Swale and garden bed improvements
Our wwoofers beginning the swale rockwall
To further improve our kitchen garden swales, we have rockwalled a number of them. This stops erosion of the garden beds, since soil falls or is washed down into the swales. It also creates a beautiful frog and lizard habitat, and levels the garden bed, instead of having it on a slope.
Thanks Fede and Julie, for your hard work on the wall!
By using the combined resources of wwoofers and our creek rock, and PDC student Andrew’s experience in rock walling (he showed the woofers how to build the dry rock wall), the swale rock wall took only 3 days to build. This included getting rock from our creek bed, sorting the rock and laying it. It has made the garden bed more functional and more productive, and as we build the soil and raise the garden beds, we can add more rocks to the rock wall to keep all the beautiful soil where it belongs: in the garden bed.
We also added sawdust, a waste product available at our local sawmill, to cover the path and to stop weeds. We use sawdust for all our kitchen garden paths, to slow down weed growth and to create defined borders. Sawdust breaks down over time and becomes part of and adds carbon to the soil.
The finished rock wall, with sawdust paths.
Scott starting the garden bed cleanup.
The next project was to make the carbohydrate garden beds below the freshly rock walled swale more productive. There was a sweet potato bed there, that produced more leaves than root, and other beds further down had gone to weeds. Scott, another wwoofer with us cleaned up the beds.
Everything was removed from the beds, then the beds were fed with our beautiful homegrown compost. The main bed took 4 wheelbarrow loads of compost! We are also preparing the swale below that bed for another rock wall, so all that compost can stay on the bed, instead of being washed away…
The finished result! New rock wall is in the swale to the right of the pic, rock wall yet to be built in swale on left of pic
Tom planted potato and sweet potato in those beds, getting some carbs ready for our next PDC course!
©2012 Permaculture Research Institute Sunshine Coast – Rockwalls for Permaculture swales improves permaculture gardens.
Author: Zaia Kendall
Zaia grew up in a family of musicians in Holland, and has a background in top sport (snow skiing) and web development and design. She co-founded the PRI Luganville and PRI Sunshine Coast Inc (now PermEco Inc.) with Tom, and runs the “invisible structures”, like finances, business administration, website design and maintenance, writes articles and records and edits videos. She assists Tom in running the Kendall Permaculture Farm and supervising other volunteers. She is an active member of several musical projects and bands, involved in community music and runs percussion and marimba workshops, is the percussion leader for the Woodford Folk Festival People’s Orchestra and composes as well as plays music. She is passionate about community music and loves seeing people discover that they can play!
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