It all started with the geese. That’s not to say that they were fault, just that their habits started me on a new line of thinking.
The geese were a gift to myself for my birthday one year. I don’t usually do that but I wanted them and it made a good excuse. Since the hatchery had a minimum of ten goslings, and they sent two extras, I ended up with about seven more than I needed. The trouble was that they were so cute and engaging, that I didn’t want to part with any. That was one of my first mistakes.
Did you know that generally speaking, domestic geese reach their full height within eight weeks of hatching? I did not know that at the time and found it a completely amazing feed conversion rate. What’s even more amazing is that they can do it on good pasture alone.
To say that geese love grass is an understatement. Geese LOVE grass. They love it to the extent that they will pull the roots from the ground to get enough. Obviously this would not be a problem with adequate pasturage for twelve geese. This was yet another reason why we should have culled more than half of our flock early on.
Until that first goose summer, our back hill was well covered by a thick layer of Bermuda grass. I used to cut and dry it like hay to bed the hens and ducks over the winter. The grass kept up until the geese were full-sized. Then it became a losing battle.
By the second summer, narrow leaf plantain and Cuban jute (wireweed) had become the main plants, plants the geese didn’t particularly care for. By the end of that summer, you could see large patches of bare, red clay.
It was about this time that our finances entered a time of extreme restriction. I was able to rehome more than half of the geese (they had become spoiled pets). I sowed the large vegetable garden over with wheat for the winter and fenced it in for the geese. I hoped to give the back hill enough time to recover, but that didn’t work out. By the end of the summer even with a severely reduced flock, it was almost stripped bare.
As a result of this lack of cover, amazing amounts of muddy red clay washed off the unprotected hill into the shed/workshop that was cut into the low side of that same hill. After shovelling a several inches deep layer of muck off of the concrete floor in the shed, it was evident we needed to do something quickly.
We tried digging the mud away from the backside of the shed, but that was temporary at best. It was about that time I saw my first Geoff Lawton video. Using swales to collect and redirect water made perfect sense to me. The rub came in with how to construct the necessary swales without a budget to do so? We spent a good bit of time studying the situation before coming up with an answer.
Making swales out of soil was not an option we could use. That would require purchasing fill dirt and renting equipment. What we did have was loads of brushwood, woody vines, perennial weed stalks, cardboard, grass clippings, chopped leaves and some woodchips.
Working together, my teenage son and I began cutting brush (small weedy trees) and woody vines that were choking areas around the garden. We piled it several feet high in a wide row above where the shed was cut into the hill. Then we took larger, heavier pieces and lay them on top to compact the brush down. Then we repeated the process. Once it was about four feet tall and about six feet wide at the base when compressed, we laid a layer of flattened cardboard boxes on the high side of the swale so it could more effectively hold back the water that would rush down the hill when it rained. The cardboard was spread out over the ground a short distance out from the foot of the swale. Then we piled on leaves and grass clippings to not only hold the cardboard down, but to act as a sponge for the water. The mulching also helped keep as many weeds from growing up in the swale itself. The thick layer of absorption also blocked the water from continuing down into the shed with a load of mud. The idea was that after the swale matured and the wood and all rotted down, it would become the soil that we couldn’t move into that place.
The night we finished getting the mulch in place we had a huge rainstorm. It was the perfect test to see if the idea worked.
The next morning, we went out to check the shed floor. A tiny trickle of clear water had gotten through, but no mud! I was elated! That didn’t mean that there wasn’t more work to do, but I’d proven to myself that the principle worked, and that was all the encouragement I needed to keep on! I just goes to show that money, though helpful is not absolutely necessary for getting started with permaculture.
love your article… You had a very creative idea and the good thing is that it worked.
Congratulations and thanks for sharing it :)
Just goes to show – Necessity is the mother of invention!! Well done for adapting the swale plan to fit your needs!
Very clever! My dad had geese and fed them grain and wilted lettuce that the grocer gave him for free and free old bread … now I think I recently read that bread is bad for them. I don’t remember bare ground in the pen, but they lived beside a pond, so maybe paddling around in the water all day prevented them from eating all his grass.
I’ve seen the swale and geese first hand, and the solution worked, but it was a good bit of hard work and exercise. Would geese eat kudzu?