Making your to scale base map go permaculture design

So what we're going to cover now is how to make an exact two scale base map that gives us our percentage slope across the whole land and across specific points, gives us our contour lines and that can be used to create a full sector analysis which we're going to go into after this. So in order to do this you just need two people, a fishing line and a small level to make sure the fishing line itself is level and then two spirit levels that are at least a meter tall. So before you start you're going to take your first spirit level and you're just going to put a notch on it one meter from the bottom. Then the first person is just going to take one end of the fishing line and they're going to hold it at the level of the ground at the highest point of the land. The second person is going to stretch the fishing line out, they're going to hang a level from it to make sure that it's actually level and then they're going to take their meter stick with the one meter mark on it and they're going to find the point where you have a right angle right here and that shows you where you've lost your first meter in altitude. Really important thing to realise here, the horizontal distance marked x here is called your run, the vertical distance marked y is called your rise. Rise over run times 100 equals percentage slope. So as we go down and we're now going to repeat this process we're going to get a percentage slope if we measure x on every point down through the land and then we're going to be able to add up all of those horizontal distances and we're going to be able to add up all the rises and we're going to be able to get a full percentage slope over the whole land. For now we're just going to repeat this process, person A is going to come to the first point that you've marked, you can mark this with a flag, you can put a stake in the ground or what we often do is we just put a little bit of chalk or lime on that first point. So we repeat this process, we go down to the bottom of the land. Now we just have some really useful information, we can see the distance between these points. The next thing we want to do is we want to come and mark contour lines, not necessarily on every point, we might do it every two or three metres in altitude loss depending on how big of an area we have to mark. In this example here we marked one metre altitude drops but we mark contour lines every second metre so what these lines are going to show us are contour lines marked every two metres. So now what we do to mark our contour lines, there's a couple different ways you can do this, you can do it with a hose. So to do it with a hose person A stands at the reference point, they take one of the spirit levels, both of them now have notches one metre from the ground. They'll take their hose and they'll put the water level exactly level with the mark that shows them they're a metre from the ground. They'll never move their spirit level, they're controlling the reference point. The second person is going to make their way across the slope, they're going to try and guess using their eye where it is on the ground that they're going to be at the same altitude, but you never get it totally right. Now this is the tricky part, the person who is looking for the equivalence is moving their hose and their stake together, the person who's on the reference point is only moving their hose up and down. So what's going to happen in practice is the person at the reference point puts their meniscus to the one metre level. The person who's searching for that will take a guess and they'll see if their water level is above or below that one metre mark. And then it's very simple, if they want their water level to go down they'll move up, if they want their water level to go up they'll move down. They'll take their next guess so they'll move up or down slightly, they'll wait for the person at the reference point now to readjust and to send their water level back to the one metre point and they'll keep fine-tuning until both of them have their water levels exactly one metre from the ground. You'll then put a mark in this spot and just like before you'll repeat this process until you have a series of points, two, three, four, five metres apart, it doesn't really matter, the closer together they are the more accurate you're going to be. And so again what you do here is you create a series of points and then you connect them up. It's important when you're connecting them up in terms of accuracy to try to stay also on contour when you do this. There's another way of doing it, it's to use the same two spirit levels and what you do is the person who's on the reference point is simply going to tie the fishing line around their spirit level at one metre. The second person is also going to tie the fishing line at the one metre point and they're going to again stretch the fishing line out, make sure that it's level by hanging the spirit level on it and they're simply going to move their spirit level up and down the slope until they get once again that right angle. That is probably a faster way of doing this in all honesty, you are dependent here on the accuracy of the bubble on the spirit level which on these small lightweight spirit levels tend not to be that good. If you want to be super accurate with it you can use a laser level, that's an expensive bit of kit and I'm really in favour of giving people the tools and techniques to do this without buying expensive gear. The reality is with this stuff these lines don't need to be exact, we're going to find levels once we make terraces, dig swales and all the rest of it. You repeat this process the whole way down the slope and now you simply fly a drone up in the air and you take a photo. This is the most useful base map you can ever create, it's naturally scaled, there's almost always going to be buildings, cars, something in the photo that will allow you to create a kind of intuitive scale. If we combine this with filling in a report, just like the ones that we've got formatted here, we're going to end up with something that's extremely practical and extremely usable. Our next step is to start layering our design, water and access, vegetation, subdivisions and structures. Those are the layers that we're going to create that are eventually going to lead to us having a full professional looking permaculture design, but this is our first step and if you do this properly more than half the work is done.