Strategies for water retention:
I am very grateful for all of the water retention ideas that have come from the course and the field trips that I was lucky to attend. I’m excited to try out a variety of structures at our place when the time comes. In the meantime, I am excited to help others with their vision (sometimes it’s nice to not have to make the decisions and just be told what to do, especially during the learning phase). Please feel free to throw me where I’m most useful!
Also, shout out to Torrey Ritter, who had some great advice for the plots we visited with Holly Harper and crew last Wednesday. Thanks so much for inviting us all along for such an information-packed day. Nothing beats a field day when it comes to educational value!
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Water retention with a focus on soil:
The only unique strategy that I bring to the table here is reintegrating the microbiology into the soil. There are many methods to do this, and I can talk about them in depth in a later post. To keep the focus on water retention, I copied a link for a short video from the Soil Food Web School below, but full disclosure—>I watch it with the volume off and read the subtitles. When you hear his voice, you’ll understand. But, out of all the videos I know about, it provides the most concise description of the water-related issues that arise in a substrate that lacks bacteria and/or fungi. The video details how these microorganisms do the work to catch water for you. This important work can raise your water table since more of the water that falls as precipitation will be absorbed rather than flowing away as runoff.
The video I recommend watching with sound off and subtitles on:
These process-based watershed restoration techniques have some similarities and differences with the soil restoration that I do. In some ways, the two go hand in hand, and overlap with similar goals. I would also hope that the soil biology restoration techniques I describe here can be used to help mitigate weeds that would occur as a result of disturbance from process based installations in the future, but I’ll work out the methodology specifics for a future study as time goes on. Here are some thoughts about how the two methods may compare or contrast:
From a “soil biology restoration” perspective, the process of recharging your aquifer and increasing the soil sponge would involve reintroducing the native, locally adapted organisms in their proper balances along the tracts of land that are outside of the direct floodplain. (The aerobic organisms are not going to survive in areas that are remain flooded for most of the year, so this effort would focus on the soil-sponge capabilities outside of flooded areas.)
The process of soil restoration starts with assessing the biomass of organisms in the soil by taking soil samples and physically counting the active organisms under the microscope using a consistent sampling strategy. After that, the goal is to create an aerobic compost* that is biologically complete with an array of organisms from four major functional groups, or at least containing the organisms that the substrate is lacking. The compost always gets checked with the microscope before being applied to the soil to ensure you actually got the organisms that are lacking in the soil.
*If you know someone who tried compost to remediate soil and it didn’t work or only had marginal effects, I just want to say that biologically active compost is more than just decomposed matter and a mix of nutrients. Biologically active compost and is like a kombucha starter. It has the power to transform a substrate into something that acts like a loam, and can transform the vegetative structure to exclude early-succession plants such as weeds. The only way to know for sure if a compost will benefit any stretch of land is to check it with the microscope and observe the type of organisms—good, bad, or neutral—that are present and in what quantities. The microscope does not need to be an<span style=”font-size: 1.6rem;”> inexpensive model ($350).</span>
In my view, a waterway restoration project will increase water retention and at the same time can increase the capacity for the beneficial microorganisms because the ground is getting more moisture, causing a greater diversity of plants show up, and therefore photosynthesis happens more consistently and for a longer duration throughout the year. The microorganisms will naturally flourish in such an abundant environment with water at hand and abundant food available through both decomposition and photosynthesis (plants release compounds to attract the bacteria or fungi species they want). The more the land can retain moisture but still remain aerated, the more these organisms will flourish. As the organisms flourish, they continue to create pore spaces that allow more water to soak into the soil. Thus, they go hand in hand, but the two types of restoration techniques meet at the shoreline and in the interstitial places between “water” and “land.”