Nuisances and dangers

Jan 31

One of the principles of permaculture involves identifying the nuisances and dangers that your surroundings pose to your space and its inhabitants. Once identified, we include provisions to address them in the permaculture plans. Typical nuisances are noise, smells and visual blights. Dangers include theft, fire, flooding, and other weather related events. 

On our half acre plot we enjoy silence and pure air, and wonderful dark nights. Probably ants constitute  our greatest nuisance at this point and we're studying options to eradicate them. A little black ant with a fierce sting lives under our house and when the new inhabitants are kicked out to go establish their own community - which seems to happen once or twice a week at this time of the year - they come up into our bedroom.

The reddish worker drones of the black ant colony under our house. 

The swept-up dispersing ants that collected in our bedroom one afternoon.

Other insects plague us as well, such as the huge green caterpillars that eat the tender new leaves of our manioc (cassava, yuca) plants. I pull them off one by one to get rid of them. 

Caterpillars on manioc stems.

We also have grasshoppers on the citrus fruit trees, aphids, ants in the okra and probably some unidentified insects eating away at our produce and fruit. I have successfully sprayed the okra leaves with an infusion of tobacco and coconut soap.

So far the monkeys haven't become a nuisance - we actually really enjoy watching them when they occasionally pass through the trees along the creek corridor. But the mangoes on one of the trees close to the house are golden ripe and one recent morning I heard the monkeys chattering in the tree. If you look closely you'll see one of the monkeys as they beat a retreat. This little guy stood up to get a good look at me before he scampered away.

Monkey in the tree next to the mangos.

I've probably left out some of the nuisances but I'll move on to the actual dangers. The first week that we slept in our new house we were robbed. There really isn't a lot of crime in our area but drug-related crime is arriving from the cities and we believe that Guy's guitar and an empty propane tank were taken for their quick resale value. So we're upgrading the locks on our doors and windows, and we had this handsome gate put in right at the entrance to our property. This photo is looking out from the property toward the public road on the other side of the grassy area.  

Bridge over the creek at the entrance to our plot. 

Another danger is fire, that can sweep through dry pastures especially in the dry season.  As you can see in the photo, the area on both sides of the fences gets cleared regularly, usually a meter on each side.

Fire gap between the pasture (low, grazed grass) and our property (tall uncut grass that hasn't experienced
Guy's scythe yet). The climbing vine is a passion fruit plant. 

Right now it's raining a lot, one of the wettest months ever in the Brasilia area, but we have no significant flooding because we are high up on the central plateau. At most the roads might get washed out or a bridge swept away. But it's pretty flat here, with no developments on steep hill sides to be destroyed by mudslides as is the case elsewhere in Brazil.

Poisonous snakes represent a danger to keep in mind, but there's little we can do about them except to remain vigilant. Actually if we kept geese or guinea hens I'm told they eat the baby snakes. Lightening is another danger, killing more people than snakes, but again the solution is paying attention.

All in all, we feel quite safe and serene in our lovely home.