One of the main Permaculture tenets is water management. Storing rain water in reservoirs for the use of irrigation, household use, and for animals is an important component of farm design. We already talked about how we built a channel to manage the water path. Now we had to create a reservoir to hold this water.
This was the first time we brought in an earth mover into the farm. There was a natural ravine that ran through the farm, in the path of water channel. We decided to expand this a little, and create a little reservoir for the water to collect, and also to slow down while moving through the land. Not wanting to do anything too big, and also pressed for time, we simply dug out a pit and re-settled the earth on its edges making an embankment of sorts. We planted grass on the slopes and edges, and we glad that we could manage a short term water reservoir, for the monsoon that was about to start any day!
This was a short and sweet project, and would be followed by a larger pond digging exercise in 2012 but I would say that if you don't have the space, time or resources to build anything bigger, just a reservoir like this, lined with plants would do.
For more information on water management, you can watch the following videos: