The Most Undervalued Rainwater Harvesting Tool

the Zuni bowl is a rainwater harvesting tool that we're going to be utilizing on our property so I want to show the simple design and where we're implementing these what's growing on everyone I'm Brandon and welcome to the Greening the desert project if you're new to the channel welcome we're in the middle of our gaban walipini project here on our desert permaculture Homestead on the last video we had actually finished up on the rammed Earth wall at the level that it needed to be for the next stage of development here which is gathering and stacking

more rocks in the Gabon baskets so we're actually out on our Southwest end of our property we're at a very bare area where we're actually going to utilize the Rocks not only for building up the Gabon baskets but we're also going to use the rocks for building up some Zuni bowls so the Zuni Bowl was originally invented by the zi people so the Native Americans came up with this idea long time ago so this isn't anything new but it was actually further promoted by a man named Bill Mollison no no no no his name was

Bill zc there's so many bills around bill zedi is the guy who did a lot of work in Arizona and a lot of work in the wash areas and building up the banks as well as allowing the water to be able to be slowed and spread out on the landscape furthering the promotion of vegetation and essentially Greening the desert and this concept works for for our sake and for our landscape because we have a whole lot of rocks here we've got more rocks than I can count on my fingers so we're going to start with

the zi Bowl right here in this area and this is an area that we know has been constantly flooded out and that's why we've built the rock check dams that we have here to help slow and soak the water more but we actually can take this space around right here and we can create a zi Bowl right in this spot because our driving path is right above here so we actually can at least dig something here to further soak and store more water in our landscape all right so we've got our handmade A-frame here and

we're going to use the A-frame to kind of find our level point just to get a gauge at least but essentially we're going to take the A-frame and just use it like a giant Compass so that we get a nice clean Circle that we can draw out in the sand here for our zi bow and I'm pretty much going to start the circle in front of the rocks here so that when the bowl overfills it's going to still have to sift through the rock check Dam here and then we actually have further bowls that we're

going to do down the way here so this is a little bit of a big circle I'll admit here but that's the nice thing about our little giant Compass tool we'll just take the level off of it and then we'll just shrink it down so I can close it a little bit but we'll just shrink it down and just make a smaller Circle all right cool now that we've got our Circle drawn out it's a nice mediumsized Circle so now I'll be able to just start chipping away at this and honestly for everyone's unique situation

I mean that's the nice part about these bowls is that you can make them really deep or you can make them really shallow you can make these really wide or you can make them really skinny but we can do you know more oval shapes we can do squares as long as we have a pit for the water to drop into so that it's capturing sediment soaking water and slowing a lot of the water down that is the main concept of a Zuni Bowl basically oh and I forgot to say I think with the material that

we excavate out of the little Bowl here we're going to end up just kind of helping to build up our Rock check Dam here and then we'll use some of it to help fill in the gaps in the Rocks itself on the check Dam here and kind of just build up this whole kind of burm here that's on Contour so that we're capturing water all in this area helping to soak and just grow more vegetation in this area and then any of the rocks that we find in it then we can use for the bowl

got a nice patch of grass that's in our Circle so we'll kind of just leave the grass as it is we'll just kind of keep this as a nice little bump so that we get continued grass growth and then the bowl will kind of help propagate and promote more of the growth too all right so I just wanted to stop and dig for a second because right here we actually had flooding before so with the rock check Dam we actually were slowing and stopping water the last storm we had was probably about a week ago

and actually right here you can kind of see here that we still have moist soil we have stuff that's still clumped together so down below we still got some good moisture and the last rainstorm we had was probably about a week ago which is super cool meaning I think we soaked a whole lot of water in this spot but that's even the cooler thing that this is such a bare area and we're still retaining moisture even after a week later here now that we've gotten our whole dug this is probably the most strenuous part of

building these Zuni bows but now we can actually start Gathering up our rocks and we'll basically just be doing one layer of rocks to cover the whole bowl and we'll go from there for so now we've got our Zoni bll finished and you can kind of see that I used a variety of different sizes of rocks for general purposes I mean it really doesn't matter what size of rocks you use I think as long as you're not really using like small little gravel or maybe at least softball size rocks is probably the preferred method I

think and I usually try to do bigger rocks on the bottom of the bowl and then kind of start spreading out with the smaller rocks but then also something I didn't mention was that we kind of did dig out a little bit in front of the bowl so the water that is coming this way we are essentially leading that water more so into the bowl than having the water really just run around it but eventually once this bowl actually fills up then the water will spread out a lot farther and that's a big goal that

we have here but we want to sink the water down but also spread the water out on as big of a surface area as we can so that we have that much area being soaked and water being absorbed into the ground and into the soil and that's another thing with the Zuni Bowl itself is that with the rocks being inside of the bowl now we're actually going to be stopping and slowing sediment along with the water capturing but for our sake we have multiple Earthworks along here that are going to be slowing and stopping water

and allowing it to soak and therefore slowing and stopping a lot more of the sediment that does come down the way so we're going to be holding more of our top soil here and that's the benefit of the Zuni bowl with capturing the sediment once it fills up we'll be able to scoop that out and clean it but we'll use that nice top soil and sediment mix to be able to lay on our garden beds and our SES and a lot of the other earth works for growing plants super nice we got one Zuni Bowl

done so we've got multiple more to do I've got to still collect more rocks for the Gabon walipini and hopefully in the next couple days we'll be getting some storms so that we actually can see how that Zuni Bowl works so part of our goal on our desert permaculture Homestead here is capturing storing and soaking as much of the rainwater as we can on our property so the Zuni Bowl along with the other Earthworks that we've done around our property have already contributed to the rainwater actually soaking into our land landscape so we're already off

to a really good start but in reality we've really only covered maybe a couple acres of our 10 acre property with Earthworks so we still have a lot of Earthworks to complete so that's been part of the design plan of our landscape as well as the gaban walipini is when we're needing materials for the gaban walipini we're Gathering the materials out on our landscape but as we're Gathering the materials we need for the build we're also going to these certain areas around on our property that need help that need a little bit of Earthworks on

them in order for more water to be slowed and soaked in the area and so the areas that we've been choosing have been very bare areas that need more grass need more diversity need a lot of help so that's kind of our main focus when we're looking at the materials we need and Gathering those materials carrying out with the design plan on the Earthworks that we'll need for that certain area and that's actually what's really cool so far because we're probably towards the end of the monsoon season here and so we've been actually able to

experience at least a little bit of the weather patterns and the sudden downfall of rain coming on our property and Landscape granted I don't think it's really been that great of a monsoon season especially hearing from other people but we've been able to see a whole lot of action from the Earthworks that we've already kind of carved out and outlined in a lot of these places to give us actually ideas on the improvements that we need to make around here but also giving us a chance to see where we need to put more effort in

our Earthworks in slowing and soaking more of the water and I've been able to look back on the videos from the past rainstorms now and I've been able to actually see more so our problem areas where we're getting a lot more water flow compared to other areas so it could be that water soaking better in some areas and water just isn't soaking the best in certain areas so we've actually come to an area that I've been able to look at a few times now and see how much water actually gathers up and we've created already

a Little Rock check Dam in a couple of these places here where the water was filling up in this certain spot but now we're actually going to upgrade the area with some better Earthworks that will actually slow and soak the water more efficiently and more effectively but we'll also combine that with our check dams so we'll see with this area that we need a bit more help so we need to stack more rocks and that's where the Zuni bowl is going to come in I do want to focus in because there is the abundance of

rocks all around so the Rocks we need for the build and then we'll be able to use some of the rocks for the Zuni Bowl itself and I actually have another take on the Zuni Bowl as opposed to using the Rocks we'll actually end up using the sticks so I'll kind of show you how we're putting putting this all together [Music]