feel free to answer these questions on the blog]

--if an acre is 4047 square meters, how many runs with your truck does it take to get enough cardboard to cover an acre? How long does each run last (hours)?

I guess it takes an hour and a half to drive to haiku recycling, climb into the newspaper bin and pull out a ford aerostar van load of newspapers... the vanload might cover something miniscule like a 20th of an acre? Of course, other elements required are mulch of some kind to hold down the newspaper and disguise its papier mache appearance. You also need fairly large volumes of water with which to soak the paper...
another option is large pieces of cardboard, and identifying reliable sources of large pieces of cardboard is something we would like to do. bicycle stores have large boxes, as do appliance stores etc... possibly even contacting the recyclers themselves might be an option... or having a big enough truck to provide a recycling service for a few business with the right kind of cellulose to dispose of...

-- how long does it take to sheet-mulch an acre? (or, a meter?) Aside from the cardboard, what materials do you need to sheet mulch? (i.e., what clippings? how many do you need?)
of course, it all depends on how motivated you and your workers are. it is pretty boring work, to be sure, and it is hard to motivate people to do it for long let alone in an aggressive sort of way...
the top dressing organic matter can be anything from straw to pond scum to woodchips. You probably want enough material to make at least a depth of one foot preferably two three...
you really get into economies of scale I suppose. I can sheet mulch so many square feet with a weedeater a rake and a wheelbarrow, so many more with a tractor, mower and giant mechanical rake and trailer, and maybe even more with a bunch of chainsaws and trucks and big diesel chippers. It is sort of a fantasy of mine to charge people money to prune and remove trees and haul away the mulch! Did I mention I am taking a course this semester that will prepare me to take the exam to become a Certified Arborist...
A problem that you will be familiar with is that a lot of the biomass we have here that can be converted into sheet mulch, has a tendency to keep growing and root down through the sheets of carboard or newspaper. So a combination of composting first and using the partially decomposed straw as a top mulch in the sheet mulch approach makes sense...

-- is sheet mulching something you would go with for all
the plantings from now on? what are the alternatives (i saw the alternative, i participated)

all things being equal, in terms of access to materials, sheet mulching is probably the best in terms of energy investment in the longterm. It is a lot of work at the start, and you do have to follow it up with some spot weeding, and make sure you defend the edges against running weeds, but it does seem to be the best way to institute a regime change. Tilling, sowing a combination of annual and perennial groundcovers is cool too, but often you will end up doing so much weeding that you end up doing some amount of sheet mulching anyway...
Of course, mulching is better for the soil than tilling, although initially tilling can give you good growth...

-- what about sheet mulching after digging swales? do these go together? yeah, they can, of course.

--what specification of earth mover did the swales recently? What was the cost per hour? How many hours per acre, roughly, for a total cost?

it was a small bulldozer. may a D5 or D6. He charged $80 an hour and made three swales totalling about 900 linear feet in about 2 or 3 hours... He made a mound that was about 4 feet across, and a cut of about the same size... So, not a huge swale, but a pretty good size I reckon! he wasn't all that accurate in terms of staying exactly on the contour... and his blade merely pushed big clods of soil downhill... I followed up with the little 5hp tiller and spent probably about 5 o 6 hours breaking up the clods into something like a tilth we might be able to sow a cover crop into... also several hours of shovelling the tilled soil back onto the "swale mound"...

It will be interesting to see, once it rains, or Malte runs his well and we flood the swales just how they shape up in terms of levelness... then later it will be interesting to see just how well they hold up to really heavy rainfall. obviously, they will hold better once we have some groundcover established and some roots to hold it all together...

It is hard to make generalisations though, as the best thing to do depends a lot on weather conditions, how much human labor, how much and what kind of machinery you have at your disposal...


hope that helps a bit?