Where It Starts

 

Earthworks Workshop with Warren Brush near Pismo Beach in early December of 2017.

This is where it started for me, where vague theory transformed into actual practice. "It" being what I wanted to do with the 10 acre property I'd purchased in Western Colorado. I'd been involved with a permaculture makeover on a small suburban property in Los Angeles, but scaling up my thinking was a new process for me, and one I wasn't quite sure I was ready to tackle in practical terms.

Filmmaker Kellen Keene and his partner had purchased an old farm a few miles inland from the ocean, just south of San Luis Obispo, degraded farmland where there was already a legacy dam for water storage - but it was empty and dry here at the end of the season. And frankly, the dam was just sitting on a slope where, if it was actually put to use, the water would have no place to go. Below it, a relatively flat field intermittently flooded with irrigation or stormwater runoff from a farm next door - but again, it wasn't being put to any productive use. Kellen and his partner lived in a farmhouse slightly upslope, but wanted to downsize into a yurt elsewhere on the property, and they had plans to turn their residence into some sort of permaculture teaching center. I have no idea whether or not those plans were ultimately realized.

Warren and his design team (website here) had already mapped the property and assembled materials and the machinery, but they were also lecturing on the design principles that they'd employed to conjure up a flow of water, in and out of storage and across the property.

 

Warren Brush checking out soil horizons.

During the four days we were on the property, an amazing amount of work was done: the land was surveyed and contours plotted with a self-leveling laser. Trenches were dug and urbanite spillways were constructed, emptying into vetiver grass plantings. A major swale was created to harvest potential rainwater from a nearby roadway and run it across the property to the pond. Most of the slopes on the property were converted in some way to take advantage of whatever rainfall was available.

Broken concrete armors the spillway from a potential pond, slowing the overflow and delivering it into a winding vetiver grass buffer zone.

There's a great deal to be learned from attending one of these workshops, and you are, of course, paying for it both in terms of a registration fee and the labor you're donating to somebody else's project. But there really is no substitute for what you gain both in camaraderie and in inspiration, in seeing a plan develop into a practical application. It's an experience stateside of what Warren and other permaculture designer/developers are doing internationally with the tools and resources at hand.

The trusty old Yeoman's plow. The field was ripped on contour to ensure water infiltration and topsoil development.