Now that we know where the swales are, Bach and I did some digging yesterday for holes to put in some more bamboo's and big windbreak trees North North East of the the proposed food forest area.
Oh, and first we planted the Gigantachloa arundinaceae "Maxima" down there in the gulch in the hole we dug a couple of months ago. It was a bit if a shenanigans. We got the red truck stuck half way up the hill and had to cart the compost and cinders and mulch and newspaper by hand and wheelbarrow quite a lot of the way. But it is in the ground finally, and looking good...
As well as digging some pretty big holes around the back end of the swales we got a bit of a production line going to plant out a big patch of gliricidia as a secondary primary windbreak... I mean that in that it is behind the roadside hedge of casuarina, bamboo's and koa, but before the next patch of bamboo's... Anyway, Susan wielded the rebuilt husqvarna weedwhacker and cleared enough of a patch of grass that the post hole digger could do its thing, then I moved in with the tractor and bored a hole. Then Bach came at each hole with a cultivator and roughed up the sides of the holes, threw in a gliricidia cutting that had been soaking for a week, and backfilled the hole with a little compost cinder mix thrown in. We put some newspaper and mulch around most of them... If only 50% of them take, we will replace them with sesbanias, calliandras, cassias and pidgeon peas in the coming months. They are on a six foot wide grid, with about 6 rows of 6 -8 cuttings. Full canopy would be a while in coming at that spacing, but it felt pretty good...
We also set up some small rain catching barrels underneath Geoff's gutters, so we will have auxillary water supply for these plants, and the bamboo work we'll be doing here in the coming weeks/months.
Went to the pound to let Uzi and the red cattle dog have a "dog to dog". The red dog wanted to play with Uz, but Uz wasn't too interested and snarled at her a bit. Even so, the people at the pound still said we could have her if the home inspection goes okay. So, we might have a little guard dog here pretty soon.