Permaculture Keyline Water Systems: Don Tipping @ Seven Seeds Farm

first come to earth you got to take care of it and come to people then which is fair share of it as I for the earth and you design for y'all to help design a world better for you and everybody else you welcome the 17th farm I'm Don tipic and I've lived here for the past 12 years we've been planting trees and building ponds and developing a permaculture intensive farm system here ever since so we're on the North Slope of Sugarloaf Mountain we're at 2,000 feet elevation here we get about 40 inches of rain average a year we're 42 degrees north latitude we have a seed company called Siskiyou seeds that we sell seeds the really worldwide but predominantly we're focusing on our bio region of the Northwest and then we also have a CSA that we run with a cooperative called the Siskiyou sustainable cooperative that we deliver food to about 200 families one element of our water system is been the restore and rest you know repairing the native waterway that's on the farm this is Spring Creek and it's fed by three year-round Springs up on this mountain at about 4,500 feet is where the springs emerge and when we first moved here the streamflow would plunge a lot in the late summer early fall and sometimes even go dry by the end of the day and then flow in the morning so we built this pond here at kind of at the topmost portion that we could do on the land so this represents the highest water storage that we have on the farm so from here I have enough gravity pressure to run about eight sprinklers so our idea is to store water and our biggest pond that's about a thousand feet below me pump it up here with a little solar-powered pump no battery no inverter just pumping on the sun shining so this is our our storage tank this represents how much water we can water with in one day so I'm standing on a skid road that was here is probably built in the 50s when they had originally logged the land and when we were doing some pond building I realized that I could come in with the bulldozer and do what's called in whaling so water that's flowing down from this slope and from upstream is concentrated and a the inside cut of the road and gets directed downstream into a pond here we're up at the top pond and 17 feet deep it's about 200 feet in diameter and we're basically at the top of a five acre very intensively planted permaculture landscape where we have about 400 fruit trees and about two acres of annual row crops and then we also you know maintain aquaculture is about five species of fish in here so if you can imagine there was a giant excavator scooping material out of bulldozer spreading it across the dam and then a roller an 18,000 pound vibrating roller compacting it down so this here is a a wet dog the spillway the pond so in a like a catastrophic flood the water will flow out this wide spillway that's about eight feet wide and go back to the creek and then we're actually you know also filling it from the creek here from a gravity line gravity water line when there's plenty of water this time you're plenty of water in the creek that we're filling the pond with we can open a wooden gate and allow the water to flood down a ditch that then zigzags down through this five acre system so I like to view the water system really is like the circulatory system of the farm in a way we're playing Aikido with water we're trying to hold it as high in the land as possible so here we are the the toe of the dam of our large irrigation pond so I have a four-inch valve here that I can open up for flooding and and so this is water coming out of the pond and we obviously we have a screen on the other end to keep fish and newts from coming out so as this water goes into this kind of shallow ditch it will fan out going both directions and then we can block this water up using a just a simple plastic dam to direct its flow where we want it to go this will be like a pull three and sheep and goat food forest all flood irrigated so once again with the keyline system this whole thing is called rapid flood flow irrigation that we're rapidly applying a large amount of water to the land that then soaks in so we don't have much evaporation which means ultimately we're far more efficient than using overhead sprinklers where a lot of the water is evaporating into the air before it reaches the soil so what I'm standing in here isn't technically a swale what we'd call a keyline Terrace meaning that it has 1 feet of drop for a hundred feet of horizontal run so the water moves through so these trees work in concert with the earthworks to open up the soil for more porosity for more water to be able to store in the soil you know long-term drought proof this landscape where normally you couldn't just grow an apple tree here without irrigation this field is about three acres in a big rectangle of seven swales about every 50 feet so when it rains and we get runoff it fills into the Swale and it forms a long skinny pond and then we've planted trees on the uphill side that will open up the soil and work in conjunction with the earthworks to be able to store more water and over time the trees won't need any irrigation because they'll just be working off the stored water all right so here we are at the next pond down in the system and that zigzagging keyline terrace ditch system comes into this pond here and fill this pond up and then overflow on the other side of these willows here and go above the greenhouse through another keyline Terrace that has a slight drop and then it zigzags below the greenhouse and then below the dam of this pond you've noticed more algae growth more plant growth and better fish yields in our aquaculture system here so this is a not only a sink for water it's also a sink for fertility so we're capturing any fertility before we lose it off the land so as water spills out of that aquaculture pond it comes down here and is moving this direction and this is also an access road another thing I like to consider about this type of structure is that as frost moves down the landscape like molasses that it's captured by these structures and possibly moved away from an intensive annual garden where we want to create a more protected microclimate so this is another part of our system that's connected and when we were looking at that skid road that we had in whaled to use as a water catchment system that water comes into this pond and then it goes into a valve that then fans out across this meadow there's about four acres of land below here that I can flood irrigate from this pond and then both of these systems go back into the woods into a seasonal drainage that only flows when we get significant rain so again we're doing that system of playing Aikido with water of taking from a low place on the land and trying to keep it as high in the land as possible and one thing we have gotten feedback from that the people that were downstream of us that they're well productivity increased and our neighbors that are using active wells have noticed that their wells produce longer into the summer and one thing we've noticed in particular our downstream neighbors have noticed since we put in all the swales and ponds is that the stream flow below us is much more regular and a much higher volume we're mimicking the action of the beavers of storing water and letting infiltrate in more slowly as as having a positive influence on stabilizing the the peaks and lows of stream flow downstream from us and making it more steady so what I like about these systems is long-term I visualize I could walk away from here and come back 25 years later and that these trees would still be alive even though it gets to be a hundred degrees in August here because the water is passively catching and releasing water and moving it down through the land without me hoping any valves or anything it's going to do that instead of flowing downhill it's stored here and it's going to seep in so that's happening every time it rains every time we water and it's holding water high in the landscape which not only is benefitting our farm but our neighbors well productivity has gone up the stream flow has gone up and I imagine our water table is being replenished as well

Channel: Andrew Millison

Views: 256,350

Rating: 4.9506173 out of 5

Keywords: Permaculture, keyline, don, tipping, seven, seeds, farm, water, siskiyou, oregon

Id: _X-BMbLBozA

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 18 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/WhiskyTangoSailor]

This needs upvoted!Thanks for the post