Swale Part 1 - It begins

This morning I finally started work on my first Contour Swale. A very Permaculture thing to be doing.

What I am doing different to how many western swales are created these days is digging it by hand, an endeavour some might consider a bit crazy. Its going to be a little over 100 of  my paces long, my paces being a little over a meter I think. Its about a quarter of the way down the property, the highest point at which I could get a clear path all the way across. 

For more on what swales are and how they work I suggest a look at this two minute youtube video, Geoff Lawton can explain far better than I can :) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFeylOa_S4c 

The proposed path for the swale.

In terms of how I have my mind around this gargantuan task its another one of those cases where I see strong similarities between my new life and my old city job of animating. Animated productions are ridiculously huge undertakings, requiring amounts of work that when viewed in their entirety seem overwhelming. However, if you break the job up into small components and set yourself small goals along the way it is amazing what you can achieve. At Oska Software I might have produced over an hour of animation in a year, which would be over 36000 frames of animation, but by focussing on what I needed to get done each day, then each morning or afternoon, and then even what I want to get done in the next hour or even ten minutes it can become achievable.  

And so it is with the Swale, 100 paces sounds like a lot, but I won't be focusing on that. Here I dug out 4 or 5 paces in a couple of hours, which is what I intend to focus on doing regularly, it still leaves me time for other duties on the farm and makes sure I can give my back a rest. But 4 or 5 paces every couple of days will add up to say about 20 paces a week, in just a 4 or 5 weeks I'll be half way across etc etc.

This is how things are done when you choose to live a cash poor, time rich lifestyle. I could watch someone do it with a bobcat in half a day if I did more work off farm, but I think there is a big difference in how I would feel about the swale. This will be my swale, I will know every inch of it, instead of knowing every bit of some other job I had done for someone else to profit from just to get my hands on a slither of the money it might make, so I can then have an "easier" swale that I felt less connected to. I know its not for everyone, but this actually makes me happy, I can't wait to look back on my work when its done.

So far I expect I've been spoiled, the ground is quite soft after all the rain we had late in January, it will be interesting to see how we go. I'll keep you posted.