November 5, 2013
The
permaculture experiment continues. Since we moved onto the property just a
little over a year ago we’re still working mainly on the first and second
zones.
According
to Peter Bane, The Permaculture
Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country (2012):
Zones describe
a progression of territories surrounding the center of a system. On a homestead
or farm, that center is typically the house where people dwell.
Zone 0: House and attached structures,
other building interiors, pantry consumption, processing, storage
Zone I: Garden,
intensive garden beds, laundry and drying yard, woodshed, garden, tool storage,
small greenhouse, piped water, outdoor rooms, summer kitchen, rabbits, poultry,
children’s play; animals needing special care; (z. 1 or z. 2) root cellar,
cisterns, sauna self-reliance, household provision
Zone 2:
Orchard, productive fruit trees and shrubs, piped water, small ponds, poultry
forage, compost piles, greywater treatment, dairy barn (at the edge of z. 3),
workshop, storage barn, mulch crops, nursery crops, living fences, resource
inventory, tank aquaculture
 |
| Zones 1 and 2 around our house. |
Zone
3 contains fields, zone 4 pastures, and zone five wild areas. Our property is
on the small side, about one acre. Sometimes I think there’s enough to do in
the first two zones that we’ll never even get beyond them.
One
of the good things about permaculture is that it encourages taking things
slowly and proclaims that if you’re working too hard it’s because you’re doing
something wrong. Peter Bane continues:
Choose Small
and Slow Solutions: Choosing to work with small, slow technologies and systems
may seem paradoxical in the face of daunting social change. Shouldn’t we hurry
up and get ready? Well yes, civilizational decline and economic contraction
should engender in us a kind of urgency. It need not provoke haste. Most people
are still sleepwalking toward the future, so it can seem that we must awaken
them in a hurry. But haste and the waste it makes are the hallmarks of our
energy-abundant culture and the cause of much of our present distress.
Small and slow
means local, human-scale, intimate and familiar. It means steady progress and
setbacks that do not ruin us. It means appropriate technology: tools that help
us but do not enslave us. (The
Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country)
Here
are some of our small and slow projects:
Trees – We’ve planted a few more
trees since we returned to the farm in August, namely two neem saplings (native
to India, this regal tree produces leaves and fruit that repel many insects,
making it a good addition to orchards and vegetable garden areas), two coffee
saplings (to replace two that didn’t survive from last year), and a bamboo
plant (of the enormous variety that in ten years or so will produce poles
strong enough to build a house).
 |
| One of our two neem trees (in the foreground). |
 |
| A thriving coffee sapling, behind the corn and squash. |
Hortas (the Portuguese word for
vegetable garden) - Guy has
rebuilt last year’s horseshoe garden following Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening principles,
including a soil mix of compost, palm fibre, and vermiculite – we plant the
vegetables in six inches of this mix, above the existing ground. Last year most
of our vegetables failed to thrive in the local soil even though we added some
organic fertilizers such as manure.
 |
| The horseshoe garden |
In
the meantime, I planted some of the same veggies in manure that I seasoned by
spreading it in the sun and watering it for five days. So far both gardens are
doing well.
 |
| Orange tree planted in early 2013. |
Orchard – Guy and I agreed from the
start that we wouldn’t sacrifice beauty to functionality. We’d seen several
gardens and orchards where plants grew well but the surrounding areas were
unattractive, unpleasant to walk through.
Last
year my daughter and I designed a small tear-drop orchard that would be divided
into five sections. This is where we’ve planted most of our trees so far –
papaya, lemon, pomegranate, fig, orange, tangerine, coffee, persimmon, nespera,
pitanga and jatobá - and there’s still place for many more. We projected paths
that would cut through the orchard and a central trellised area for repose and
meditation. I’ve been cleaning up the sections and working on the paths
(described below).
Agro-forestry
practitioners instruct us to plant vegetables and other edible plants, such as
cassava (mandioca) amidst the trees as they begin to grow, planting in guilds
as much as possible. (See the December 2012 blog entry) We’re just learning,
partly by trial and error, but this year we have corn, squash, beans, tomatoes,
okra and peppers growing in the orchard, along with the cassava and castor
beans we planted last year.
 |
| Cassava from a year ago and new corn amid the tangerine, papaya, pomegranate and lemon trees. |
Grass – The area we’ve settled on
was mostly pasture, planted with a very tenacious grass of African origin – brachiaria. As you may remember from
previous posts (April 2013), one of Guy’s tasks is to cut the grass with his
wonderful Austrian steel scythe, a huge job given the vigorous growth of the
brachiaria grass. Since the rains started up a month ago the grass has taken
off, threatening to go to seed, which is exactly what we want to avoid. We
can’t use the grass for mulch once it contains seeds and even when it’s added
to the compost the seeds remain active for a long time. (Hurray for the power
of seeds!)
 |
| From our front porch, late afternoon sun on babaçu palms. Beyond the fence the cows have kept the grass 'mowed.' |
I’m
encouraging Guy to think of his work as harvesting the grass. Before it seeds,
it is a real resource for us as hay, biomass. I use it to mulch the tear-drop
orchard, to suppress grass in the open areas, and we use it elsewhere as mulch
and as an addition to the compost piles.
Paths – Between Guy’s ideas and
mine we’ve come up with a very attractive and inexpensive way to create paths.
We’ve found along the highway just beyond Cocalzinho (the nearest town) a free
source of beautiful red wood chips. I hoe the paths clear, line them with
cardboard (free from the supermarkets in town) and newspaper, make a border of
flat rocks (picked up along the road where they’ve spilled from passing trucks)
or small bricks we buy in town for less than 10 cents apiece (not so cheap but
the only thing we pay for), and fill in with wood chips. Guy plans to use the
same system to surround the horseshoe garden.
 |
| The first section of path. |
Insect combat – A constant threat to our
tender plants, ants, grasshoppers, cut-worms, and other insects we don’t even
know about keep us on our toes from one day to the next. Suddenly last week Guy
noticed a cluster of tiny black grasshoppers on a leaf of a jiló plant. (Jiló is
a small green eggplant relative, somewhat bitter but delicious once you get
used to it and know how to prepare it – sautéed and browned with onion and
garlic.) He successfully sprayed the leaf and the surrounding plants with a
neem solution, but since then the clusters of little hoppers have shown up frequently
on other plants.
We’re
learning to make a variety of deterrent sprays along with the neem: garlic and
soap, hot peppers, tobacco, for starts. Vigilance – we’re insect
vigilantes.
.jpg)
