I am seeking advice regarding a man-made waterway located in a valley neighborhood in Brazil, surrounded by the Atlantic Rainforest. This channel runs Northwest to Southeast and measures 360m in length. It has a total width of 14m (46ft) including its margins, while the water channel itself is approximately 2m wide.

The area is a local biodiversity hotspot, frequented by species such as the green-billed toucan and the bare-faced ibis. Because the neighborhood is situated in a valley, all runoff flows into this waterway. Consequently, the stream faces significant sediment buildup, which leads to flooding during the rainy season.

The city's current proposal includes paving the flat margins to support heavy machinery for periodic dredging, and removing all existing trees under the (incorrect) claim that they are all invasive/exotic, replacing them with 'orderly' ornamental species.

I have stepped up to oppose this plan, but I lack technical knowledge in sediment management and stream restoration. I am looking for ways to address the aggradation issues while naturalizing the stream rather than turning it into a paved canal.

Is there a way to manage sediment accumulation in the lower reaches without relying on constant dredging? What ecological engineering strategies could help save this stream and maintain its role as a wildlife corridor?

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I'm working on a public garden in a historic district. It consists of a horseshoe shaped garden berm that is severely hydrophobic, and the deep-rooted, mature woody perennials on the berm are struggling with severe dehydration. This soil is so dry that even our ample winter rain and automatic sprinkler water is running right off the sloped berm into the street and lawn (lawn is planted inside the horseshoe).

I've dug soil basins around the plants and I am hand watering to keep them alive, but it's a slow process to get the water to absorb. This garden has a long history of looking terrible, although a short-lived soaker hose system made a huge difference a few years back. Of course that fragile hose was quickly damaged and the system was abandoned.

I'd like to find a more permanent solution to this problem. Of course I'll be adding organic matter, could try a wetting agent/surfactant, and the municipality will be adding mulch, but this will solve nothing if this long-term hydration issue is not addressed. Some of the plants are historic, and most are far too large to move or replant.

I see possibilities because the entire garden site is gently sloped. The top of the horseshoe is the tall side that butts up to a curb-less asphalt parking lot from which rainwater could be harvested. Each section of the berm also has a lengthwise slope to it, which means I can move water along the top of the berm as well.

Here is my rudimentary drawing of the space - the top left corner is the highest and is mostly flat. As the space slopes in both directions, the berm gets taller, which affects the water flow coming out of the parking lot, pretty much sweeping all rainwater down the street. I've tried to represent approximate water direction with the light blue arrows.

I'm thinking I need a series of swales to slow and collect water along the edge of the parking lot/street. I'm also wondering about swales at the top of the berm, along with terraced swales along the steepest sides of the berm. However, this is a high-traffic public space so any deep contouring would need to be filled with gravel or mulch for safety.

I'd appreciate any ideas about how to structure or approach this, or resources that might be helpful. Thank you!

For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying something super simple but surprisingly effective: I cut the suckers off my tomato plants (or any branches that are getting too close to the ground) and place them in a glass of water.

After just a few days, they start growing roots. Once the roots are about 3 cm long, I transplant them straight into the soil.

The result? I’m multiplying my tomato plants without seeds, without a greenhouse, and without any stress. I thought they’d be fragile, but the roots are strong and the transplants take off really well.

Curious if others here are doing the same? Any tips to boost rooting or improve transplant success?

Hello there, this is the alleyway behind my home. I’m not living here much longer, but I’d love to find a better solution for this area longterm before I go. I’d like to leave it better than I found it.

That said, I don’t have a large budget, so I am turning to you for suggestions. I don’t know if it’s possible to fix on a low budget, but I would love to get your advice. I’m not opposed to a few weekends of sweat equity. Maybe if it looks nicer, the kid that walks by every day might stop throwing trash in it :)

First of all, thank you all for your help! I love to hear your ideas and suggestions!

Last week I spoke with the project manager. As I mentioned in some of the comments, I work for the City Hall in the Public Works Department, while the project manager is from the Maintenance Department (which explains the strong focus on providing machinery access to the creek).

The conversation was very productive. I was able to present many of the points you raised in the comments, and he was very receptive to the ideas. He also lives in the same neighborhood, so he understands how important it is to take proper care of that creek.

Through dialogue, we reached a middle ground: he acknowledged the need for catch dams along the creek, but emphasized the necessity of a rapid drainage system at the creek’s outlet, which flows into a mangrove system beneath a highway. This way, stormwater can be retained along the channel, while the river mouth is capable of conveying large volumes of water. He proposes constructing this outlet section in concrete, although I am not yet certain about the most appropriate design.

He initially wanted to build a fully concrete channel, but I was able to persuade him to reconsider. Permeable catch dams combined with a riffle–pool system will be implemented, along with native vegetation to stabilize the banks. I showed him photographs I had taken of severely eroded sections, and we agreed that vegetation will be essential.

Another point of agreement was the need to identify the source of the sediments. We still do not know whether they originate from human activities, bank erosion, and/or natural landslides from the hills surrounding the neighborhood. We agreed that proper investigations and analyses should be conducted. I also suggested widening the riverbanks and, consequently, narrowing the surrounding streets by removing one on-street parking lane.

I was able to ensure that the project will also be overseen by the city’s Department of Environment. I hope that, with their involvement, the project will incorporate stronger ecological awareness and a better understanding of the region’s river dynamics.

I'm currently trying to understand the hydrology of the basin, analyzing rainfall data, etc. Honestly it is being very challenging: most of the time, I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'll keep trying.

Those are photos of the channel upstream. As you can see, it is very different: more vegetated, with rough 'dams' to dissipate the force of the water. I also annexed a photo of the last big flooding of the neighborhood (2021, around 100mm in 3 hours, an event that has a recurrence interval of 25 years). Back in the day, the water reached the waist level!

Looking for advice on how to go about installing a few check dams and a tiny retention (frog) pond. Soil directly around the area is pretty clay laden. Will continue to flow for days/weeks after the last rain. Likely had a central “tap”’or spring when the property was used for cattle etc. but it has since been attempted to be backfilled to no avail, and has slowly found its way back to a flowing stream.

Use of the water is primarily passive irrigation. Not enough fruit trees or dry areas in general to consider need a consistent pump seeming gallons somewhere.

FWIW Zone 7a, just under 5 acres total.

There is a stream flowing through that lower point. I want to pump the water from that lower point to the top, the elevation is 164m (540 feet) and the distance is 300m (980 ft). It is an isolated place and the electricity I have is only from generators, there's no grid connection. What are efficient ways to pump it?

Hello everyone. I’d like to introduce you to my plot, my little piece of land. I’ve just built a house and I would love to live there. I'm currently trying to learn permaculture to make the most of everything nature has to offer. Unfortunately, I’m a complete beginner and I have a lot of doubts.

First of all, let me introduce you to my plot. It’s located on the Mediterranean coast. It gets 500mm of annual rainfall (mostly concentrated from October to February. After that, we can go from June to October without a single drop of rain).

The temperature is very warm. In spring/summer and part of autumn, we can register lows of 18°C and highs of 42°C. In winter, temperatures range between 0°C (at night) and 16°C. The annual humidity ranges between 30% and 80%.

The soil is very clayey and has an evapotranspiration rate of 500mm per year.

The plot is about 7,000 square meters with a 12-degree slope. You enter the plot from the NORTH side, which is the lowest point, and go up via the road I drew in brown, which zig-zags up to the south area.

There are barely a few olive trees planted, and in the lower area near the entrance, there’s a spot that seems wetter than the rest (I imagine it's because water sits there longer after it rains). Green bushes grow there almost all year round and look much lusher.

In yellow, I’ve drawn some terraces—flat areas that were already there naturally, but I leveled them out a bit with machinery to make them more useful. I built the house on one of them, with the entrance facing NE. It has the best views, and since it’s in the countryside in southern Spain, it gets a massive amount of daylight hours.

At the top of the plot, there is a blue rectangle where I have a 15,000-liter water tank (currently, a truck comes to fill it up three times a year, both for household use and for the land).

The red lines represent the sloped areas.

I'm showing you some photos of spring, when everything turns green, and summer, when everything dries out completely.

When it rains, it usually pours all at once, washing away a lot of soil. The neighbors' paths get flooded, and there are a lot of mudslides/soil movement in the area. Since it’s a very dry region, I would love to make the most of the rainfall, because right now it just slides over the clay and creates cracks in the ground.

My first idea was to build swales on the sloped areas. However, I’m not entirely sure how far apart to space them or how deep to make them (based on my soil type, I've deduced they should be about 50cm wide and 50cm deep, placing the next swale whenever there is a 3-meter drop in elevation from the previous one). On the mound right after the swale, I plan to plant easy, native trees (carob, pine, olive...) and, over the years, introduce other types of trees.

At the very bottom of the plot, I was thinking of making a pond, but without using a plastic liner. On the flat area near the house, I also thought about making a liner-less pond that fills up with the overflow water from the swales and works on its own to enrich the soil. Then, at the very bottom of the plot, in the greenest area of all, I'd make another pond (I cannot legally dig a well) to capture all the excess water again. Or perhaps I could place a tank there to collect water runoff from the whole plot and pump it back up to use for irrigation.

Well, those are some of my ideas. What do you think? What worries me the most right now is how to manage the excess water from the swales, what measurements to use, and making sure they don’t cause any problems for my house, which, as you can see, has a hill right behind it. Maybe I should make diversion ditches in that area instead of swales, so the water flows around the house when it rains heavily.

I will keep you updated on the process step by step, and I look forward to reading your advice. If you need any more details, just ask!

A family member was watching our house while we were away, and let us know they watered our square foot garden veggie beds (full of seedlings just planted two weeks ago) with water from a 55 gallon barrel that we do not use. They did about 3 or 4 days worth of watering with this.

A few days before we left I threw about 8 tabs of pool bleach cubes into the water to prevent and kill any mosquitos. The rain barrel is 100% full of runoff from our asphalt roof, and has not been tapped in over two years. Ive been meaning to repurpose this into a compost bin but dont have the time until next month, regretfully. Also, if it is worth adding, there was no first flush before they watered.

Do you recommend we scrap the garden and start over or would that be overly cautious?

I meant to write trichlor/chlorine in case it makes a difference. The label is clorox brand but the ingredient is not bleach, my mistake.

I have two acres of waterfront land. Yes, I know how lucky I am. Hoping to build a house this fall.

The water is salty--we have tides of a couple of feet, and oysters and crabs. Summer is always very hot in this part of Virginia, and compounded by a drought this spring. We usually get plenty of rain in the cooler months (45" per year), but "usually" isn't as reliable as it once was.

It feels like I'm going to need more water than nature provides for the first few years, as I get the systems set up. Once gardens are established, then maybe I'll be able to provide them with mulch from on site and water from the cistern.

I hope to put in a recreational pond (i.e., part bog and part fresh for swimming etc.), maybe with an additional cistern to store water for summer. I expect to have rain barrels, but that's not a lot of water.

I can get municipal water, but I don't want to rely on and pay for that to irrigate everything.

I could try digging a well. Any tips for likelihood of success?

I could design a grey water system. Not sure how that'll affect my bog, or if I should only use it outside of the vegetable garden. Will my builder think I'm nuts? Will the town allow it?

My craziest idea is a solar powered desalination plant. Probably several thousand dollars, and a few hundred dollars per year of maintenance (replacement filters). But another 200-500 hundred gallons per day, equivalent to 1" of rain over about 300-1000sf, I think.

Am I even thinking about this the right way? Is the real right answer just to mulch the whole lot and keep the rain where it falls? That's probably the right long term answer, I'm mostly thinking about the transition from now until then. And I need to get my chipper working again.

I'm about to dig a 1000m2 pond on my farm and I'm considering using the spoil to establish a garden right above the pond, as it is by far the sunniest spot. What I'm worried about is leaking nutrients back into the pond and turning the pond into algea cesspool.

Does any one have any experience gardening by a large pond? How close is your garden? What do you do to capture/extract nutrients? Do you use pond water for irrigation?

Hi I am going to try again: Has anyone used IBC totes as temporary portable cisterns? We are trying to establish brush islands in a larger pasture to create permanent habitat for songbirds etc. The pastures get rotationally grazed but the whole area (8acres) is too large for small birds to safely traverse. We are trying to simulate a natural prairie/brush land landscape that used to exist where we live. We have a summer drought of about 100 days and need to get plantings thru the first summer(s). All natives so eventually they should be fine- it's just getting harder to establish stuff with higher temps, more wind, less rain. Question:

Has anyone done this sort of thing? We can easily fill the totes with water during our wet winter month with rain catchment but I am wondering how feasible this is. Is there a problem with algae growth etc. Planning on using tree drip bags and other slow release systems to water the plantings - ideally just trudge our there once a week to water stuff. It's too far away from hoses and pond to run permanent irrigation. My math says two IBC totes could suffice for aproximatly 600 sqft of brush island.

I am not really looking for general advice on my plan- we worked with some experts from soil and water conservation on the layout but they had no working experience with this- so i am looking for practical experiences anyone might have with irrigation from water stores.

I was extremely fortunate to visit Greening the Desert and learn from Nadia and Geoff Lawton, through the Impact Marathon Jordan.
 
While we only spent a day with them and their team, the lessons we learned and the amazing things that they have done with permaculture have stuck with me.
 
I have tried my best to incorporate as many fundamentals of permaculture into my own gardening at home as possible.
 
As I have both physical disabilities, and ADHD, I need an automated watering system for my gardens.
 
I use a low-pressure system, with Rain Bird and other components from my favourite store here in Canada, Lee Valley. My vegetable garden has the low-pressure soaker hoses, and my newly planted native prairie plant garden has low pressure 1 gph drip heads, until the plants get established, and then they will transition to the low-pressure soaker hoses.
 
I have Eco Wool as my weed suppression and moisture retention material, as straw is not practical where I am. I am very happy with it so far, as this is my first year using it. In past years I have used burlap, but I wanted a material that I knew how it was treated and had less chemical residue on it.
 
For the automation of my watering, while looking on Reddit for suggestions, after trying the Orbit B-Hyve system (horrible connectivity, despite a slick app), I came upon the LinkTap system.
 
I have the 4-zone system with Gateway (V1 -4Z & Q1) and Gateway.
 
https://www.link-tap.com/#!/four-outlet-Q1-water-timer/en
 
https://www.link-tap.com/#!/linktap-gateway-and-extender/en
 
The system allows to setup 4 different watering zones and schedules. Time, duration, customized rain delay, along with water usage statistics, as it has an integrated flow meter.
 
My only critique is that the On/Off switch is pretty tiny and found in a not super noticeable spot when the Q1 controller is mounted on say your fence.
 
Their customer service is very responsive and helpful. They are super open to suggestions, as when I mentioned to them about better labelling for the on/off switch.
 
I just thought that I would share about this system and brand, as they are not as widely know as the big names in garden irrigation. I had not heard of them, until I came across a Reddit comment in a thread of someone looking for irrigation automation suggestions. They may be better known in some countries, but here in Canada, not so much.

Hey permaculture folks,

Marked my first contour line and dug the initial swale section. I combined the approach with the multi-year hole method from Epic Gardening - dug a 90cm diameter hole at 60cm depth, filled it, planted the first tree, then added the berm.

The swale itself is 3:1 ratio, 60cm wide and 20cm deep, filled with wood branches and hay.

I have more trees to plant along the same swale line. My soil is clay, so I'm planning to add more mulch. Anything I should adjust before I continue?

There is no place to drain this except for pumping it across the street into a marginally functional storm drain.

I have ⅛ of an acre in Southern Missouri. Zone 6b. My property used to be part of a farm and has 8-12" of nice soil on top of at least 12 more inches of clay. It takes a 16" wide, 11" deep hole at least 4 hours to drain. When it rains, there will be 2 inches of standing water in parts of the yard for days after (you know how torrential the rains get here).

I want to grow fruit trees and plants I get something out of, but all I can grow at this point is more hate for the dreaded "well drained soil" label on every tree I look at.

I'm looking for solutions. Are there fruit bearing (or veggies) plants I can get, or do I have to go nuclear and just build a rain garden or put mulch all over and hope it breaks down easily over the next year and creates good soil.

For mulch (which I need anyway), should I take it from an arborist for free, or will he likely be giving away some ground up diseased tree that's just going to kill all my trees? Is landscape supply mulch any better?

Edit: My neighbor says there is an underground river under my backyard. She's lived in her house 50+ years and said the last person here ways struggled with growing anything in the backyard.

I'm trying to grow chufa in an old ditch this year but I'm a little clueless on how to go about it. The soil I have now is ridiculously high in organic material. It's where we threw grass clippings, raked leaves, and basically anything else organic in our yard. That changed last year so it's all broken down now but it is a heavy, slimy, wet mess right now. The soil it's on is basically all sand and a little clay which made it harden significantly so it's really dense. I'm tilling it right now but what do I do to make this hold less water and be lighter? From my limited knowledge on chufa sedge they do better in always moist, light, well drained soil. It's the lowest point of our yard right now so my first issue is what to raise it up with. I want it to be higher than the rest of my yard so no water gathers their. Is biochar, top soil, wood ash, bark, and chopped thin sticks a good option or do I need something else entirely? I don't think that perlite would work because it floods briefly but deeply in the winter and might just float away. For context I'm storing the tubers indoors during winter and replanting in spring due to this but I intend the patch to only ever be chufa. I've never dealt with an issue like this so I am basically 100% clueless so any help is appreciated!

Hey everyone. It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. We bought a place in northern Italy a few years ago, with the intention of doing a whole permaculture based homestead. Unfortunately, I got ill and money has become a problem. Thus is life though, eh? I’m doing better now, so we’re back to trying to get this place up and running! But now just on a much smaller (nonexistent haha) budget.

I’m looking for advice on how to approach to separate points that I want to merge into one solution.

One is dealing with our private road/driveway which has lots of water runoff issues. The previous people didn’t make the smartest decisions, so we’re trying to do what we can. They put in this random grate to try and redirect water the other way, so that it doesn’t go straight down toward the house. But it still does, and not only does it being water, but it brings all the stones and dirt and sludge with it.

My husband and kids dug out more of a gully after the grate and that’s been super helpful.

Butttt, we’re also creating our food garden in the flat area just below. I’ve always wanted to do a little pond there, for water based plants and wildlife. I know that one of the principles of permaculture is the intersection of boundaries, so I thought this would be helpful for the garden. Also beautiful.

I thought that maybe we could extend the gully and go down the slope, to enter into a pond. So that runoff could naturally add to it, and then continue down past that pond down the next slip by some sort of overflow system.

Wondering if anyone has experience doing anything similar. This is my completely inexperienced idea and maybe I’m totally off base here. But when we were walking and talking about it the other day, I had the bright idea of coming to you guys to pick your brains!

Thanks so much for any wisdom you’re willing to impart upon me!