g'day saille, you should be able to plant whatever you like if the swale is as it should be and is actually going to do the job it is intended to do - that is 'aid the transition of catchment/run-off water into the sub-soil'. if you had planted along the contour and mulched around and between the food trees this too would have created a swale, you soil type could have an impact on how well the swale will work, a lot do the classic copy book trench swale with downside berm but when it is cut into clay it acts as a dam, and does little to put water into the sub-soil. you need also to take into account how much rainfall you get. so in areas that get very good rain you could if the swale works right water-log the soil below the immidiate area, in which case you want to plant moisture loving plants a opposed to plants that like it a bit drier as many fruit trees do they like to be well watered about once a week then they like to drain. in the situation we had we uesed rip swales (made by using a plow like tool often seen on graders and bull-dozer in combinations or 3 or 4 but we used a singel configuration), then planted the trees in the swale lines and then mulched as i said earlier this was in sandy loam soil and worked a treat. then on the other hand i have seen where others used the classic copy book swale in heavy clay and caused trenches that where little more than dams and the water went nowhere well not into the sub-soil least wise. one person needed to introduce fish into his swales to control mosquito's. len Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page

My idea was to create swales to generate soil to use to create an accompanying berm on which to plant. (ie like "pit and mound"). When the pond was dug, all the dirt was piled along the eastern edge of the property and created a laneway that is some 2 ft above grade. It is well drained and growth is lush compared to soil on natural grade. I thought to recreate this throughout the field for planting in a way that doesn't require purchasing soil. The swales would be like that marsh the municipality has created by cleaning the ditch and making a berm with the material cleaned out of the ditch. Your straw bale garden would be great on top of the berms. The way the land is now, it would be impossible to grow food crops other than elderberry, wild wetland flowers for honey, cattail etc. The soil is just too wet and unworkable. I would like to keep the water on the land to have those wetland places. All the native plants are right there. I think I just have to take the plunge and try one swale and one berm to see what happens. Your recipe for a straw bale garden on top of the new berm would be just the ticket to condition that clay.

lol lol lol Guess what? For as long as you live here, you're stuck with it. We all just do the best we can with what we have, but probably the hardest lesson for a gardener to learn, whether they are new to gardening overall, new to slow-draining clay or new to gardening in a highly erratic climate, is that we cannot expect this year's weather to be just like last year's which means our challenges with our clay soils will be different. Thus, we must adapt our planting plans accordingly. Sometimes, despite our best effort, the weather changes a great deal during the growing season after the majority of our plants are planted (which is even worse), and we are left scrambling to help the plants deal with a lot more (or less) moisture than they'd been receiving or significantly hotter or colder weather or whatever. My first three years here were droughty and it was hard---the clay was barely improved, you couldn't even water enough to make the plants produce well, yada, yada, yada. Then we had two wet years back to back and I was so delighted! I had incredible yields and beautiful flowers and all the new, young trees and shrubs were so happy. I remember thinking "See there, it won't be so hard to garden here after all." I guess in my mind I was thinking the drought years had been an anomaly and that now our weather had returned to "normal". So, you can guess what happened next, right? The next year, 2003, was the year we had less than 19" (our average here is 38" at the western end of our county and 38" at the eastern end, and I'm in the middle) of rainfall and the worst plague of grasshoppers I've ever seen. It was terrible. The garden was terrible. It was depressing. Then, in 2004, tons of rain but not too much....except in May and June. Our big crop of gigantic tomatoes were so watered down by the rain (over 12" just in June) that they weren't edible. No flavor at all. It was around then that weather averages became clear to me. I finally understood that we'd almost never have a year when we got our average rainfall of 38-42". We'd either get 19-23" or 48-52", and over the long term it would average out.....but in the short term I'd never be gardening in average conditions. That was an eye-opening realization. Once I understood that, I could clearly see that we were in our 5th year here and the weather hadn't really been the same in any two years. It was like a roller coaster.....and I began to understand my planting methods and gardening practices had to be able to ride the roller coaster of weather conditions. And so, that's what I do. I trust my instincts (based on all the previous years of weather we've endured here) to let me know what to do at planting time. If it is wet and I feel like that will continue, I plant high. If it is dry, I plant deep, etc. etc. etc. It is easy for me (or any gardener) to fall into the trap of expecting this year to be like last year, but the reality is that our climate and weather in this part of the country are highly erratic, so we cannot become complacent and expect what worked last year to work this year. Maybe it will, but maybe it won't. I've never sat and listed each year as "dry" or "wet" but, if I did, I bet I'd find the weather see-sawed back and forth even more regularly than I remember. I kinda think I do get 2 dry years for every wet year, and rarely 2 wet years back to back. Despite our rapidly-changing weather, gardening has become easier simply because the soil has improved so much over the years. Soil that has been amended for 15 years or more is going to be easier to work with than that same soil was in its first or third or fifth year of amending. In that sense, the wet years aren't quite as troublesome now as they were 8 or 10 years ago. But, every time I think I have our weather all figured out and can cope with anything, Mother Nature sends a "gotcha!" to show me that my thinking is wrong. Our last "gotcha" was in 2011 when even native plants died. Even the cacti native to our place died. I always thought that if they died, it would be in a wet year. Nope, they died in a dry year. So, I guess I'm still learning.

When all was said and done - after bill made the down - the lawyer spoke up. He was the original lawyer used to handle the old man's affairs after his passing including alterations to the will. He's a judge, now. Over the last couple of weeks they were wanting to sell it out from under us when lawyer reminded them of the original arrangement and the old man's wishes. I'm glad this happened this way.