I wanted to share something I was reminded of this week in the garden that might shift the way you approach earthworks on your property.

This morning I was planting one of my favorite lantanas, Miss Huff, in a spot where I’ve been trying to work with greywater.

The area already had a raised mound I’ve been building up over time, so I reshaped it into a planting bed.

I carved a kind of donut-shaped basin for the plant, and then a shallow moat about 30cm out to guide the greywater around the bed, slow it down, spread it evenly, and let it soak in instead of rushing across the plant's root zone.

At first, I tried to eyeball the contour.

But it wasn’t really working.

So I turned the water on, sat down in the dirt, and just watched what happened.

The water showed me where I was wrong. Where it pooled. Where it escaped. Where the soil needed to be moved.

And I adjusted the shape with a trowel, letting the water itself guide the correction.

It felt less like engineering and more like play.

It brought me back to my early days in the food forest, working out in rainstorms building French drains and rolling dips, learning by watching how water actually behaves.

But learning Earthworks from a book or video can feel so intimidating. And for good reason! It’s one of the most debated areas in permaculture. Swales, keyline, terraces, and all the variations in between. And when they are done wrong, it can be catastrophic; but when they are right, you sometimes barely notice them at all.

So we tend to think we need to know everything and have a perfect plan before we begin. But many times, we don’t really understand how water moves and behaves on our land until we start interacting with it.

Because what gets lost in all the information is the simple power of observation.

Sometimes all it takes is a willingness to get muddy, set up small-scale experiments, and let nature show you what happens.

Then as we better understand, our experiments will naturally get bigger as we grow more and more in our knowing of how to respond to the land.

Because the garden isn’t something we design and execute in a straight line. It’s something we learn in relationship with, over time, through repetition, through adjustment.

So if you’re in your own garden right now, building, learning, or feeling overwhelmed by decisions...maybe this is a small reminder:

You don’t have to figure it all out before you begin.

Sometimes the next step is just to play… and let the land show you.

🧡 Erin