Swales are great for capturing water and infiltrating it slowly into the landscape.

Swales collecting water after a rain.

This post shows the evolution of a swale I built and planted next to the house where there once was a lawn. It catches all the runoff from the roof of tthe house and waters the plants.

Here you can see the swales built on contour with the slope of the land.

Next, I planted it with a mesclun salad mix. This shades out any weeds trying to push through the straw mulch.

The salad pushed up early in the year giving us fresh greens to eat in February before anything else was growing. Had some good salads and enough left over to feed the rabbits.

Six week old bunnies. Rabbit manure makes great fertilizer and won't burn your plants. You can plant right in it without composting it first.

Around March, the chickens were let loose to eat the remaining salad. They scratched the ground removing any remaining weeds and prepping it for planting.

Chickens Eating Mizuna And Weeding the Garden for Spring Planting

The chickens made very quick work of it.

Three hours later after the chickens work was done the bed is weed free and ready to plant again.

Then I sprinkled some seeds on the freshly prepared bed and a month later it looked like this

Chickens did all the work. Weeded, debugged and fertilized.

Properly managed, chickens will work all day from sunrise to sunset. They love it and the eggs are so good.

This is so much better than having a lawn and it turned a problem, having a very wet area from all the roof runoff from the house, into a summer full of great tasting, healthy salads with friends and family.

Another benefit of swales is all the worms migrate into the burm of the swale to escapes the water in the swale. This concentrates the worms into the room zones of the plants, increasing fertility and aeration.

Follow @luzcypher and read about the new 5 acre farm project I'm designing here:

https://steemit.com/gardening/@luzcypher/quit-my-six-figure-job-to-grow-a-food-forest

Thanks for watching and Steem on!

@luzcypher Follow Me
Read my introduction