Berm & Basin construction works!

It has been a while since I posted something here! I have been ill, suffering the effects of untreated high blood pressure. Who knew that suffering a major flood, losing half your livestock, driving truck across the country and planning a move across the country using "new" building techniques could cause stress???

So here I am, home from work until further notice, planning our new home. One thing I have had time to do, was to learn about the "berm & basin" landscaping methods to mitigate water flow & erosion across our land. Today's photo is of my freshly completed berm, with a watercourse moving water to the bottom (center of photo).

This and about 10 other berms were installed and then we waited and waited for rain. Finally we had 2-3 fairly small showers. Enough to start the grass seeds, but not enough to test the berms.

Yesterday, that changed! We received about three inches of rain in three hours. All the berms did their job correctly, except the one pictured. It ran down to another berm with a drain pipe to the retention area. The drain pipe plugged and that lower berm washed out. But the result showed we did not need the drain pipe and berm anyway.

The retention area held about one foot of water in about an acre and a half (1.5 acre feet?) for about seven hours before is noticeably began to infiltrate. This would have been enough time to pump all the water needed into storage tanks!

The best thing about this is that the soil here, infiltrates faster than the soil on our new property will. So if we could have stored this water, we definitely will be able to store the water in Terlingua!

The better news, was that a similar rain in Terlingua, would have offered us over 16,000 gallons of water to store from our rain water harvesting system. The harvested water alone would have more than filled our tanks! So I am re-thinking the entire "berm & basin" construction toward moving the water to planting areas and into the one big lined area we will use to store water, rather than trying to create a "ground water capture" system to grab what hit the soil.

So life goes on here in Florida.... waiting for the buyer for the farm to appear (http://suwanneewildlifesanctuary.com/ in case someone is interested)

Robert