Swale drains are amazing. Their main purpose is to improve water to your garden, but they serve many other purposes as well. They can also be useful for collecting water from small areas, or even using them as a small pond or water feature.  If you want to get the basic concept, consider searching table drain at EARTHLOK

Understanding the concept of swale drains

Swale drains are a water management technique that you can use to keep water on your property after it rains. The swale drain is a low-tech, low-cost way to manage stormwater runoff and improve your garden.

Trenching or digging a ditch in your yard may seem like hard work, but installing a swale drain is quite simple. You can do it yourself in an afternoon and it will be the easiest garden job you ever do.

Swales (also known as berms) are depressions in the ground that allow water to collect after heavy rains so that it can soak into the ground rather than run off and cause erosion. They’re like ditches except they don’t go all the way down to the subsoil layer and they slope up from one end so that excess water flows out of them at a regular rate.

Tips for building swales

Here are some tips for building swales:

Stake it out. Before you start digging, make sure you know where the swale will go. Use stakes and string to map out the route and make sure it has traveled at least 10 feet from any buildings or driveways.

Build a mound. Dig up soil from the bottom of the swale and deposit it in the ditch section. This raises the level of the surrounding land so water drains slowly into the ditch. It may take a few trips to move all of the soil from the bottom section to the top of the swale, so use wheelbarrows or buckets to pass it along. If there’s a lot of debris, use a leaf blower to clean away leaves, sticks and other organic matter before moving it uphill.

Construct a berm on both sides of your swale (a berm is an elevated ridge).

How to make swales

Trenching, which involves the use of a trenching machine that cuts a deep slot in the ground, is one way to install swales into your landscape. The machine is used to cut a 3-foot-deep trench across the slope. After the trench is dug, an elbow fitting is inserted into each end of the ditch and buried to form an inlet and outlet for water.

Another way to install swales is by hand digging or excavating, which involves cutting a shallow channel across the slope by hand or with tools such as a spade or shovel. Digging swales by hand allows you to create irregular channels in contrast to the straight lines formed by using an excavator.

Swale drains generally consist of two separate trenches that are dug in opposite directions at right angles to one another so that they form an X shape when viewed from above.