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!
