I’ve been obsessing about water on our property lately. After a rain/snow event that broke our potential drought, I ran around like a crazy man saving water, making sure it was diverting it into the swales and filling every possible rain barrel and available bucket. This is part of my attempt to follow permaculture principle number 3 of catching and storing resources, energy and materials. In the case of water this means keeping the water that falls on our land, on our land. Since moving to Colorado in 2001 and learning to garden in a dry climate and especially since I took a permaculture design course, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about water. Actually, living in this climate on the Front Range averaging 17 inches of precipitation a year, I have become kind of obsessed. There are several reasons that this not such a bad thing. For one thing, water is a diminishing resource here in Colorado and climate change may very well make our area drier and hotter. It will definitely make water and temperature less predictable and more dramatic. A conference on water I attended last week in Denver predicted that though we may not get less water on average around here (no one really knows what climate change will bring the Front Range) the hotter temperatures will affect what water we do get and the plants, animals, insects, people and other organisms that depend on it.
I want to talk about water today and how my understanding and use of it has changed since I started learning about permaculture. One of the first things one is supposed to do in a design for a property is consider the way water moves through one’s land. (This is part of permaculture principle number 1, observation.) When we first bought our two acres and began to plan the house and garden I tried to observe carefully. Our main source is precipitation, which largely arrives in the winter and spring. It’s important, for example, to plant trees, shrubs and perennials in the fall or spring to take advantage of this and not spend your life watering, which you may do anyway. There is a well on the property, but it is very alkaline and not usable for watering (bummer). We are at the end of a “ditch”, water runoff from foothills, which the neighbors dammed up for a pond many years ago. There is a run-over pipe into the back of our property, so we have a wetland in about 1/5 of our land in the spring and early summer, gradually diminishing as fall arrives. Wildlife use this area, and I have considered putting in a small pump to divert it which may or may not be legal in Colorado water law. I haven’t studied it because I don’t really want to know. If I do decide I need it I will have do decide whether forgiveness or permission is more advisable. We also have an interesting asset which is that our other neighbors have “ditch rights”, which means they own a portion of the water that flows in another ditch from the foothills. These rights are quite old but only recently purchased from another neighbor. The rights entitle them to use the water for watering or even saving in a pond or cistern. They use it for flood irrigation of their back field. The good news for us is that before it flows onto their land it goes through a ditch across about half of our land. We have noticed that as this ditch is uphill from our land, all the area downhill of this ditch receives a great deal more water (we assume flowing underground downhill from the ditch) than the other side of our property. Trees, shrubs and other plants on that side have flourished with this underground flow. Even the swales I have dug on that side of the property benefit from this flow.
So my goal has been to save and utilize as much of these various sources as possible. This, by the way, is in accordance with permaculture principle number 5, that each function of one’s design be supported by multiple elements. That means I try to keep water on our land by as many means as possible. So far I have concentrated on digging swales to catch water as it flows across the land. Swales used in permaculture are ditches dug on contour to slow down the flow. There is fun tool called a bunyip that I used to find the contour of the land. I encourage you to google “bunyip water level”. I have dug the swales by mounding up dirt on the downhill side of the swale and filled the swales with wood chips. Over time I am told the groundwater begins to collect as a “plume” of water in the ground around the swales. Plants planted on the swale or just below them (on the key line) benefit from the water in the swale and groundwater plume. I have placed the swales on the south side of the house, which is much hotter and drier than the north side, so that the water coming off the roof fills swales during downpours. On other downspouts on the East and North sides I have placed rain barrels to collect water. I also have rain barrels on the greenhouse (a separate structure) and the shed to further maximize my collecting.
All this seems to working except when the rain stops as it did last summer and we are forced back onto city water to irrigate, a sad but necessary step to preserve our gardens. We do keeps buckets in our shower and drain the bathtub out the window via a siphon, but have not set up more organized gray water systems….yet. Low flow toilets and washing machine help a bit. Overall, however, I have to say that our efforts are paying off. The plants below the swales are definitely better supplied with water than those not on swales. The rain barrels save amazing amounts of water…when we have precipitation. I must say that I’m not sure I’m following principle number 6 very well, using the least change for maximum effect. My teacher in the permaculture design course emphasized how we are supposed to minimize effort. So far I’ve found permaculture to be a lot of work. Though I admit that when things are in place (such as a swale) it does save effort.
All this explains a bit of why I spent a portion of the days when it rained and snowed a couple weeks ago outside getting completely soaked, making sure all the rain saving systems were at least partially functioning. This involved quite a bit of unclogging swales and downspouts, filling buckets and hooking up hoses to the water barrels to divert water to the swales when the barrels were full. My wife thinks I’m crazy and mentions obsessive compulsive disorder when I do this, but once one knows how important the water is, it is easy to get a little crazy. So that’s my current struggle with permaculture principle number 3. The final upside is that I am guardedly optimistic now about the future of water use on our 2 acres.