Swale and Sheet Mulch Pictures and Welcome Brad!
Greenerminds is now officially a community project, thanks to Outback Brad who joined and posted for the first time this weekend. I’m looking forward to the details of his project, and what he’s going to share here.
For my part, I promised pictures, so here they are. These are a few weeks old- I dug the swales in mid-April, and did the sheet mulching the next weekend.
Here’s an overview shot of the main garden area, delimited by the swale in the foreground and the straw bales along the back. This area is about 40′ by 60′.
Now here’s a detail of one of the swales. I’ve overlaid a rough section drawing showing the water flow downslope and soaking into the lower side of the swale.
Here’s an overview shot of starting to do the sheet mulching. With the materials all collected this process goes very quickly.
I did an area about 20′ x 30′ (25% of the garden) in an afternoon. For the whole garden area I now figure I’d need 5 cubic yards of manure, 1 cubic yard of compost, and 36 straw bales. The sheet mulch will break down over a winter into excellent garden soil, thanks to worms and microorganisms that do all the hard work. However, you can plant directly into them by creating little pockets of topsoil in the straw. I’ll show this in a later post.
Here’s the detail on how the layers go.
Historically, I haven’t been very good at aesthetic design of gardens, and I have to say that putting in the swales and the pathways really helped to frame the areas. I have a main path running through the middle of the garden that will eventually include a patio area, then smaller paths extending off this along the upper sides of the swales. Keyhole garden paths then extend of these secondary branches.
This design framing was an added benefit I hadn’t anticipated. It also helps with plant placement, especially for larger anchor shrubs and trees by limiting the number of appropriate sites.