Creating Paradise on 5 Acres or Less - Decentralized Water Retention for a Sustainable Homestead

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Published 2024-03-04
Learn how to create your own paradise through decentralized water retention:
www.waterstories.com/core-course

This project implements water harvesting to capture and store the rainwater from the roof of the house in a natural swimming pond. This is the best kind of natural swimming pool, with an earthen bottom and lots of stones, a dock, and human interaction features to enjoy the water.

The terraces grow a wide variety of edible and medicinal species, while also helping to infiltrate the rain. The circulation system helps to filter and clean the water with the natural bacteria living around the rocks in the waterway. The pond even grows fish, and supports wildlife like fox and heron.

If you want to make something similar on your own landscape join us in the Water Stories community to learn how.

Water Stories is a community committed to water cycle restoration with films, videos, articles, webinars, live events, and a whole training program for those ready to become practitioners.

www.waterstories.com/core-course

www.waterstories.com/community

All Comments (17)
  • @sarafaria4155
    Very beautiful. I wish i could have something like that but we have a serious problem with mosquitoes here. Even with fishes and other aquatic animals.. its impossible to deal with them.
  • Absolutely amazing. You doing amazing work. Keep sharing this simple message.
  • @natneopit5366
    Herons, as perhaps you already know, can eat most of the fish of your lake, I think that some hideouts deep in the lake, as pipes or something similar, would provide for your fish a safe place to avoid the predation of herons. At least some of your fish would survive. Probably you have already implemented some solution for this issue. I don't eat fish but I think that this woody and watery landscape is shaped brilliantly in many ways, it's very well planned in many main issues and details to take into account so as to work all the year round no matter the conditions (composition of the soil; the cycle or availability of water throughout the seasons; the gradient of the surfaces; creation of habitats and, at the same time, natural filters for water; etc.). Beautiful paradise.
  • @BarryMambo
    Great work, what a nice place to live! You mentioned that there wasn't enough clay - how could you seal te pond then? Did you have to use a foil?
  • Hi ive recently found your channel - amazing work! Have you considered founding a water land trust which buys land for restoration purposes?
  • @nancyb1587
    Hello, can you do something like this in a sandy soil environment? Prairie; loom sand?
  • @tribalwind
    We're on 1.25acre. Heavy clay but heavy shale so it drains.. i wouldn't want an empty pond for months, would have to buy in bentonite clay or use a rubber liner as bad as that is.
  • I'm curious how big of a pump one would need for a system like that? and how much well water gets pumped in the pond now with the fish in there? I'm also curious in how you sealed the pond. I'm thikning about installing a feature like this with my existing pond for a couple of weeks now
  • @isaacnazar
    Question: you say the water filter down the channel feeds the fish, can u give me any more information about that? At least a name so i can look for it? I wanna know how to create a low maintenance pond and this comes really handy
  • @allocater2
    I own no land and my parents have a 0.01 acre garden.
  • @uggali
    Trout is the blandest fish I’ve ever tasted