all off of our solar powered water pump our little rv 12 volt pump which when we've got a big accumulator tank so it should work however when we started planting all the trees and we realized we had way too many trees we planted a bunch of them on the back side of the soil so we have we're lining this well one tree's down the berm trees along the side of the swell so essentially we doubled our tubing run so instead of now 200 feet we've got it on the other side so it's 400 feet and then another 400 feet right so we're a little concerned that that the pump and the accumulator tank won't be able to run all of it at exactly the same time so we got a timer that has two outlets and we'll just program and time it so it does one half for one hour one hour one half for one hour one half for the other hour uh but that means we've gotta figure out how to elbow and t all of this stuff so that it works i am very this is one of those days where i'm just really optimistic i think that we're always like opposite because i'm just hot i feel like this is real simple though because i mean we've never done it before ready okay [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] pressure test looks good so far i don't see any leaks do you so we're gonna throw some emitters in and see if it does what it's supposed to [Music] how are we supposed to use it if it leaks [Music] ready [Music] behalf of it nothing nothing happened [Music] okay the north berm is finished and watered and it worked that's the south side let me start again the south berm is finished and we watered for a while and it works just fine which is very exciting instead of doing a bunch of t's and elbows we're just gonna bring it out of that second connection on the timer go all the way down loop it and come all the way back that way we don't need to use any fittings smart idea but what i'm out of popsicles it's a problem yeah so honestly the hardest thing about this is unrolling the stupid tube without it getting all kinked up so we're going to try to make sure that doesn't happen i'm going to unroll it all the way down come all the way back and hook it up put the emitters in and be done [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] the last step is to connect it to the source of the water now we have a 25 psi down regulator and then we have a garden thread two half inch tube connection so that tube is going to push in here and hold and then this is going to screw on to that garden connection and then we'll just push it in [Music] so this thing that we got it's got two outlets so we're gonna water each half of this berm separately it also has an app which is kind of cool so i'm going to say water manually i've already set up my south side and my north side which is zone one and zone two so we're gonna do north berm we'll do it for an hour while we uh put in the emitters and test to see if there's any leaks in it so let's see we hit play nope we got a leak we got a leak where to start looks like it's leaking out everywhere so the problem with the leak is that we accidentally got a pipe thread instead of garden thread so actually gone back to the hardware store to get that and some more of those little clips to hold things down in the meantime we actually planted two more trees here in this area right outside the berm so we thought hey why don't we irrigate those two so we're gonna tee off right here run it there run it there should be pretty [Music] one tip that rudy told us when putting these emitters in is you want there to be pressure in the line because otherwise this pipe is so thin it's just you're not going to be able to poke the hole through and then there's going to be enough pressure to actually push that little part through to snap in so you have to turn the water on and then snap the hole and then it's going to spray you and then you're going to push it in and then it'll be okay [Music] [Music] so it's taking the girls longer to get back with that piece that we need so i thought hey i'm gonna try to put this in without water pressure turns out with this tool at least it works about 95 of the time you kind of got to hold the tube right as long as you get the hole through then these do snap in just fine so i'm going to go ahead and finish this up until they bring that other piece back see if i can do it [Music] hey guess what helps to use the right fittings so now we have the correct garden thread on both of this our reducer down to the half inch i've set it to manually run the north berm for an hour so let's go walk it and let's see if it's working just heard the pump kick on so it's doing something [Music] so our north berm is going to start right here so those are working and then we don't have anything until we get past the big mesquite all right that one's working that one that one's working looks like it hasn't got over to this side yet can you hear that that means the water's still moving that one's going okay let's get a little boring sorry working working i'm gonna go a little faster working now let's see if the other side has made it yet okay yes um this one's not done oh there it goes oh no i missed that one okay we're gonna have to come back to that one those are working those are working those two and these two and then the end cap all right that's it i gotta go fix those two and we can call it finished [Music] i'm attempting to learn how to use this app to program tomorrow morning's watering which is pretty cool so i've set up two program slots in this app the first is for south swale it's going to start at let's see 4 30 a.m it's going to run for an hour then at 5 40 a.m so we'll give it some time for that accumulator tank to fill back up uh it'll start on the north berm so by the time what by 6 40 we should have everything watered i hope it works are we going to get up at 4 30 and check it oh sure [Music] [Applause] so as you may know many people have sponsored trees through our tiny shiny tree collective and we've had people donate to this project so we wanted to make sure we followed up finishing the project by recognizing all the people that helped us do this right so here's the list of all where our trees are can you can you make sense of that oh jesus it was really bad so jonathan being the designer he is created this beautiful spreadsheet here i'm getting a spreadsheet picture the spreadsheet i'm going to take a quick video of this and put it up on the screen because you can't see this they're all color coordinated color coordinated color key they've been numbered they are all numbers see we have to take away the the actual like terrain picture to see the numbers right so let's get started we have 77 trees on our property and one of the benefits of being a sponsor on this tiny shiny tree collective is we're going to be sending everybody who sponsored a tree their own little picture of their tree with what type it is and the date it was planted and the number and the number of the trees to and feed on the map we should put this on the website so that they can actually see exactly where it is on their property on our property it's a possibility okay we'll figure it out um so the next step is we're gonna go take pictures of all the trees and get this situated so we can mail out everybody's picture yeah i'm a little still a little confused on how we're gonna take the picture and number it and then figure out who gets what not i know how you've got that figure okay you ready yeah everything's fine everything's fine it's gonna be fine you're gonna wear it like that i'm gonna wear it like this oh yeah [Music] [Music] we are ready to do the first one all right what number is this one number one desert willow desert willow number one [Music] [Music] so i have the list of what kind of tree it is the number of the tree and when jonathan takes a picture i'm just checking it off making sure that the number's right and the tree is right we'll go from there [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] number 64 a eucalyptus with a perfect view of the chicken green 71 last on the swell hackberry i need number 72 desert willow 72 let's go in a minute i'm probably yelled at you was it the perfect shot it's the perfect shot okay we got five more in the cactus garden this is the very last tree it's number 77 and this is a white mulberry okay whoever has 77 has the view of my ocotillo chicken garden you can't see the so many cool things lining it up lining up we got the peak we got the ocotillo we got the chicken garden this may be the best view like this tree has the best view of the property i wonder who gets it now comes the fun part we have 27 trees that we are donating because we don't have room here on our property and we're not set up yet to water that many so we reached out to all the tree sponsors and we're like hey we've we just we don't have room to plant them is it okay if we donate a few of these to people in our local community yeah and so had enough that said yes that's fine so we have people to go ahead and take these too yeah we want to get these in the ground at people's properties as quickly as possible to give them a better chance to survive so we're packing them all up we're going on a delivery budget fun to take stuff to people i don't know that is kind of fun i want to do this more often well maybe the tiny shiny tree collective will we get to go see much bigger than us and we'll we'll just donate trees to all sorts too that'd be really cool let's load them up and get them over there okay [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh wait you're not driving you ready yeah okay [Music] [Music] two down 25 to go are you so excited to do 25 more holes [Music] on to the next one [Music] oh [Music] oh my gosh [Music] last stop on the tree delivery tree um i have bad news what there's two more deliveries after this but we're not doing it today are we yeah i'm so sorry [Music] do [Music] is it the last ride it is [Music] so i'm here at the post office putting stamps on all these cards that we're sending out to the people who sponsored our trees and i just think it's really cool we've got cards going to australia united kingdom netherlands denmark and as well as like new york here in arizona california colorado texas utah sweden new jersey ohio texas south dakota illinois this is crazy i love it so much thank you all thank you everyone who has sponsored a tree this year it's been a huge project we've learned a lot and um you should be getting these cards in the mail this week last time [Music] [Music] this [Music] so [Music] so at this point it's been about a month since we installed our first berman swale and got everything planted so you may be wondering how's it working well that's a great question um so first we ran into a big issue with our chickens i didn't realize that chickens like to eat grass seed and all of our chickens are free range because we're still working on our chicken garden project so they are not contained in their chicken run during the day they just have free range of the whole property and so what happened is we planted all these grass seeds and we put straw down on top of them and we put straw around the base of the trees to hold the moisture in so we basically created a chicken playground yes and all they did was was eat the grass seed and pull up all the straw around the trees and it was a big problem so do their dustpass in the berm yes it was great kept messing up the berms taking big chunks out of them so we decided to focus on the trees because we can always replant grassy later but for the trees we had to get some metal cages that we put around every single tree to protect it and we were going to put more straw on but we decided to use some manure or some compost i guess i don't know what we call it it's composted goat manure okay which which ironically the chickens have been working for some time so they've been scratching it and doing the thing and so we just transferred all that to the base of the trees it's helping hold in the moisture and the chickens can't get to it also i think having the bedding from the goat's wood chip bedding is really helping so it's got the pine shavings straw and goat manure so all that working together it's kind of holding better than just straw because the straw is flowing away the straw does blow away in the crazy winds yes now as far as those grass seeds go we're just gonna wait to reseed and actually we have a ton of native stuff that's already growing up naturally on the berm so maybe we won't need to do it but for now no more seeds until the chickens are in the earthbag chicken garden and you may be wondering how the little swale on the top of the property is doing yeah so we did you know we had it sort of cut in with the tractor but unfortunately it wasn't really cut in at the right level so there's like a dip in the middle and then it comes back up at the end of it and we just haven't had a chance to get over there and try to fix it yet so it's really not doing anything right now but we've seen so much rain that side is still filling up so maybe it's not as big a deal as we thought it was the drip irrigation is working really great we haven't had any problems with it it's done exactly what it's supposed to do we've been on an every other day schedule up till this point we're about to switch to every three days as we get these more established they all have new growth yeah also with the monsoon season like we haven't had to turn that drip irrigation on as much as we thought we would yeah but we have had to irrigate often enough that our tank is slowly going down our water definitely using a lot more water than we would have been otherwise but yeah being able to go into the app on the drip irrigation thing and saying hey rain delay or pause for a day or pause for two days is really nice so we don't waste that water although i haven't always got to it in time and we have wasted a little bit of water but that's okay you didn't tell me that part but hey the trees all have new growth and they're all doing good yep so high five now this is actually our third summer here on our property and the first time that we've had a legit scary monsoon season it's been pretty intense this year yeah the first year we moved out here there were no monsoons at all and we were like what is going on and then the next year is one bad storm yeah but this year has been like just pounding after pounding of crazy intense storms we had hail hail crazy sideways rain yeah so much water we actually completely filled up the swales one night to a little bit overflowing and remember those swales are sized for a 100 year event so looks like we already got our 100 year and they held and they did their job speaking of holding i mean remember the whole point of this is to protect where the house is going to go and even though we had an enormous amount of water you know flowing down the property usually we have it all running under the airstream where the house is going to go and hardly any of that happened because the swales did catch and they stop that water which is what they're supposed to do yeah but i can see that we are going to be adding more worms and swales later on after our house build because on down the property past where the house is going to go yeah it's getting a little crazy down there it's definitely moved the landscape around a little bit yeah so eventually we'll be adding to this series and creating more berms and soils but for now the one that we have is working great yeah and what's cool is that because our soil is so sandy it isn't holding water super long like it usually drains in about a day which is pretty quick that's what we want we want it to drain quickly to drain into the ground and for all the plants to soak up all that water [Music] i'll have to say we couldn't be happier with how this project turned out and we can't wait to start the process of greening the desert here in arizona we hope this video inspires you to look at more sustainable ways of working with your land especially if you're in the desert climate if you're in the cochise county area and you want to do something similar like this definitely get in touch with rudy at waterslifedesign.com he comes highly recommended so what's next well we have lots more plans for permaculture techniques burns and swales but you know what we got to build a house first it's true there's always something going on here at the tiny shiny homestead and we hope you'll keep watching to find out what's next see you soon i got no issues it's kind of nice like running water into a paradise got no drama feels like we arrived [Music] picture perfect it don't exist but when i'm with you don't have to question it true ocean [Music] [Music] i never someone to thought like that like that like that i liked [Music] to it

Channel: Tiny Shiny Home

Views: 1,274,552

Keywords: off grid, permaculture farm, off the grid, living off grid, self sustainable, geoff lawton, greening the desert, permaculture farmstead, permaculture farm in desert, permaculture farm design plan, regenerative agriculture homestead, regenerative agriculture carbon sequestration, food forest harvest, off grid solar power system, permaculture homestead, regenerative agriculture, permaculture garden, permaculture swales, off grid homestead

Id: Z_pZSMs8vjs

Length: 100min 36sec (6036 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2022