Finishing and Planting the Lower Swale

I started building the lower swale around Easter, it was more work than I expected (as everything always is), but we finally got it finished and planted.

My dad is over for a holiday at the moment and my brother (Andrew) ,his wife (Haylee) and their son (Axel) are over as well. We decided to plan a big family block weekend. Big bonfire, plenty of drinks, maybe shoot some guns. An awesome time would be had by all.

Unfortunately, the weather had other plans. For a week before the forecast was varying between heavy showers and thunderstorms with an expected 20-40mm of rain.

We decide to change the plan and just Dad, Andrew and myself would head out there for the day and smash it all out, finish the swale and plant it all out. Not as fun, but hard work with something to show for it is pretty satisfying anyway.

We loaded up the trailer with most of the plants on Friday night (Dad and I took a small load out the weekend before and we left a few dozen at home for me to grow out a bit more). In order to fit them all we constructed a second layer to the trailer with tent poles, a metal door, scaffold plank and some wood, all held together with ratchet straps. It was a very “professional” job, we managed to fit a tonne of trees, in hindsight, probably too many trees. We wrapped the trailer in feed bags to protect the plants from the wind while we drove out there.

We headed off fairly early on the Saturday morning with a plan to get as much done as we could before the rain got too bad. We ended up bringing Nic with us so that Shan and Haylee would be able to drive out if the weather stayed clear. The forecast said there would be a front of showers around 11, then the main storm from 3pm until after midnight. The trip out was fairly uneventful, but by the time we got there out second floor in the trailer had collapsed. Thankfully I had put a milk crate under the main area at risk of collapse so the damage was minimal. Fairly sure none of the trees will die from the fall or being landed on.

First up we needed to reattached my newly repaired blade. Last time I was out it decided to break a weld, my brother in law was more than happy to fix it for me for a bottle of lemoncello.

We got started on the swale and smashed a lot of work out. Previously I had been working mainly on my own with some help from Shan driving the tractor while I dug. But once we had all 3 of us working on it a tonne of work got done way faster.

My method of digging the swale has changed over the few months that I’ve been building it. I started off trying to use the bucket to build the mound similar to this video, but I found that I was struggling to do the fine movements with a clunky old tractor and I had a lot of issues with the tractor getting bogged.

After trying a few different methods the best way that I found was dragging the blade along the swale, lifting it in low areas or areas that the mound was smaller. Every 20-30 runs across we would spin the blade and come from the other direction. It took a fairly bit of fine tuning the angles on the blade but with an operator and a couple of people on shovels it worked really well.

Eventually this swale will actually be 3 times longer with a dam on the end. But this section of it is fairly distinct and in an area that is fairly accessible so it worked as a good place to build up my skill level. Shanelle and Haylee parked on the main road and walked in with the little kids. They made sure we ended up with a fair few photos on us working and hung out on the deck when the showers came.

During the tidy up of the last bits of the swale mound Andrew, dad and I each spent some time clearing some overhanging tree limbs as well as giving my chainsaw a bit of much needed TLC. I had planned to give each dad and Andrew one of my blunt chainsaw chains to sharpen to determine once and for all which of them was better at sharpening them. But after a few hours in the tractor and on the shovel dad seemed keen to sit on the deck and sharpen them while entertaining the kids.

The swale came up excellent. We checked some of the length with the A frame level, but it seemed fairly good everywhere we checked so we decided we were happy with how it was based on our eye.

Next up came the planting. As soon as I started roughly spreading the plants over the length of the mound I realised how many trees we had. A lot of the pots were in trays of 8 and a lot of the pots had multiple trees. Some up to 4-8 plants per pot. We expect a high failure rate and I was prepared to have less than 20cm between the trees on average as they went up and down the swale mound. We spread some of the bigger and more valued trees a bit further apart and some of the lower value (higher quantity) trees were as close as a few cm apart. We labelled every tree (despite dad’s regular objections), the logic being that even I struggle to tell some of the trees apart and especially when it comes to various varieties of apples. When half (or more) of the trees are dead or dying it will be even more important to try to keep track of what the survivors are.

We made the labels from cut up soft drink cans as suggested a while back by one of the members of the facebook group. Once cut up you can write on them with an old pen which effectively engraves into the can.

As we were planting the main storm front arrived, right on time at around 3 o’clock. We spent a bit of time up on the deck enjoying a couple of beers waiting for it to clear a little. After a while I decided that the rain wasn’t clearing and went back to work. Dad and Andrew weren’t far behind me and Nic took the chance to jump in the muddy puddles which were now forming in the swale trench.

Along the mound we eventually managed to plant (in my estimate) about 200 trees, Tonne’s of lilly pillys and loquats as well as a lot of avacados, apples, stone fruit, mulberry’s, willows, aloe vera, Illawarra plums, natal plums, rosemary, sweet potato, pepino melons, pineapples as well as probably many others that I’ve forgotten.

Then we had the next issue. We still had about 100 trees left in pots. We decided rather than packing them up and taking them home that we would plant them along the shooting range. Our range is about 50m long facing west which means we often end up with sun in our eyes from the northwest. We had plenty of trees for the area so we spread them over the northern boundary including a few bigger trees like the jacaranda’s that I decided wouldn’t fit well in the swale.

Not long before we started this run of planting dad decided to take Nic up to the caravan and try to dry him off and warm him up. Nic was starting to get a bit chilly after a day of showers and a bit of fun in the heavier rain and puddles. Andrew and I worked our way along the line diligently making new labels for the plants (turns out the hundreds of labels we made weren’t enough, the main issue was that we made too many of some and not enough of others), I never want to write loquat again.

By the time we got to the end of the line we were working in the dark and it was about 6:30, I’m honestly not sure if we were getting the labels right in the last dozen trees, everything was blurring together, we were cold, wet, hungry and tired.

We packed up as best we could in the dark and rain. It was so wet and windy that for the first time ever I needed to put the patrol in 4wd just to drive from the cabin to the caravan, everything was getting real slippery.

Loaded a sleeping Nic into the car. I threw a 6 pack of beer in for Andrew and dad on the way home (we had planned on stopping off at the pub for a celebratory drink, but at this point none of us were in the mood for celebrating), I noticed that my giant stack of keys weren’t in the car (my giant stack of keys is giant so that it’s always obvious where they are so that we can’t possibly leave them behind), I knew they would be sitting on the bench in the caravan so I wandered back over there to grab them and lock up. Unfortunately, Andrew passed me as I was heading over and said, “it’s all good, I’ve locked up for you”

So all the keys (except the car key which stays in the ignition), including the caravan, house, Perth house, other peoples houses, trailer lock, tool box lock, China’s nuclear launch codes, gate lock every single key that matters to me in the world have been locked in the caravan. I decided it wasn’t worth the stress for now (all my tools including the bold cutters had been spread between the back and front of the car, trailer, caravan, everywhere) and I would have to come back the following day to work it out.

Just as we all got in the car we found out that the storm hadn’t actually hit yet. What we were working in was just a light shower compared to what hit. Bucketing rain so hard that we could barely see 10m in front of the car despite some pretty decent lights. It was good fun driving through some now decent puddles and running water on the track to get out. It wasn’t overly hard 4WD’ing, but it felt intense and I don’t think the track has ever felt that narrow. To top it all off, the bottle opener was on the keys that Andrew locked in the caravan and the spare bottle opener had gone missing in the mess, so Dad and Andrew had a ‘dry’ trip home as they sat there soaking wet. We were driving as slow as 40km/h on the main roads heading back to Collie, by the time we got home none of us felt like doing much more than eating and going to sleep, barely even got into them drinks. I found out today that we got over 59mm of rain that day. Not bad given that the median rainfall for the whole month is only about 170mm.

On Sunday morning we headed into Bunbury for a bit of a family get together, I picked up what I desperately hoped was the spare key to the caravan from my mum and picked up a set of bolt cutters that were over a meter long from my father in law (because I wasn’t sure if the set i had would cut the lock on the van). I also grabbed a new lock from bunnings in case I did need to cut the lock.

Kelvin and I drove out and enjoyed the bit of sunshine that had finally started peaking through. We arrived at the turn off to the block and started heading in through the big puddles and sticks and branches. We came up to a larger branch and Kelvin offered to jump out and pull it off the road. I said it’s no worries I’ll just go over it. As I went over it, some feat of engineering and wizardry happened. I drove over a curve in the branch, that caused the other end of the branch to flick up and bump the side of the car. I drove on, thinking nothing of another little ding in the side of the car. Then Kelvin turned and said to me, that broke the window. A little knob on the branch hit the back drivers side window and shattered it. There wasn’t much I could do while we were out there other than put a massively oversized tarp over it.

Thankfully, the spare key was for the caravan so there was no worries getting in, I grabbed all the wrappers, cans and rubbish that had been left in there during our rush to leave then got to work installing the spillway that I had completely forgotten to build the day before. All that rain had put about 8-10 cm of water along well over half the length of the swale, it was obvious now that building it level to eye had gone a little off in some areas. But I know where they are and can clean them up when it dries out.

I installed the level sill spillway about 5cm higher than the current depth of water and about 1.5m wide, hopefully it should do it’s job to let the water out relatively passively if too much manages to build up behind the swale.

Next we planted out the seeds that we didn’t have time to the day before. A nice big container of nasturtiums (although they were a little mouldy so i’m not sure how well they will germinate), 2 spice shakers worth of parsley seeds and a coffee jar worth of basil seed pods (including about 6-8mm of basil seeds at the bottom.

It’s amazing the difference that less than 24 hours can make. We timed it pretty much perfectly I think.

I would have hung around longer and cleaned things up a bit more, but having a smashed back window put a bit of a dampener on my mood so we headed back into Bunbury with the tarp flapping through a few sun showers. On the way through Donnybrook there was an RBT, I think out of the goodness of her heart the cop (as she saw us approaching) turned away from the road and didn’t wave us in with our broken window, muddy car and a tarp help on by the back doors and tailgate, as soon as we passed I saw her turn back towards the road to wave people in.

I found out later that my strapped on tarp had broken the plastic spoiler on the back of the car, but there’s not much we can do about it.

Thankfully Shan managed to quickly sort a new back window which wasn’t too expensive ($200) and there was a guy that had one in stock that put it in for us first thing on Monday morning.

Massive weekend full of good and bad. But I’m sure when we look back on it 5-10+ years from now we will only be in awe of the wall of fruit trees that we have grown and 30-40 years from now the struggles will be long forgotten as our kids and grand kids enjoy the excess of fruit around them.