What are beneficial ways of keeping water onsite to build a lush habitat for humans and wildlife? How can you locate the best spot to construct a pond in your landscape? What indicators can give hints about existing subterranean water systems? When is the best time to shape your land for water retention?

From cold plunges, land regeneration, habitat diversification, climate resilience, soundscape enhancement to intense beauty and entertainment, water nurtures living systems. In this episode Ben Falk of Whole Systems Design shares profound insights into the workings and wonders of water systems!

Opening tune: Waterplant Waltz by Carmen Porter (https://carmenporter.com)

To contact Ben Falk, see more of his glorious work, register for courses or order his brilliant book (The Resilient Farm and Homestead):

https://www.wholesystemsdesign.com/

Welcome to song and plants.

My name is Carmen Porter.

In this episode, I was joined by Ben Falk of whole systems design.

His knowledge of the land, growing systems and permaculture design are steeped

in experience, making his teachings personal and profoundly insightful.

Water nurtures lush vegetation, and through various means, Ben

has mastered capturing water to feed and nurture landscapes.

I was delighted to have the opportunity to chat with him about his methods.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Welcome to song and plants.

Would you mind introducing yourself?

Sure.

My name's Ben Falk and, I'm a site planner, landscape architect, property,

homestead designer and manager.

I live with the systems that I help others design and set up and consult on myself.

Try to grow a bunch of my own food, live a healthy life, try to produce

an abundance, for more than just my family , to share locally, especially.

We teach others how to, how to do this through permaculture

courses and some other courses.

And I have a book that shares a lot of, well, some of what we've learned.

Been doing this pretty intensively on my own sites for 20 years and been kind of

into permaculture and ecological design for, I guess, close to about 30 now.

Yeah, I'm in central Vermont and I look forward to chatting with you

about water systems, especially today, but really about anything

you'd like, you know, our focus is improving the health of the place we

live while gleaning enough yields to supply us with our basic needs, like

food and fuel and medicine and health wellness, and many of the other

things that, that we need day to day.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you very much for joining me.

The way you work water on your land is just absolutely astonishing.

What are some of your preferred methods of keeping water from

leaving or running off of your site?

Well, I think those would fall into the categories of swales, like

on contour ditches, ponds, terraces.

Building soil is, you know, always applicable, you know, building as

much organic matter as possible.

Rice patties were one of those systems we experimented a lot with, on one site, but

we don't really implement them anymore.

And just permanent cover green cover plants, especially

deep rooting perennial plants.

I think you could say that's a way of keeping water on site as well.

Yeah, those are, those are the main ones I think.

What do you plant into your swales?

well, we plant generally on the mounds.

That's part of the swale, you know, it's kind of a ditch and then a mound and

on the mounds or right halfway down the mounds, depending on the size of them,

we plant pretty much anything you could think of that's like woody perennials.

We don't do annuals on them in general, but any woody of the

dozens and scores of trees and shrubs that we grow, we plant there.

Hmm.

And when you're looking at a site, what sort of considerations are you assessing

when looking for pond sighting or where you would use the different

types of water retention systems?

What aspects of the site am I looking for?

Yeah.

Well really I'm taking into account anything and everything but of

particular import is the slope, how steep it is, the soil type, the shape, whether

it's in a valley or a ridge or in between.

Those are the primary things, aspect comes into play to some extent.

Goals of course, of the client or whoever is, you know, desiring to implement

such a system, is a big one as well.

But, the climate of course, those are the big ones.

What would you say would be a good place to put a pond, like where,

what in the landscape would you look for?

Mm-hmm well, generally the most typical place you're looking

to put a pond is in an area where there's overland flow or below a spring.

Which is less common.

But typically the way we implement ponds is to catch, store and slow

waters flow downhill, in valleys.

And when I say valley, I mean, you know, very small valleys compared to what most

people think of as valleys, any little, you know, low point in a landscape where

water may intermittently even flow.

So even like micro valleys.

An acre to 20 acres would be like a typical watershed to feed a small

pond where I live and work and well all over the country, we've done

this kind of work so, you know, even that applies to really anywhere.

I mean the dryer, the climate, maybe the larger the watershed you

would need to feed a viable pond.

and sometimes more, I mean, sometimes, you know, you have hundreds of

acres going into a pond, but often just 5, 10, 20, 30 acres.

I have a lot of ponds personally that are, only, an acre to 10 acres of

watershed that feeds into the pond, you know, and again, intermittently not,

not year round, really on any of them.

In the driest part of the year there's no input to a lot of these ponds or pretty

much all of the ones that I manage.

So, how do you get that pond to be funneling or collecting

that water from such large area?

Well, it's you locate it in a valley where that water runs into.

So you can also put ditches across the slope, pitch downhill towards the pond.

So they're going uphill slightly across the slope, like arms outreaching

into the landscape to catch more water and bring that water into the pond.

Kind of the opposite that you would often see above a house, that's

on a slope where water's a problem to get water around a house, like

a curtain drain, curtain ditch.

You do the opposite, like a, a catching ditch to bring water toward the pond . So

you're catching a wider water shed.

That can be a common way to add, you know, make sure you're

harvesting more water for your pond.

We also pretty much always put roof water into our ponds when we can,

by adding gutters to buildings or capturing, if there's already gutters,

you know, where that water's going, and sending that water to the pond.

Hmm.

I guess you're using the soil to filter the water so you

don't get a lot of silt or...?

Well, there's a lot of ways to catch this.

Usually you're looking to put a forebay in or a system of swales above

the pond to catch any silt that may be moving through the landscape, so

you don't fill the pond with silt.

So yeah, you want to catch all that because even naturally materials

moving through the landscape in water and you want to fill up

like small swales or ditches first

and not your pond.

Or a forebay, which is like a mini pond, or both.

You want a series of basically very little catchments above your main pond.

So you're reducing the amount that your core pond is gonna

fill in over time with sediment.

Okay.

and you also, of course, you know, want to basically manage

for no erosion in that watershed.

So permanent cover, not a lot of vehicle impact or equipment impact, grazing

carefull if you do graze in those areas, you know, all the things that would keep

erosion to a minimum, permanent green cover, not tilling, ideally, careful

use of any roadways that might be in, in those areas, et cetera, etc...

And how does soil type play into all of that?

Well, in a lot of different ways, the pond itself

needs heavy soil to hold water.

So you need either very heavy silt or ideally clay.

And it needs to be built carefully such that you're able to make

an impermeable strata that the water doesn't move through.

If you're on, you know, sandy soil or light silts or gravels, you generally

have to use a liner of some sort, whether it's polyethylene or EPDM or

bentonite clay like rollout liner, or bring import clay from ideally somewhere

else on the site, or not so ideally offsite, to actually line the pond.

We've pretty much done all of the above, everything except a bentonite

liner . We've even built ponds on sand and even some gravelly material

with clay from offsite and that worked.

So you can make a pond happen in a lot of places if you're willing

to do a lot of extra work or spend a lot of extra money or both.

But the most, you know, elegant places where ponds fit the most naturally

and harmoniously with less of that expense and energy are where you have,

let's say a nice valley with a bunch of water going through it, at least

intermittently and some nice clay soils.

That's the most feasible place to put a pond.

But depends on the scale too.

I mean, you know, you could put a small pond for not a whole lot of expense with

just rainwater off of a roof on rocky, gravelly soil, and you just use a liner

and don't make a very big pond and you have like, essentially like a natural

swimming pool and it can be really great.

So it depends also what we mean by a pond, you know?

where I live, typically people are talking about a pretty decent sized

water body bigger than like most pools, but it doesn't have to be that.

And I suppose, knowing the site and doing soil tests on the site can

also help for determining where to put it, in that very often there are, like

you said, pockets of clay or pockets of different material on the same site.

Yeah.

but typically you look at the land shape first and you look at the soil second.

You definitely always look at both.

You wanna always look at both.

When I do consults, helping people determine pond feasibility and optimal

locations, we're looking at the citing first and the soil second.

And when I say citing, I mean, where is a valley shape, ideally, or where can a lot

of water go to via roofs, parking areas, roadways, you know, things that catch

impermeable, conveyances in the landscape.

Those can allow for a feasible pond too, in a place that's not a valley.

If you can just get a lot of water to it or enough.

And for a lot of ponds, people really get the most value out of them if they're

in zone one, in permaculture speak, that is, in a place you spend a lot of time.

The area of the landscape that you use every day, near a home, near your main

garden, where you park a car, you know, et cetera, et cetera, like in your sphere

of high interactivity, not where you maybe only go a couple times a week.

Things like that.

Not that those can't be also very useful for different farm functions

and we have ponds like that too.

But, generally the highest value ponds are, are kind of in your most used areas.

And that's where you tend to have a lot of buildings so you tend to

have a lot of easy water harvesting.

Our roof surface is a hundred percent impermeable, well all but living roofs

and they can evaporate some, so you're going to be able to harvest, you know,

600 some odd gallons for every inch of rain that lands on a roof per

thousand square feet of surface.

That can add up pretty quick.

And when you're collecting it and funneling it into the pond.

Are you just using a gutter system or are you moving it through water systems

before it gets to your main catchment?

Both.

I mean, we have a pond that I'm lying near right now where the water that

just, it just rained quarter inch an hour ago, was awesome, and I went and

checked out cuz it hasn't been raining much lately, I ran out, got nice and

soaked during the rain event to see the water coming out of a, about 150 feet of

four inch, 10 foot pipe, you know, the green drain pipe that catches water from

the down spout of a very long gutter.

And you know, maybe 10 gallons a minute was coming out of that tube

right into one of our ponds.

And then it actually goes into a little like erosion control, armored little

basin, like hand dug basin with a whole bunch of rocks around it to reduce

erosion, then trickles into one pond, via over more rocks again, should just reduce

erosion cuz there's like a couple vertical feet that has to fall into the pond.

And then it goes out that pond down a stone lined creek, which we built in a

permaculture course, and then through a series of like two forebays and then into

a much bigger pond, which you may have seen photos of that I posted recently.

It's the latest pond we built.

So where water wants to run, we're always trying to help let it walk and

get the most distance out of its path through the landscape and not shunt it.

So, whereas the modern world of industrial design and engineering is

always trying to basically pollute it, pipe it, pump it, forget it,

try to get it out of our way.

Just get it to the oceans, get it to a river, to the oceans, you

know, polluted, get it out of sight.

We're trying to do the opposite.

We're trying to slow it, spread it, sink it.

Convey it over very low angle grades to let it move through the

landscape like its course is within an intestinal type of system.

Like think of how water moves through animals.

We're trying to extend its stay and get the most value by interacting with it as

possible and not shunt it out immediate.

And that's what we're trying to do in the landscape as well.

If regeneration and, you know, just value, is our goal.

Hmm.

So would you say when starting, like when somebody is wanting to start a

project is that one of the primary things that they should be considering

before putting in the garden before putting in other points of interest that

they should consider building the land

for water?

Yes, mm-hmm definitely, that's a great question.

And, uh, yes.

Is, is the answer for sure.

It's often not done that way that's why I'm kind of chuckling, but yes.

there's this great rubric for landscape design called the scale of permanence

that helps elucidate the importance of looking at features and processes in the

landscape that are most permanent around which you wanna design everything else.

And it's a gradient.

So water is very high on the list because it's connected with landshape.

So you can put a pond like maybe here or there, maybe one, or let's say two

places in a landscape, but you could maybe put a house in more places.

Or a garden, even in more places or a fence in even more

places et cetera, et cetera.

So like there's more primary and less primary things to cite in order.

And definitely water, land shape is very high on the scale of permanence.

You want to have other things pivot around their ideal locations,

not the other way around.

So often of course, it's not done that way.

People put the house in, you know, kind of as the first step, in let's say a rural

property type of situation I'm thinking of, cause that's what most of my work is.

And then they'll say, oh yeah, like we want a pond near the house too, but

they put the house in a place where pond really, isn't feasible in that area.

So they're outta luck in that situation because they didn't honor the scale of

permanence, you know, in their thinking.

But yeah, for sure you think about land shape more primarily

than building locations...

usually let's say.

And land, shape and water are intimately connected.

And you also do multi-tiered ponds.

So you're moving water from one pond to the next pond down the landscape.

Using gravity to feed the ponds...

yeah, we're letting gravity move the water from one to the next.

It's just, it's just, again, following that rubric of trying to get the

most value, interact with the water the most before it's offsite...

spread it, sync it, utilize it as much as possible.

But I've also seen you move water uphill.

How do you do that?

Well, that requires a pump of some kind.

So usually we like to use as passive systems as possible, so like

we're big fans of ram pumps lately.

But I've also used solar slow pumps as well.

But generally are trying not to move water uphill.

I mean, I do have a well pump, you know, an electric well pump that moves

water uphill out of the ground to my home and to the garden, but then

we have like a solar pump and ram pumps to kind of back those systems

up for when those systems will fail.

Is your irrigation mostly for your, your crops?

For, yeah, for my garden, my veggie garden is pretty much

where most of the water gets used.

I would say like 90% of our water gets used.

Well, on the farm right now, probably veggies use the most, followed by

cows, five cows, probably the next biggest use, and then domestic water,

which is mostly washing, not drink.

You know, you don't drink very much water compared to how much you used

to shower and wash dishes, that kind of thing, would be the next,

you know, the next biggest use.

And so when you're watering, when you're irrigating your

vegetables, is that mostly gravity fed or are you using the ram pump for that?

Well, so the Ram pump is in combination with gravity feed.

So like right now, day to day, I water my garden off our well cuz

the well pump's working and it's easy, quick, it's all set up.

But if and when the well pump breaks and it has actually in the past already, or

the powers out or any number of things are not working so that I don't have the well

water, then I can gravity feed from tanks that are about 40 vertical feet above the

garden, which are filled by a ram pump.

So for water to get into those tanks, the ram pump has to work, but that

ram pump is run only on gravity and the power of water itself.

It's a water powered pump, which sounds kind of weird, but they're pretty

amazing and that fills those tanks.

And so then gravity does the work of bringing that water from those tanks.

It's 1300 gallons of storage, it's like five IBC totes, those

275 ish gallon plastic totes in the woods above the house.

And then they can go through a series of three quarter inch lines

to come out of my garden and drip irrigate the vegetables that way.

And also they could feed the house.

I mean, I wouldn't drink that water, ideally I would drink

from my spring if the well was down, uh, when the well was down.

but, you could boil it and drink it, no problem.

I mean, you probably could drink it direct and be fine too if your

microbiome was used to it, it's coming from a very clean pond.

Did you know where your spring was located or did you find it?

On one of our sites, we knew where the spring was cuz it was

developed before we got the property.

And on the other site, we've found three so far or four, really about four.

We've developed three of them to some extent, some very much so.

And then there's a fourth spot that we haven't developed, but

we know there's a spring there.

We didn't know any of those were there when we got the property, but we

knew, I knew that the property would probably yield a spring or multiple

springs just given the shape and the size and the location of the property.

So I wasn't really surprised to find those springs, but it took me

some years to actually find them.

And and every, every, every couple years I basically found a new one.

I mean, if I look more, I'd probably find more, but we

kind of have enough right now.

There's more in probably in other parts of the property that are like

zone four, you know, it would be like a thousand feet of piping to get

that water and we don't need it.

So I found the ones that are like close to zone one.

What was I looking for?

Well, I was looking for water, but I was looking for signs

of water, like sign of water.

Like you're looking for an animal, like water leaves tracks in just

the way an animal leaves tracks but obviously through different means.

But you wanna look in the dry season.

So if you're looking in spring in new England, you're gonna

find springs everywhere, or you're gonna think they're springs, but

they're not, they're just seeps.

It's very seasonal, like intermittent seeps that are not real springs.

So you wanna look starting around now, August, September, sometimes

October when things really dry up.

I'm speaking to the Northeastern United States, Canada, Southeastern

Canada, type of climate right now, cold humid climates in the

Northern hemisphere, maybe in general.

But wherever you are, you want it when it's dry is when you wanna look for water,

and when it's wet is when you wanna look for dry ground, that's like when you

can tell where those places truly exist.

Hmm.

So when you're looking for the water, are you digging?

That is not the first step, but, yes, eventually you

will be digging usually.

Initially you're looking for shape, land shape, and plants to tell you.

Those are the two main clues, I think that you will be using to find water.

There's a third, which is dousing, which I don't practice per se.

I've taken workshops, couple different dowsing workshops and

worked with a couple dousers.

I feel like I probably could douse, but haven't felt the need to because

I've so far been able to find water pretty well, by those other two methods,

which is looking for the landshape.

So generally at the key line in the landscape or the key point

is where you tend to find water.

So from where a slope moves from steep, to some extent,

relatively steep to less steep.

It doesn't have to be very steep, but a certain angle to a lower angle.

So often in the hills of new England, that would be, let's say a 10, 20,

30% slope changing to a five, well, eight, five or less percent slope.

It's that inflection point from where a slope goes from steeper to

less steep, the concavity in the slope.

That's where water tends to express itself.

And the bigger the slope you have uphill, the more likely it is you're

gonna find water in that general type of spot in the landscape.

So if you wanna find water and you have like a 500 vertical foot hill,

let's say, and you look in that concavity anywhere along that, at some

point you're gonna find water in a climate that's generally a pretty

humid climate, well watered climate.

It's just a question of where.

That's a pretty reliable thing.

It may be in the dry season four or five feet down and in the wet season

expressing itself on the surface but there's water there usually.

And then if that slope continues, which hopefully it does to some extent, you

can dig down and get that water out via gravity, cuz there's still a slope

dropping that you can get water out.

You can't move water uphill without a pump.

So you have to then pipe that water out to daylight to access it, you know, like

a horizontal or just below horizontal pipe through the wall of the spring

tile, or a box that you're digging into the ground to access the groundwater.

So that's called developing a spring.

There's a bunch of ways to do it, but they're all basically doing the same

thing, accessing the groundwater and then allowing it to flow downhill slightly

out to daylight where it can be used.

Or stay below ground and then come into a house, basement or

wherever your point of use is.

Plants are the other clue and they do a really great job of telling you and

can tell more than you might think.

Rushes and sedges and willows and alders and other water loving plants...

not just water loving plants 'cause all plants love water, but plants that tend

to be like wetland associative plants.

If you see something like cattails, like a true like marsh plant,

then you have, like perennial, almost perennial water usually.

But often where there's not a ton of water, but there's some

water, you'll see sedges.

If there's a little more water, you'll see rushes.

If there's even more water, you'll see cattails.

I mean, if you see cattails, you probably don't need the cattails

to tell you there's water there, if you're looking carefully.

But, willows and alders can tell you in places that aren't really all

that wet, at least to an initial eye, depending on the time of year.

And it's interesting, before I found this spring, I had a dowser out

here, this older guy named Leonard Robinson, who's a real local legend.

And he found a few different veins of water and I didn't really do anything

with them cuz wherever he found them, he said like this is 10 feet down or deeper.

And I don't have the means to dig 10 feet down really, or it's not worth it for me

and wasn't and definitely still isn't.

So I never explored those spots.

One of the springs I found was about a hundred feet downhill of the spot he said

is 10 feet, the vein is 10 feet deep.

Well, we didn't walk down there, but turns out a hundred feet downhill,

that vein was expressing itself at the surface one dry season.

In September, when I was walking through that area barefoot, I stepped

into like ankle deep, very cold water, and it hadn't rained in like a month.

So I knew instantly that's didn't come from any rain.

That's that's groundwater, it's cold and there's water at the surface.

So that's the first spring I developed here.

incidentally, there was no indication that that had been ever developed.

There was no depression or mound or anything, it was just like

a smooth part of the landscape, just like everything around it.

And I was sure when I was digging it, that I had found a spring

that had never been found before.

Well, I was totally wrong.

I got four feet down and found planed wooden boards.

Like Cedar or hemlock boards that were handled like human, you know, shaped

boards, four feet under the ground, wood.

So someone had developed that spring probably in the 1800s, or maybe late

1700s and at some point someone had filled it in, buried everything there.

But what I was gonna get to is that later, when we started letting a

lot of vegetation grow, parts of this site had just been kind of

mowed and brush hogged regularly.

And just 10 years later, basically this year I noticed the spot that

Leonard had said I could find water 10 feet down is on a very steep

hill, about a hundred feet above this spring...horizontal feet and 10 vertical

feet, let's say, makes sense, right?

10 feet down.

And that vein is, that's the same water.

And there now is a willow growing quickly out of that spot.

I didn't plant it, but we just let stuff, whatever volunteer in that area

that wanted to grow, we just let grow.

We just stopped mowing that area.

And it turns out there's a willow there just raging.

Did it know that water's there because it's pretty interesting if you think

about it because willows aren't growing in most of this landscape, it's pretty

odd that a willow would be there.

The ground is not wet at all there, I mean, it's actually very dry.

It's a steep slope, well drained soil.

That willow's only getting water when it's tapping quite far down, like it

didn't get water for the first couple years anyway, or, I mean, not initially.

It wasn't like seed landed on wet ground and started, or that when

you see a lot of willows and alders, they're starting in wet ground where

other stuff doesn't grow as well.

And they're kind of thickening and they're established in those

areas and they're dispersing in those areas or running along them.

So this is like an island where there was no willows anywhere

near by and it's dry ground.

And there's this willow thriving, and it has to get probably about 10

feet down, or at least I know for sure, at least six to eight feet down

before there's any real moisture.

Leonard says it's 10 feet down.

So it's, it seems like, you know, that willow knew something about

that spot is what it seems like.

So it's kind of interesting.

So, and then the other spring I developed on this property, one of the other

two, was also at a key point in the landscape where it goes from steeper to

less steep, quite a ways out of zone one.

Very kind of remote, like in the woods and I walked into some wet

water as well in the dry season.

I could just see the ground was wet.

I kind of dug down a little just with my hand and the ground seemed really wet.

And I had my excavator in the area.

That's actually why I was checking it out before I was gonna move the excavator

away, just a little mini excavator.

And then I went in there and dug and I started hitting water

and I was like, well, this one's definitely never been developed

because I mean, I'm in the woods.

Like, you know, it doesn't feel like anywhere near where people lived.

Even though I knew in the back of my head, people lived kind of

everywhere in the hills of Vermont.

And I knew there's an old foundation downhill of this spot actually.

Turns out I get like three, four buckets in and I hit this huge piece of wood.

You don't find wood 2, 3, 4 feet down in the ground unless someone put it

there, you know, that's not where wood ends up and it was a perfectly straight

log . As soon as I pull it up, water starts pouring out of one end of it.

And I knew immediately, I never seen one of these except in a book, but I knew

it was a pump log just instantly, just cuz that's the only way that can happen.

It turns out, I jump out the excavator and there's a bored hole on both ends

of the log that someone had made that.

That's how they used to make water pipe.

They bore holes end to end.

And someone made that in the late 1700s or 1800s and the last person touching that

log was 200 years ago or 250 years ago.

So realized all of a sudden, wow, I'm like in an archeological site, like

I better , I better stop running this machine and be more careful, you know?

I eventually found about 10 of those in that area and then towards

our home from that area, and there's more in the ground for sure.

I would love to map them and maybe eventually unearth them all and get

them in a museum or hang them up.

But, they're there and they don't rot really when they're in the ground, cuz

they're just in anoxic, you know, they don't have really any oxygen there.

what kind of wood?

Some kind of soft wood, pretty hard to tell.

I would think hemlock, but I think they used even spruce or fur too.

But definitely soft wood, about six to eight inches in diameter bored

perfectly end to end, a hole on one end, a hole on the other.

They're both in the exact middle of the log

amazing

and these logs are eight and nine feet long.

Basically,

Wow.

little, they're not little sections.

They're long.

And one has a male end and one is a female end.

One is a flared end and one has, you know, an open facing end.

So they fit together and seal.

Yeah.

It's a pretty amazing technology.

They actually outlive modern plumbing from what I've heard from people, like

they're still in use in some cities, there's still these wood water pipes.

Yeah, mm-hmm the Midwest I've heard there is.

I know in Vermont they've been kind of replacing them over the years but I've

heard some engineers say the metal water pipe actually rusts out quicker

and maybe the plastic will last longer.

We don't know yet.

I mean that stuff's all new.

that's pretty fascinating.

And it would probably require quite a lot of land movement to install them.

Yeah.

I mean, this is, you know, 150 years before any type of heavy equipment.

So they're digging these trenches by hand.

Two to four feet down is where I found them.

You couldn't find anyone do that work today.

Seemingly any old farmer did that work, you know, back in

the day or had someone who did.

So when you're mentioning the vegetation, what plants

do you tend to plant like in your ponds or along your shores, what

are plants that you tend to prefer?

Kind of any and all plants that would add diversity and wildlife

habitat or food for people as well.

So like, we go to Vermont wetland plant supply, and wetland plant

providers and sow wetland plant mixes at the edge before the pond fills up.

And we're going for a lot of rushes and reeds and a whole bunch, you

know, there's like dozens of plants.

We never really sow cattail because that comes in.

That just is latent in that environment.

It seems it comes in even if you're far from a pond.

So I've never actually had to sow cattail and they're usually more than abundant.

I often will weed them so there's room for other plants.

We'll sow wild rice too.

That's actually kind of taking hold in all of our ponds to some extent.

The high diversity is key for just water quality and habitat beauty.

So if you have something like willow coming in,

are you going to take it out?

no, not necessarily.

I've barely ever removed a willow around a pond.

I don't know if I have.

I've cut them back sometimes, but, they're great for water

quality, for everything, for wildlife habitat, human uses, early bee forage.

I mean, I won't want a willow, let's say shading where I hang out by a

pond, cause they're a big plant.

The main plants that we sow that we see coming up, 'cuz we sow a lot of

plants that just kind of never do anything, I'd say sweet flag is a

big one , marsh marigold sometimes where it's like a little dryer and

then bull rush is really great.

There's a whole bunch of sedges that come up.

Joe-pye weed does well where it's like drier edges.

Cardinal flowers is good also where it's kind of drier and

other Lobelias and pickerel weed.

Those are some of the big ones besides like cattail, and also

blue flag iris is a great one.

And so is there sort of a balance between what you

are seeding and encouraging and then the volunteers that come in?

Yeah, exactly.

We're seeding a lot, knowing that that's gonna represent less than what

would naturally come in from the area.

Mm-hmm

We're just trying to increase the diversity of what would be there.

But you know, especially if you're building ponds near other

ponds and especially if it's downhill, you're gonna get a lot of

dispersion from those other plants.

And do you use a lot of what comes out of the pond?

No, I mean, not directly.

I guess you could say enhanced wildlife habitat is something we use, but as far

as like harvest and consume or make stuff with in a direct way, I would say most

of what's in the pond we don't forage.

Sometimes parts of cattails and wild rice, fish sometimes,

which we stock in some ponds.

on the edges there's a lot of stuff that grows like aronia and seaberry and

elderberry and cranberry that we do use directly and currant, those are on like

dryer edges, but still pretty wet zones.

How would you say that bringing the water into your landscape

has really benefited your site?

What are some of the highlights, the things that you really appreciate

about having water on site?

Mm-hmm well, I mean, swimming and cold plunges are a big

one just for health and enjoyment.

Micro climate enhancement for extending seasons, cuz they hold the

heat and kind of buffer temperature swings, for some of the year.

Definitely not in the winter, cuz they're frozen over.

Beauty and light, like daylighting of buildings, the light comes

off the ponds into buildings.

Wildlife habitat and that also plays into beauty.

We see all sorts of wildlife that wouldn't be here.

The soundscape is massive.

I mean we just listen to bullfrogs all night now, twanging away.

And before that it's the American toad.

And then before that it's the peepers and the wood frogs, those

are all sounds that just wouldn't really be in this landscape at all.

There might be some of those animals in some of the wetlands,

but if we didn't dig any of the ponds, there'd be none of those guys.

Have you noticed like mosquito populations go down?

Yeah.

I've seen those go down.

Exactly.

It's not like the water wasn't there.

It was just kind of subterranean and/ or in little like intermittent pools,

which is really good for mosquitoes.

And once you dig all that wet ground out...

it doesn't always have to be wet ground, but when you change that to an open water

situation, then the frogs and salamanders and everyone has access to the water.

It doesn't tend to be a place that mosquitoes succeed in.

I think, I think all those amphibians keep them from happening.

They're eating their larvae, I guess.

The bugs really come from like wet ground versus open water,

which is a common misperception.

Cuz I think most everyone thinks, oh, you make all these ponds,

you're gonna make it super buggy.

Not if you're really careful that all the water that's in the area is in

the pond or that you're not having like random little pools next to

the ponds, which poor grading, poor heavy equipment used can certainly

result in, if you're not careful.

You mentioned the project that you just published,

that you just presented

Mm-hmm yeah, I just shared a couple photos.

Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Well, that's just the latest pond that I've dug here.

Pond scape, we don't just do ponds.

We do it, integrate it, and ponds are part of a whole landscape.

So everything around the pond is part of that pond scape.

That's just a nice, pretty good size pond with a big garden terrace around it.

And it's gonna feed a very large ram pump.

We call it the garden pond.

Better to look at photos of it I could paint a poor picture with words,

but I'm looking at it right now.

It's a great pond.

It's really beautiful.

It's very Impressive and amazing how you've integrated the food

system into the water system.

It just-looks like a beautiful place to be as well.

Right.

Yeah.

It certainly is.

It's great, my son loves it.

I mean, it's a play scape for all of us.

It's our healthcare facility, it's where we go and sun bathe and swim

and exercise and stretch and play.

We have a woodfired sauna and jump in the pond.

And then it's huge buffer for the garden that's there and the micro climate buffer

and water...I mean, it's nice to have the water I'll dip my watering can in there.

I generally don't do a lot of watering with a watering can, but when it's

right next to a pond, it's pretty practical, even at a decent home scale.

You, mentioned currants a couple minutes ago and this a little

off topic, but I'm really curious.

What do you do with white currants and black currants?

Well, white curarnts I pretty much just eat fresh and that's it.

Black currants, we eat fresh and we make mead out of them and we freeze them to

make popsicles and syrups and smoothies.

And then mead sometimes in the winter or just juices, like aids, mixed

with water and a little honey, like a natural Gatorade type of thing.

So black currant's great for that.

I'm not big on jams and jellies, but it's like amazing for

those, if you're into that.

they just grow so abundantly.

Yeah.

The black currant's like the easiest berry you could grow, you know,

besides, for maybe aronia berry, but much more versatile than aronia.

I mean I love aronia too, that's a pretty versatile plant, but if you're

gonna grow one berry and you don't wanna fuss over it, black currants in

this climate, I think is definitely at the top of the list for me,

What do you do with aronia?

aronia.

We make juices and meads

Okay,

mostly.

I think I've made some fruit leather too, but I don't consume much fruit leather.

I mean I no longer really consume fruit in the winter except in the

form of juices a little bit and mead.

I used to freeze tons of fruit to have smoothies, then I, for me

learned that like when it's cold out a smoothie, a frozen fruit smoothie

is not, is not the thing to consume.

Increasingly I'm trying to make a lot of mead with them in the

summer while they're fresh cuz I don't wanna freeze them, cuz then

the yeast I think is affected.

Hmm.

So what are some of your current projects and where can people find you?

Well usually, where I live, but don't don't

come visit unless you con...

don't come find me, but that's where I am most of the time.

I guess you can find me so to speak online, on our website,

wholesystemsdesign.com or, I mean, the best thing's come to our permaculture

course, if you wanna learn.

Permaculture course and consulting and our apprenticeship are how I

generally, work with other people.

And then we do design work, my larger company, whole system design

collective does site planning for people after we do a consult usually.

Yeah, so wholesystemsdesign.com is probably the easiest thing

to remember, way to connect.

Perfect.

I'll put the links in the show notes and any-other links that you

want to have, I'll include there.

And also I'll put a link to where you would suggest people buy your book.

Okay.

That sounds good.

Well, I appreciate that.

Well, thank you very much for joining me.

And I hope we'll speak again soon.

Yeah.

Thanks a lot.

Appreciate your time.

Thanks for listening.

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