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Hi, my name is Jeff Adams.
I'm the owner of Terrasophia LLC
an ecological design, consulting, and education firm.
And we're here in the backyard of the property that I'm renting
to look at some different strategies
for permaculture and climate resiliency
that can be implemented at a home scale
and then we'll be taking a tour to look at
some other watershed scale stategies as well.
So here one of the first things to think about in terms of energy efficiency
and resource use is the orientation of bulidings.
And this particular trailer was oriented
with its long access on the east-west access
so that it's really well designed for passive solar orientation.
And what that means is that in the winter
when the sun is low, it pours through these windows
helping to heat the house and in the summer
a lot less light and heat gets into the building
helping to keep it a little bit cool.
So that's a really great way to just by simply
the way that you orient your house and your windows,
you can save a lot on your heating and cooling bills.
So the next thing we really are looking at here
is in permaculture what's called your zone 1.
Or we have this forest garden, kitchen garden,
right off the back doorstep where it's really easy
to go from the kitchen to come out,
to harvest some different culinary herbs
such as chives, rosemary, oregano, thyme, a whole fennel,
a whole range of different culinary and medicinal things
for us to eat.
We're also standing in what could be considered
a forest garden.
That means we are in a space where it looks and functions
like a natural forest, but is full of multi-functional plants
for both wildlife, pollinators, as well as human consumption.
So some of our overstory trees, we have apricots, mullberries,
nanking cherries, choke cherries, peaches, apples,
all helping to provide shade and create a cooler microclimate
here down where it's— where people are more like to hang out
and need a little bit of shade especially in the heat of the summer.
Then we have some lower story stuff such as currants,
sumac, lilacs, rosemary, other small fruiting shrubs
that are starting to fill in that next layer.
And then we have whole variety of stuff growing
in kind of ground cover and foreplayer
so that we're really using vertical space
as well as horizontal space very efficiently
in terms of packing it full of different plants.
And trying to really get a lot of ground cover
so that we don't have bare soil,
we don't have a lot of loss of that potential
to harvest solar energy and have plants converted into
different products for human use as well as cool, fresh air.
All these other ecosystem services provided to us.
So here we are standing next to Arundo donax
also known as giant reed.
It is considered in Utah to be a noxious plant
that requires you to either eradicate it or control it,
so on our property here we are choosing to control it
by harvesting it annually to prevent it from going to seed
as well as managing its spread so it stays in this area.
And we actually find it to be a very beneficial
and multi-functional plant when it is not out of control
in our water ways.
So here it's helping to provide a wind break
and visual screen from the neighboring properties.
And it is also a very great building material
and multi-functional plant once you've harvested it.
It's a great source of biomass.
So standing under Arundo archways that are created to both
help prop up vegetation to increase wind break and privacy.
As well as we're starting to trellis vines up this side.
We have some cucumbers that are just barely starting
to get going this season to grow up the otherside.
So it's becoming a structure for additional vertical plant growth.
We also use it as bundles to help create erosion control
and little terraces on hillsides so that we can then
back fill that with some soil and have a nice flat terrace
to plant into for next year.
And another great use for it is a lot of native bee species
are solitary cavity nesters and they really like
to lay their pupae or larvae into the open ends
of different canes and stuff.
So here's a small native bee habitat house that has a little bit
of occupancy going on in the holes in the wood.
And we have some other spots on site where native pollinators
have laid their pupae into the ends of the Arundo as well.
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Alright, and so here we are on the top of the property
on the edge of a ridgeline here.
So while before we were down in a nice forested, shadier spot,
now we're up in a full sun microclimate that gets a lot more sun, wind,
so different plant palete things they can handle
a lot hot, dryer climates.
And really trying to, again, promote that multi-functional pollinator planting
so we have a lot of stuff for people to eat,
but also big swads of flowers for our native and local pollinators.
We're also trying to build in habitat features,
so we have logs for bird perches, different cane bundles for native bees,
rock walls and rock bundles for lizards and other creatures
'cause we're really trying to create a diverse ecosystem
where nature creates its own checks and balances
so that we have to do less work in terms of pest mangagement
and keeping our plants healthy.
Another thing to note up here is I'm standing
on what was dug out as a root cellar
from here all the way down there about 8 or so feet deep.
And then over the course of about 20 years all of the brush and trimmings
from the property were piled up in here just as something
to not haul them to the landfill, not burn it,
sort of make better use of that carbon and that organic material.
And so we compressed that, worked in a little bit of sand
and now we have this giant sponge here that stays wet through a good portion
of the summer and has a whole bunch
of different biological activity, fungal mycelium,
all of these things that really support healthy plant growth
and tie up that atmospheric carbon and that biomass
into a carbon sink on property instead of putting it back up
into the atmosphere.
So really trying to shift that carbon balance here.
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My name is Jay Nethercott
and I'm the property owner.
We're on the south end of Moab up on top of rocky road.
And anyway, so this is a project that we've started last winter.
And if you'll see up in here the Arundo that we've used
is sort of a base.
And then what we do is mix that with reject sand
or rock dust is what I like to call it.
It's kind of a combination of rock powder and rocks—tiny little rocks.
And then we mix that with the Arundo or oftentimes with these chips—
with these wood chips right here.
And it makes a really nice nutritious combination
because when those wood chips start breaking down
inside of this stuff which is waste sand,
you can get it by the truck load,
it actually turns into really good topsoil.
Ya the idea here, the theory —it's just a theory, I think it'll work
is if we can connect the water table which is in the bottom of this drainage
as evidenced by this cottonwood tree here.
You know I planted that cottonwood tree 15-20 years ago.
Just stabbed it into the ground because I knew there was water down there
evidenced by all this vegetation and then there's willows down below,
and watered it a little bit at first
and then it just came up on its own.
And so you can see that it's pulling a lot of water out of the ground water.
There is ground water down there.
So the idea behind these pathways is to take that water
and start drawing it up this desert hillside.
And our plan is to get it all the way to the top, eventually.
Because, I think using this method with these pathways
and connecting with trees and vegation— you know start at the bottom and move
towards the top— and I think that we can completely
revegetate this hillside and improve the hydrology
and you know create a microhabitat here good for birds and deer.
And we've got rabbits, and I've seen some peregrine falcons living around here.
All kinds of bird life, they love trees.
Organic material acts like a wick, like in a lamp.
And if you can just get a good solid coat of it, like up this hillside,
it will eventually rehydrate.
And I think that's one of the answers to pushing back the desert a little bit
which I think is an objective that we all need to focus on
because deserts are growing around the planet
and we need to come up with strategies which will curtail that.
So here we are in the bottom of the hidden valley drainage
in the channel that really only runs maybe once or twice
a season during the biggest of monsoonal storms.
And as over the years, over the centuries, down cut a lot
and caused the localized ground water and soil moisture to drop as well.
So what we're trying to do here is bring the bottom of the channel
and the associated water table back up higher
so that it has more area and more storage capacity
for the nearby vegetation.
And so what this structure is called is a one rock dam.
And that's obviously not because it has just one rock,
but because it's one rock high.
And it's built in a way that's extremely stable
in that you start at this downstream end with those rocks almost at grade
so you eliminate that power of falling water that's erosive.
And then we've maintained the channel shape
which is really important so that water flows
over the rock structure instead of around it
and potentially undermining it.
And then it has that ramp shape from downstream side to upstream side
so that that water gets pulled up on the upstream side
and then can lose a lot of its energy, drop a lot of it's sediment
and raise that channel back up.
The other really key thing with these is that we seeded underneath the rocks.
And what that does is starts letting vegetation grow up
to provide long-term stability and help to revegetate this channel.
And the rocks perform a few key functions with that.
One is that they're concentrating more water
so when it does rain or when the channel does flow,
more water soaks in between the cracks
because if you were to look down on this you would see
that there's maybe 80% rock and 20% cracks.
So we've effectively got 4-5 times as much water
going to those seeds and plants compared to if there were no rocks there.
The other thing that the rocks really do is they create a nice, safe microclimate
where deer and rabbit and other animals can still eat some of the plant,
but they can't get all the way down to the base
so that you always maintain a stubble height between 4 and 6 inches
which is really healthy for plant growth and root growth
which then feeds more root structure into the ground
making those plant even more resilient to drought conditions
in between rain events.
The other thing we're trying to do here is reconnect the flood plains.
So you notice on some of the side banks
there's these level shelves, and that's nature's way
of dissipating energy in a channel when channel down cuts too much
and can no longer access its flood plain.
All of that energy dissipation gets used
by further down cutting and degrading the channel.
So we're trying to reverse those trends, raise the channel,
hold more water in the system longer, so that it's availabe
for plants growing on the banks and can be wicked up
through capillary action and pulled up by vegetation
through hydraulic lift to see if we can connect
the top of the ridge vegetation with this bottom of the arroyo vegetation.
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