How a Pile of Rocks Brought the Desert Back to Life.

Back in April, a dozen volunteers came out here to the Chihuahuan Desert to help build check dams on three acres. I haven't been over to the check dams in three months. That's been plenty of time for new grass to establish, for new sediment to deposit. I'm expecting really good surprises when I walk over there. We've had 15 inches of rain so far, and we still have three months to go in the year, and that includes Hurricane Polo, which is likely to come in the next few weeks. The main thing I'm looking forward to is seeing evidence of water in the ground. I showed you all this a month or two ago. This is the reason that the road washed out. This is my property line. It's the reason I built this here. I can't do anything upstream because it's not my property. I don't have the right to. But I'm going to keep future check dams lower like this just to make sure that I succeed. And then we're going to come over here with the tractor maybe during the volunteer event and just get this all established so that this doesn't happen as often. I think the area towards Rich's W, this ramp is mostly intact. It just needs a single push from the dozer and it's probably passable. Wow that's extremely fast growth for a catclaw acacia. That's a tree we want. We might move the road a little bit to support that. We'll figure that out but we want that guy to thrive. I'm gonna go a little bit out of order let's start at the top and look at the soak pits these have filled out filled up i don't know how many times maybe half a dozen all right so this is an original that look at that so obvious duff deposition which is all organic material that holds water you can see that it's also catching seeds it's a great start little growth under that cat claw acacia whoa here's one of the top soak pits. I mean top as in elevation wise. And look at that. All of the cactus that Justin planted established. It's all green and vigorous. That Lechuguilla is thriving. Look at all this prickly pear. Carpet of forbs. Looks like there's a grass there. I know that's not cilantro but it kind of looks it. This is amazing. Look that's some kind of grandma I think. Wow great great, great, great start. It's a huge diversity of species in here. Same thing over here. I think Justin's got a 100% survival rate on his agave transplants. Justin's the one that really focused on building these and designing the plants. Not quite as diverse, but all the prickly pear looks this is excellent. That is the greenest cholla I've ever seen out here. Never seen it that green. That's Justin's worst agave. If that's failure, I'll take it all day long. The big question we're looking for is, does it look like we're putting water in the ground? I love the plants, I love growing them, but the reason I'm so excited to see the plant growth isn't just the plants themselves, it's because it means we're successfully putting water where the plants can find it. Look at this last one and then I'm gonna check out the pruning that I did around some trees. all of this is really thriving. so you can see all of the mulch and pruning that i cut down here. like that one put on a bunch of growth this year. that i gotta kill all those but there's grasses and growth down there. uh this is desert olive. looks good but definitely a slower response than soak pits. i do love these flowers though. acacia flowers are famous for smelling good but these literally smell like perfume. that doesn't make you sneeze. so good. this part was kind of my project you can see the cuttings where i put mulch on the ground and just trying to support the trees that are here and then the team rock came through and backfilled all this stuff and look at that ocotillo that's bonkers for such a young plant you don't see ocotillo grow like that in a year that's lightning fast my biggest problem out here is water my second biggest problem is electricity the shipping container that we've built has made an enormous difference for stabilizing our electrical equipment however i need a backup plan and thank you to Jackery for sponsoring today's episode because they are the backup plan I use these portable power stations for everything we use it for welding it provides outstanding electricity where we can use Harbor Freight welders and get really high quality welds if you've ever dealt with MC4 connectors you'll appreciate how easy this is to plug in there's nothing to mess up because you have this groove Just slide it in. Now we're charging. I use it in my cabin where it's hot and I don't want to worry about draining the main system. I just bring in the Jackery HomePower 3600 Plus and I run my air conditioner. I know that the thing's so big and it holds enough power that I can run a 400 watt air conditioner all night long. I know I'm going to wake up having slept well in the summer heat and ready to work. We're about 95% done with the room. We got to organize the shelves a little better, reroute some of the wires we have a good backup plan with the Jackery all of this stuff is stable and as soon as we're done with the north field we're going to be able to move on to the next project which is adding those solar panels make sure you check out the link in the description when you purchase Jackery you are supporting Dustups directly you got 3600 watt hours of power you can run a refrigerator for three to five days i've got a freezer outside that i want to have a backup supply for i have endless ideas for how to use it and what's cool is you can chain them together to get up to 21 kilowatt hours worth of power but that's an ambition for another day power out jackery on and now back to the episode whoa all right so this is what we call the mini forest i think we have some green grass here just a little bit look at all this stuff and i cut this back quite a bit pruning so that i could make a path and the cows or whenever they come through they look like they're still knocking it back a little bit but that agarita needs to be cut back and this creosote even though it's enormous will die over the long run it hates moisture and as this other stuff starts to retain water better and shade it out, that's the way you kill creosote you don't need toxins or poisons, you just need water and shade, just in man, you killed it, look at that. All the agave is alive and all the prickly pear is growing with new pads. The mini forest is crushing it. I need to look up what this is because it's just pretty mallow Awesome. Looks a lot different than the globe mallow. Let's go check the main waterway that runs into the ranch. I should not say main waterway. The largest waterway that forms the W enters the north boundary of the ranch And it's down in this gully and the path to it where we have some check dams built So this is the property line. I think that, I think that's Candalia, I forget but I think it's, that's right on the property line and we're obviously holding water. It hasn't rained in days and it wasn't even, I don't think this area flooded. Even though we had two inches of rain this week, one thing viewers don't understand is that the quantity of rainfall does not mean flooding We had a slow, gentle rain over the course of days, and that meant all of it soaked in the ground. Well, not all of it, but most of it. So this looks like it caught some runoff, but not tons. And I was wrong. This is a catclaw acacia. On its way to becoming a proper tree, and all of this back flooding that we've helped collect is... I mean, look at all this grass. I don't know if it looks as pretty on camera as it does in person, but all those golden seed heads. These look amazing. We want to get all that seed. I think it's so interesting how much criticism people on the channel apply towards how we build the check dams. There's always room to improve but fundamentally all of our dams except for the largest ones are working and catching water and debris and seeds. Look those are growing through the check dam. I can't, no those aren't, I can't take credit for those I think that was probably there might be too early for us to have grass that big just from our efforts but that'll be a next year thing, sorry I need to see how fresh, oh that is super duper fresh like this morning fresh where are they when you guys wonder why I carry a pistol, imagine that was a mountain line my heart's racing uh but uh you know that draw wasn't too bad I uh I'm a little pleased that's uh I got weapon out when I thought I needed it. So we'll just chalk that up to a healthy drill. We get criticized so much for when rock falls. It's not a big deal. Lower the height, make a better splash pad, learn. It's fine to make mistakes. That's how you learn. So this is almost the end of our work in the main channel and I'm gonna jump over here and then walk back upstream. That massively succeeded look at all the all the duff it'll just build up over time this is the main channel going that way where we put the skills and talents of Bam Bam known as Drew Davidson to work lifting big heavy rocks Flintstone style and making our biggest awesomest check dams so now that they've had several runs i'm hoping that we'll see good things just judging from all the grandma on this this hillside. I'm feeling good. Already looks excellent. So is this built perfectly? No. It should have a smoother ramp instead of falling onto the rocks but for the size of this wash with rocks that big you don't have to build them perfect. And it looks like the volunteers the way they packed all this gravel in and spent the time making sure the water wouldn't leak through and shows every sign of holding lots and lots of water. It's grass here that's young. One thing I didn't appreciate so you see how there's grasses kind of like in a line here and then it really thins out the reason for that is that i didn't water doesn't work the way in soil that i expected everybody understands that it can soak down but often it'll soak to the side too so this stand of grama grass is a really good example where the water isn't getting up here not even directly on top of the root crown but the water is pooling and then soaking into the side and that these grasses have pretty shallow roots so the water is actually moving almost directly into their root zone which is why you see this grass is really tall shin high knee high something like that and the grass up there also is tall but thinner it's also nice about seeing the duff and the branches in these check dams is you can get a sense for which one is catching the most flow the biggest opportunities and then when we look down at the next one no large branches or sticks so what we think will happen over time is that that will backfill all the way to level and then this one will backfill all the way to level and then that one will backfill all the way to level and so on and so on the value of check dams is water and the obvious benefit of these Groasis grow boxes that i use to protect my desert trees is water they hold almost five gallons and they they use it to drip 50 milliliters of water per day, they're training the roots of the trees to go nice and deep. But the box has a second benefit, which is protecting the trees, keeping pests and rodents away from gnawing at the bark, keeping the wind at bay so that they grow straight and tall. The best way to think of the box is training wheels. The idea is by the time you remove the box, the roots have gone deep enough, the trunk is thick enough, straight enough that the tree should be able to survive on its own. The first year is the danger zone and now the most common question people ask is how do you get the Groasis off? Well take it over the top and I watched a video on it. These mulberry look like they're threatening to grow too big so just to make myself more comfortable I'm gonna pull them now and try to not rip these tree sleeves off because I would like to reuse these. There we go. Okay we'll just pour the water out. There we go. And it doesn't look like we did too much damage to it. Now while we're here we may as well add some good stuff. I don't want to bury the roots so I'm going to take take these coffee grounds, nitrogen in there for it, and then the rest will be mulch. My goals is going to be to not mulch against the crown. We also have some worm castings, which we don't need too many of. I thought, you know what, a handful of worm castings can do a lot of good. Don't worry about burying the roots. So I mainly focus this on the outside, mix that in with the mulch. All right, I think that's good. We got mulberry trees and I'm gonna wait until, oh I did hurt that one a little bit, but I'm gonna take one of these out. I don't need two of them growing right next to each other that close. I'm going to wait until the winter where I can get cuttings off of this and just take as many cuttings as I can to establish and then I'll take down the main branch. All of that green growth you enjoyed in this episode is a result of rainwater flooding through the check dams. Check out this episode to see the flood in action.