Hugelkultur on Contour

It was a Good Friday project at the farm.  I decided to take advantage of the drier conditions we have had the last week or so and cut a few more swales on contour uphill of the barn.  Instead of leaving open catchment ditches I changed up the strategy a bit and decided it would be more "permaculture-like" if I started the soil building process proactively.  We took a lot of the young trees/logs we cleared from other areas of the property and placed them in the swales then covered them back up with the soil and wood chips we'd made a few weeks earlier with the chipper.

This is sort of a 'before' picture.  I had already dug one swale but you can see where the next one is going with the red flags.  To the left you can see my homemade A-frame clinometer leaning against the middle lean-to post of the barn.