24/02/2026
Dry season is a great time to get your land ready for the monsoons 🌧️
Here’s a simple, low-impact water harvesting strategy for sloped, densely planted, heavily wooded land, especially if you have surplus wood that is not dry enough to use as firewood.
This site is a coffee estate with steeply sloped sections, lots of timber trees, dense vegetation and fallen logs, which makes large-scale earthworks difficult. To work with these constraints, we proposed a straightforward, easy-to-implement solution. Fallen logs were collected and placed carefully along the contour, after digging a shallow trench. The excavated soil was used to build up a small berm on the downslope side.
These log bunds slow and infiltrate stormwater, trap silt, and passively irrigate the vegetation around them. After observing their performance for almost a year, we’ve seen them work remarkably well, holding runoff, capturing sediment, and allowing excess stormwater to gently spill over to the next bund below.
This approach can be adapted using whatever surplus materials are available on your land, whether that’s rocks, logs, soil, bamboo, or even silt / sand packed into gunny sacks :)
If you’re interested in learning more about earthworks, head to the link in our bio, or read our website journal post “How to Prepare Your Land for the Monsoons” 🌱
