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A Tour of Permaculture Keyline Water Systems at Wolf Gulch Farm, Oregon

Permaculture Elder Tom Ward takes us on a 10-minute animated tour of Wolf Gulch Farm in Southern Oregon, USA. It was designed using permaculture principles and laid out using Keyline patterning. Tom’s narrated journey explores water supply and storage, soil building, wind and air drainage, cropping, and an enlightened perspective on the watershed and the future of farming in harmony with natural forces.

6 Comments

  1. Andy, thanks a million for sharing some of Tom Ward’s wisdom with the wide community. What I love about this is how Tom explains WHY he chose to use the solutions he did and focused primarily on design thinking instead of just showing strategies. We need more like this!

  2. What an inspiration, to see a difficult site, with extremes of climate and slope, designed using key principles, and working well. Puts all that we read and hear in design courses into clear perspective, particularly with temperate design. The concise communication including excellent graphics is terrific.

  3. What is the closest city or village to the plot of land is it Kerby or Ashland i just want to no how much ran you get per year if its Kerby its ruffly 62.65” Ashland 19.76” per year. I want to bye some land in Oregon but i am not use to the aria. I no there is more rain west of the cascade. But it still variation even there i am not sure which amount of rain i need. I no its complex to answer if you don’t no what i want to grow… But i just want some variety…

  4. Speedster,
    The closest town is called Applegate, but it’s about equidistant from Ashland and Grants Pass.

    This site gets closer to 12″ per year (says Tom) , a South facing valley in the rain shadow. Quite arid!

    The next video I’m making is another Keyline site across the Applegate Valley, closer to Williams, where they get 40″ per year, so the rainfall is extremely variable dependent on microclimate in SW Oregon. As you go North from there, you end up in the Willamette Valley (where I live) where rainfall is more consistently high: 40-50″ in the valley, wetter towards the coast in the coastal mountains, and wetter to the East as you climb elevation into the Cascades…but then it drops off into high desert East of the mountains.

    Andrew

  5. Loved this video. Thank you for sharing. It’s very inspiring to see people make use of the land in such a good way. BTW, for those who aren’t familiar, Southern Oregon is not the rainforest that the northern half of Western Oregon is…plus, these are incredibly useful and needed systems everywhere, not just drought-prone areas.

    Great work.

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