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water harvesting

The rains have come and the swale...

on Fri, 02/18/2011 - 19:41

 

After a couple of days of rainy wether; at last water in the swale :) After the first big rains there was hardly anything. This is because it had been dry for a month or so, and the land was absorbing almost everything. Then, after a couple of bigger rain storms spread over a couple of days and many hours of lighter rain, The swale got on average some 20 cm of water. As I didn't quite finish the leveling, I could easily sea where more work needed to be done. When finished, I gues the capacity will be at least twice wat we had now, so we will be able to handle most rainstorms.

We are

Figuring out the swale

on Tue, 02/08/2011 - 19:29

I'm working on our first swale. Today I had the idea to make some deeper parts in it, so we could have small ponds, where frogs and lizards can live in the summer. I keep them small on purpose so we can easily fill them when the water evaporates in the hottest of the Alentejo summers. I will put a polyethilene liner in it and later cover part of the water surface with floating cork, to reduce evaporation.