Hey, everybody.
My name is Jeff Adams.
I'm the owner of TerraSophia LLC, a ecological design
consulting and landscape contracting firm located here
in beautiful Moab, Utah.
And right now we're up high atop Rocky Road
at a project I call Hidden Valley Permaculture that I'm
working on with my partner, and daughter, and our landlord, Jay
Nethercott, just having fun on beautiful days,
recreating hill slopes and really pioneering
some fun, new techniques that we call brush-mineral structures.
And essentially, it's kind of how it sounds.
We use brush, leaves, weeds, really any organic matter.
And we do that in layers or lifts,
mixing in whatever mineral earth you have,
to do a whole suite of different projects.
And right now, we're working on a hill slope
reconstruction that was bulldozed
maybe 20, 30 years ago.
This hill slope was cut in half to make some flat building pads
and has been slowly eroding ever since.
And we've decided over the last couple of years
to put it back together and see if we could revegetate it.
So we're in process of that right now.
We've got the first lift on this hill slope.
And essentially, as you can see, we've
got these eroding faces that we're
worried that this eventually is going
to fall off and maybe cause this beautiful greasewood to die.
So rather than let things fall apart,
we're putting them back together.
When you look in close, you can see little water marks
and spots where it's continuing to erode.
So erosion happens whenever we have water falling or running
over bare soil, especially if it's on a slope.
There's just not much to hold things in place here.
So as those raindrops hit it-- thankfully
this bush is giving it some shelter.
But over time it just keeps eroding off pieces
more and more.
And this whole thing--
this whole clump here-- is at risk of just slumping
off and falling off.
We're going to bring this brush-mineral feature right up,
and just build it, and fit it into the shape of this existing
hill slope.
So that any water falling on this is going to then get
caught into this new sponge that we're
creating with all of this organic material and mineral
earth.
And actually hold on to that valuable resource of water,
rather than letting it continue to erode away this hillside.
And so the other thing that we want to avoid
is having bare soils.
This is hardpan.
So it both eroding--
when it gets wet, it loosens up and it erodes off.
The wind can also cause some of that erosion.
But it's also so sunbaked and hard that it's
nearly impossible for any plant root to get established in this
as it is.
And so this as it is now, is not conducive for growing plants
and sustaining more life.
So this project, we were able to get a decent amount of brush
already staged and ready here to go.
So there is really is a pretty simple strategy.
Usually I try to go in lifts of maybe 6 inches
to a foot, where you layer in your organic material.
We'll get this a little denser.
And then you cover it with mineral earth.
And you repeat.
And you just keep doing that over and over again in lifts
until you've got the desired height that you're going for.
Many wooden species, such as three-leaf sumac,
can actually be used in a technique that's
called layering.
And so that's when dormant branches or actively growing
branches come in contact with soil,
remain moist enough that they can actually change their cell
composition to start forming roots out
of what used to be sheaths or leaf cells.
And now we're ready for our next course of brush on top of this.
Depending on your aesthetic and how much space you have,
I usually like to have my clippers handy and just
take off the outlying sticks a little bit just to keep it
a little neater and not have anything
that'll catch anybody as they're walking by on the trail here.
Healthy soil can be seen as soil that has oxygen, water, life,
and substrate.
And so we want it to have pore space that
allows oxygen and water to move freely,
allows macroanthropods pods to come and go,
and is actively decomposing and cycling
the fresh organic matter of any season
into the layers of the soil, to become
rich nutrient-available, water-harvesting, water-storing
material for plants to come.
And as we get materials available,
we keep moving it forward.
And so you don't have to think about,
oh, I don't have enough material for the whole project.
It's more important that I have this material that I just
weeded or harvested from this other project.
Let me get started on something.
And then I can build it out over the course of weeks or years
as those materials become available to you.
And so here we have our mineral earth, which here in Moab
we're fortunate that there's a gravel quarry that produces
what's called reject sand.
And it's essentially this great mineral earth
that's got a nice balance of sand particle sizes,
as well as some clays in it.
So it becomes a really good product
that we use a lot in these brush-mineral features.
And a lot of people use for natural building, making cob
and other such materials like that.
If you don't have access to a byproduct
such as reject sand from a local quarry,
you can really use any soil.
You can use fill dirt.
You can use eroding hillside.
You can really just take advantage of any type
of mineral earth you have.
Maybe look to see if somebody is digging a foundation
or doing a construction project and tapping into some
of the mineral earth that way.
All right.
So here we are.
We've brought it essentially up to grade.
And we're going to do one last coating of wood chip mulch
to just give it a nice aesthetic cap.
But also that would chip mulch is
essential for holding in the moisture
that we're going to get into this new reconstructed
hillside, as well as helping to build soil.
As that woodchip mulch breaks down,
it gets a lot of mycelial action and will
help to eventually form some topsoil here.
On the top of all this, we're going
to put this log, this branch, that came to us.
And instead of throwing it into one of our other landforms,
we like to use some of our branches,
and especially thicker logs structurally and aesthetically,
to form a little cap on the structure
and help to hold the mulch from flopping over.
And so now we are putting a soaker hose on it
so that we can saturate this whole zone.
And so the idea with this here, we're
really trying to go for drought-tolerant, robust
plantings.
But to charge up the system, we initially
apply water so that we can get all of the mineral earth
and all of the organic matter that we've now
built into this all thoroughly soaked,
so that that decomposition and life can start to move in there
and do its work.
Here we are with the finished product for now.
We will expect some amount of settling and decomposition.
Though because we put so much of the mineral earth in here,
that we'll probably only see it settle a couple inches
over time at which point we might add some more
material to bring it up.
Or we may decide to just go ahead and plant into this
because once this all starts to break down with this moisture,
then it'll be ready for plants.
And they'll either come in by seed--
we're hoping to see if some of the sumac
will grow out of the middle of this
as it gets saturated down there--
or we can come in and pop in a couple wildflowers or something
into this.
So I would expect, if we came back
to this site in a year or two, we're
going to have this whole hillside reconstructed
and vegetated.
And so here we have a berm that we built
just over three years ago now.
Originally it had been at this grade all the way,
dropping and down over the hill into our backyard.
And so we wanted to enhance our privacy, break up the wind
a little bit.
So we just layered, in this case,
Arundo cane with the reject sand, built it up.
And then we threw a seed mix on, used the biodiversity approach.
Just threw a bunch of different seeds of all sorts of things
on.
Put a dripper on it.
And now we have at least a dozen different species growing here.
We have Palmer's penstemon, hollyhocks, clary sage,
Maximilian sunflowers, rabbittbrush.
There's some blue flax, blanket flower,
a couple different types of grasses,
all grown in this space that used to just be air.
And so we're really excited.
Now, we get the privacy and the windbreak
that we were going for.
But we also have this beautiful biodiverse patch
that the carpenter bees especially love it.
They like to go into the ends of the Arundo canes.
And that's where they do some of their reproducing.
And it's also the only spot on the property
so far that I've seen a snake, was
a garter snake crawled into the berm,
somewhere right around here.
We're getting multifunctions that improve our human habitat.
And we're getting beauty.
But we're also really increasing biodiversity
and that structural ability for different critters
to find a home here.
So brush-mineral features have really
been inspired by a range of ecological processes
and patterns, including flood deposits, beaver dams,
and the work of Indigenous cultures
and permaculture people all over the world.
And really what we're seeing is that various combinations
of layering organic matter and mineral soil
can be used for all sorts of beneficial purposes.
And some of the allied strategies
that it's very closely related to
are things like beaver dam analogs
that are used to raise the water level in creek channels, stream
channels, hugelkulture, sheet mulch, chop and drop, lop
and scatter, some of these various techniques
that also are shovel ready and low energy input.
To get that material cycling back into your system
is really the main goal.
What we've been trying to experiment with and push
the envelope a bit with is how do we
use these range of techniques and adapt them
to very arid conditions, and very
steep and hilly conditions, and see how we can create paths,
terraces, and whole new landforms that
are high in organic content and ready to grow plants?
I'm also really happy to point everybody to a new technical
guide that myself and Neil Bertrando of Reno-Truckee
Permaculture out of Reno, Nevada put together on Brush-Mineral
Features--
A guide to using organic matter and soil
for multi-functional benefits in drylands.
And really what that breaks down to
is using your organic matter close
to where it grows to create multiple benefits.
Yeah, so here we are on one of our most massive brush-mineral
features.
It's a-- well, a new landform that we've
been working on over the past three years, four years now.
And where I'm standing, I am approximately 8% to 10% feet
above the native grade.
And so everything below me has been
added for that 8 to 10 feet.
Just layers of really whatever anybody brought in,
brush, sticks, leaves, weeds, cheatgrass, anything.
We've added some mineral earth and woodchips as we go,
to make it solid layers.
And we're about to use this soil probe to core down into it
and see how it's decomposing.
So there we have approximately 9 inches top.
We've still got our active woodchip layer
that we've been adding.
And then it's starting to turn to soil there.
Looks like we hit a good pocket of mineral earth.
Let's go a little deeper and see what we can find.
So here we have the bottom end of an organic layer,
where you can barely even find a wood chip, a stick, anything,
and then a slightly more mineral layer here.
So that's probably a sign of where
we did a couple of wheelbarrows of the mineral earth.
And then had another layer of organic matter
added on top of it.
So here is a sample from approximately 3 and 1/2,
4 feet down.
And this white stuff right at the tip of my finger
is the start of some fungal mycelium
that is taking hold down there and helping
to decompose things.
And so this is one of the biggest chunks
that we're able to find at this depth, these couple.
And a lot of it's more turning into this really, really
fine, nice topsoil, where we've still
got the mineral component.
And that organic matter is being actively incorporated into it
through decomposition.
Smells was like topsoil.
Looks like topsoil.
Tastes like topsoil.
I think we made topsoil.