The First Rainwater - New Desert Homestead Catchment

foreign foreign check because it's the first heavy rain we've had since we pushed out this damn wall and it's almost exciting what's going on here last night there was some rain but we've had five millimeters in the last hour and that is what's happening here we've got a steady flow coming in a meter deep about six meters wide from just these three little Hills in front of me here but this is amazing to see so this thing isn't sealed yet and it probably will just soak in but this is water that's now not going to the river and into the sea but staying on the property and hydrating the land going back into the ground so I'm very excited I mean when it rains in the career it's something to enjoy and celebrate already and the last season has been quite Bleak because it started getting really dry with the fountains getting slower and people's Wells dropping levels and here we are we've got more rain on the way behind me as you can see in here there it's slowed down now because the rain stopped but I think we put this down in the best possible spot it's been a week since the last rains we've had 17 millimeters that's less than an inch of rain and about 70 percent of the water where it was in here is still here so it doesn't look like we're going to be needing a lot of bentonite clay to seal this there's some other chemical products that you can use like damn it but Bentonite is a natural way to do this all ducks many many ducks we'll do it this is still a rain water that we stopped from leaving the property with topsoil so there's a few things to consider if you're new to dams like we are maybe this will help [Music] so first of all make sure you've got your legal issues sorted out depending on where you stay which country which state which province there's different laws about how much water you can store how much water you can catch there's definitely laws about impeding flow so keep that in mind sort that out make sure about your area what you can do this time that we're working on here does not impede normal flow of a stream and this is water from the catchment of three yield sides that one over there this Hillside and then the bit of rock face in the back keep in mind how much flow you're going to get we have monitored this to make sure how much water comes down here that's why we chose this location not much had to be done there's already a v-shape in the land here that made it easy to just take Earth from both sides dig some out here and push it into a wall the excavator then compacted it by driving over it and pushing down on it however next point is what happens when this thing gets full when a damn like this gets too full it needs to overflow the water needs to go somewhere and what's going to happen it's going to go to the lowest point on your wall and start flowing over there but because this is only loose Earth that will erode away and within an hour or two that the erosion will cut through and the dam will be null and void you will lose the water you lose all the time that you put into it you'll lose the money that you spent on the excavator so make sure to get an overflow solution and you can use concrete that is one way to do this another way to do this is to use plastic sheeting or damp liners rubber liners and that can stop your water from eroding at your wall as it will overflow over the liner over the plastic or over the rubber liners and then a third way which is one of my favorites is to just mimic what the big dams do is while you push the wall down add piping in there so that you can have pipes at the level that the water will be and that pipe will act as an overflow so when the water gets to that point it goes through the pipe and it will never actually reach the top a tlb will do this in a couple of hours however excavator worked out cheaper because this whole wall was done in less than an hour with less than 5 liters of diesel so it worked out more cost effective to use an excavator Nothing Stops it and the weight and power of the excavator helps with the compaction of the damn wall that helped us a lot location is everything you need to look at your landscape and decide if that's going to yield enough water to actually give you the water you want we looked at this you need to do the same you need to monitor some areas get some ideas and make sure that you know what you're in for the actual level of the land here is a bit higher than the rest of the properties so if we ever need to use this water we can use gravity to feed it down to the animal areas what are you actually planning for the dam is it going to be a permaculture type seepage Dam which you're just going to use to catch the water and sink it into the ground for hydration or are you actually trying to store water for long-term use this will feed the groundwater we didn't lose much in a week so I think this is probably going to be more of a holding area or a storage damp than anything else and that is fine because we can start attracting Wildlife attracting Birds getting all kinds of insects and bees and everything to hydrate from this area which helps the whole system it will help the plants around it we can start adding they you can do a fruit Forest around something like this once you get water here that's reliable and here all the time you can start doing a food Forest if you're in a suburban area you can catch rain water in tanks or you can catch water in a pond just make sure again about legalities how much you're allowed to hold and what's going to happen with that water once you've got too much what would have happened with the rain water before you add a pond the water needs to continue that route are you allowed to impede it are you allowed to hold it just consider things like that in terms of doing a pond seepage Pond recharging your landscape or just holding water in a small scale in a backyard definitely a good idea any water that you can keep on your property is a good idea any water that you can sink into your own property and keep their moisturize your own landscape get mulch over that that is a good idea that's water that would have gone lost water that would have gone into Waterway storm water rivers and just go back to the Sea this is water that was pumped here using Nature's biggest gravity pump rain so this is fantastic stuff this is the step one baby steps for a new dam and share this video with good people so that they can also do good things and share good information with everyone else see you next time goodbye [Music]

Channel: The Simple-Earth Journey: Untamed

Views: 569,178

Keywords: homestead, off-grid, subsistence, permaculture, simplicity, self reliance, survival, prepper, earthdam, how to build a dam, beginners rainwater harvesting, beginner pond, building a dam without skills, rainwater dam, harvesting rainwater, mountain water harvesting, catching rain, homestead water independence, how do i make a dam, how do i catch rainwater, how to harvest rainwater, desert homestead, dam in the desert, water works, water, desert water, greening the desert

Id: AvvxB9ixv8k

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2022