How to Design a Food Forest with Swales Layout
In today’s blog post, I want to showcase the exact design process of creating a layout for a food forest with swales.
But before we start with the process, you have to understand one crucial thing about your site: the slope of the land.
You see, you can only install swales on gently to moderately sloped land (below 15% slope). Any steeper than this, you risk blowout from too much water buildup, overflow, and soil destabilization.
If your slope is steeper than 15%, you would have to use terraces, and they’ll act in a similar way to the swales in harvesting water on level ground.
Checking slopes across your property isn’t hard, and you can do it in 10 minutes with my Google Earth elevation profile hack outlined in this post. Once you determine that swales are indeed a viable option for your terrain, given your property’s slope gradient, you can proceed to the design process.