podcast 185: A Good Road Lies Easy on the Land

Listen Online
Download

Get all of the podcasts in convenient, giant zip files
Subscribe on iTunes

Summary

This is the first part of a four part podcast about building roads - A Good Road Lies easy on the Land - part one.

Neil has already started a thread to discuss this podcast, with a load of links to downloads on the subject, and a request to share experiences and photos.

Here's the link - A Good Road Lies Easy on the Land - discussion on permies

And the blurb...

"Paul Wheaton talks to Neil Bertrando about the book, “A Good Road Lies Easy on the Land,” by Paul Zeedyk, which fits well with keyline design. Paul talks about making dams to form ponds. Neil talks about induced meandering, which allows streams to intentionally erode an area, which reduces the need to bring in heavy equipment. Paul shares about a bad experience of a group making a road. They didn’t understand what it meant to build a crown. Paul would maintain the crown on his driveway every spring when the snow cleared. They talk about pot holes. The book focuses on good drainage and preserving the integrity and health of the surrounding land. The book asks how to allow the water to feed the landscape and reduce road maintenance costs. They talk about building a road with local, on-site materials. They talk about designing for emergency overflow in a dam. They talk about utilizing swales. They talk about creek restoration and Mark Van Der Meer. Paul admires Ben Law‘s approach to woodland management. They talk about different roads for different vehicles."

Support the Empire

Help support the empire and get all of the podcasts in bundles here

To support production of these podcasts, make a donation here at Paul's Patreon page.

thanks Paul, I found the book itself (free pdf) very interesting and sent the link to others.

Here is the link to the PDF of 'A Good Road...'

http://quiviracoalition.org/images/pdfs/1888-A_Good_Road_Lies_Easy_on_the_Land.pdf

The link to the PDF version of 'Let the Water Do the Work':

http://quiviracoalition.org/images/global/144-Let_the_Water_do_the_Work.pdf

The Quivira Coalition is an outstanding resource.

There is an error in the description.  The author of the book is Bill Zeedyk, not Paul Zeedyk.

"If you get a pothole, that's just an indicator that you suck at building roads."  --Paul

Did you hear that, Boston???

Supposing you didn't have any earth-moving equipment, but just a car, could you drag a couple of boards behind a car , along the road, to form a loose crown? is a loose crown better than no crown at all?

Or, put down some planks and then drive the car over the planks to push dirt inward toward the center of the road...

Or drag a snowplow angled to make a crown shape?

I unintentionally made a little bit of a crown path on my yard.  It's a bit of wood shavings and quail poop from Henry's quail, and a bit of wood chip mulch had been in that strip too.

It worked.

To some degree, the snow melted off of both sides of that thing, leaving me a path I can walk on that's not turning into ice (the rest of things around there are getting icy, probably because i'm trying to capture water in the landscape and it doesn't soak in before it freezes).  

This sort of answers my question.  I think this could be useful for making footpaths that are a bit more navigable than the surrrounding terrain.  

To be clear, I wasn't trying to make a crown, and I wouldn't say I actually made one, it just happened to have the shape of the crown and a bit of the effect, just a slight mounding of mulch and shavings and poop.  Mounded the way a strip of mulch will naturally fall.  (I had put it there mostly to capture a bit of water on contour).

The poop may be warming that a bit, I don't know; I can't imagine it's breaking down much at all at near-zero temps, but maybe it does a little bit each time the temperature goes up.  At any rate it gives it an edge over the surrounding snow.