Contours

I've described the field as north-facing, but in fact it has all sorts of interesting topographical features that I encountered as I dug some shallow swales across the landscape last spring, including an abundance of prairie dog mounds, screwing up my contour lines.

The land shapes tell you where to place things - that and the flow of water downhill and off the property. I used an online contour creation tool here to give me a rough idea of what I was dealing with, and the overlay I produced (easily applied in Google Earth Pro) has served as my roadmap (see the first post in this blog).

Ordinarily, one might want to place the house down from the ridge, and store water up higher. But this placement looks at the house (i.e., the roof) as a rain catchment device, so I'm locating it near the top of the hill and hoping it will catch and store water in an adjacent pond, which can also be filled from the irrigation pipe. And the domestic water line hookup runs along the top of the ridge as well.

Also, the view is better.

The contours make it fairly easy to see the central ridge, and the adjacent shallow valleys on either side. The bright green line in the image below is a swale (surveyed first with one of those A-frame DIY levels, then corrected with a self-leveling laser) that should, in theory, feed some additional water into the pond. But will the pond remain filled in all seasons in this high and dry desert country, with the impact of climate change breathing down our necks and the many days of sunshine evaporating precious moisture into the air? I'm hoping that plantings and increasing the shoreline "edge" will help out on that score: the shoreline won't be a simple curve as shown.