Quick and Dirty Swale Calculator

If you know permaculture, you know the importance of swales... those wonderful little ditches that trap water and use it to feed your land. If you don't know what they are, this is a link to a video by the great Jeff Lawton himself that describes it better than I ever could.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KftJ5ZP4nTs

A cheap, quick and easy way to make a tool to calculate the contour of your land is to ...

1. Take two long boards - doesn't matter exactly how long, as long as they're the same length and long enough to come up to about eye level.
2. Bolt them together at one end with a 1" or 2" block of wood between them, because you're going to...
3. attach another board as a crossbar to the first two boards equidistant from the other ends of the first two boards, forming a capital 'A'
4. Strap a level to the crossbar and you're done

To use that tool, you ...

1. Start at one end of your property
2. Find a spot on the side of your hill, preferably higher up, where you'd like to stop the flow of runoff across your land. 
3. pound in a stake in the ground
4. put one leg of your "Atool" next to that stake
5. then swing the other leg around, watching your level on the crossbar and making sure it stays level.
6. When you hit the ground and you're crossbar is level, you know you've found the next place to pound a stake. 
7. Keep doing that across your property until you get to the other end.
8. Now you dig your ditch along the line you made with those stakes, piling the dirt just below the ditch you dug.

Update: 1/5/15

Quicker and dirtier? Yes you can!
If you can't afford a level --- try this?
Just tie two long sticks together, holding the "A" together at the top.
Hang a weight from a string tied to the point of the "A".
Notch where the string crosses the center of the cross bar.
Flip the A frame around so each leg is in the exact same spot the opposite leg was.
Notch the crossbar again where the string crosses it.
The point halfway between the two notches (if they're not at the same place)
will mark the exact center perpendicular to level ground.