Chapter 13

Inside the gates, inside the robust and misleading exterior of the property, was a system of design that had taken Bryan months to plan out. Nearly every square inch of the fourteen acres was utilized for something.

The front half of the property sloped away from the crest of the hill near the road. It sloped down to a small creek which ran across the property at almost precisely the center. On the uphill side of the creek there was a culvert which came through the wall.

The creek meandered for four hundred feet across the property, and ended at the low pond. The pond was approximately three quarters of an acre. The dam was wide and flat and the driveway crossed it, along with the eastern wall. The rest of the dam resided on the neighboring DNR land as it had since before the property had been purchased. There was an extensive overflow system to keep the pond from getting too full and washing out the roadway, and several buried pipes which popped up out in the fields below.

From the creek to the south was where a majority of the buildings and house were. The hill rose steeply from the south side of the creek and crested only fifty yards away, where it began to slope to the south again.

The house sat on or more correctly "in" the crest of the hilltop. The main shed and greenhouse sat further up the slope to the West, nearly against the western wall. This was the highest point on the property. The rest of the buildings sat over the hilltop, safely out of sight from the road or even the front half of the property. If one looked closely they might see the windows of the house sticking out of the ground in a place or two, but from the North side of the hill they were nearly invisible.

There were cross fences, or more correctly walls constructed in the same manner as the outer walls, only on a smaller scale. The inside walls were built to contain livestock as such were only four or five feet tall and only eighteen inches at the base. They traversed across the landscape, short fat lines of tar and stone snaking back and forth in ways that would have made many cattlemen scratch their heads.

Bryan had laid out the walls due to the shape of the land in accordance with a system called Keyline design. Since the walls were impervious to water he used them to direct the water flow on the farm in such a way as to best utilize it.

Water has a tendency to run downhill and pool, which is common knowledge but few had ever thought about how to best utilize that fact. A man from Australia by the name of Yeomans had in fact used just that fact and altered the way the land shed its water, thereby minimizing both droughts and flood conditions.

There were small ponds all over both hills. The south hill was mostly fed with the collected rain water and pumped well water. However, there were small ponds dotting the landscape. The northern half of the property relied completely on the collected water from rainfall.

All around the northern hilltop was a terrace. It was shallow, only about half a foot deep and only sloping about two inches per foot. It drained into a small but deep pond on the eastern side of the hill, utilizing a natural dip in the land. There was a gate in the dam, as well as an overflow pipe which flowed down a channel toward the southwest. It drained into a slightly larger pool, which drew its water from the pool above as well as channeled water from the surrounding hillside.

Eight times this was repeated before emptying into the low pond. All along the way the water was channeled away from natural channels to the ridges on the hillsides, distributing water along the way in a manner that doesn't typically happen in nature.

The channels snaked back and forth across the hillside, letting the slow moving water soak into the soil in a manner not typical for the region. Soil which normally only got a bit of water during a rainstorm found itself saturated and grass grew lush in places that normally grew nothing in the hot summer months. In the same regard the overflow and runoff on the property was much less and soil erosion was almost completely stopped due to the slow moving nature of the water.

There were small paddocks distributed all down the northern hillside, some bunched together while some were separated by areas of wild growth. Bryan tried to keep the livestock separated from the trees, and especially the fruit trees which grew in contour rows and coppices all over the farm.

In one location on the southern hill there was a bunch of apple trees that he had planted in a circle around a much older and apparently wild apple tree. In a similar situation with the outer hedge, he was weaving them into a lattice and forming a dome out of them. The circle was about thirty feet across and the trees had grown enough that the outer sides were about seven feet tall, sloping in about three feet at the top.

Bryan's hope, if he could get the mass to support its own weight, was to come together in the middle at the old crab apple tree. He had left two areas open as sort of natural doorways and had now woven arches over both of them. He intended to let the chickens free run the area in the summer time and both clean up the pests from the soil as well as fertilize the area. Most aerial predators would leave the chickens alone in an enclosed space so it would also be a safe haven for them.

The resulting natural building may not produce great apples, as they were not grafted trees, but the fruit could be used as baking apples or fed to livestock. He thought that maybe someday in the future he might even try his hand at grafting and get some branches that produced good "eating" apples.