Back in October last year, I began an experiment in pond building. As I wrote then, it’s part of a strategy to retain water for longer in its passage through the quinta. Not just for irrigation purposes, but to increase the range of environments we have for growing and to support a greater diversity of wildlife.
But the ponds are rapidly becoming part of a developing long-term drought mitigation strategy as well. There are evidently years of severe drought here once every decade or so and at the moment it looks very much like that cycle is about to deliver another challenging year.
Since the beginning of October, we – or, more precisely, Duncan with the occasional help of Wayne – have been working hard in the woods above the terraces. These steep slopes of predominantly Maritime pine (Pinus pinaster) have been neglected for a number of years and were overcrowded with self-seeded saplings, wind-blown fallen trees and sparse but flammable understory of Carqueja (Genista tridentata), tree heath (Erica arborea) and bracken (Pteridium aquilinum).
Permaculture, yes, but this is only the beginning. The first baby steps. To truly work with nature, not against it, we need to listen to our elder brothers …
Activities like this – saving seed to plant next year with enough over to share with friends and neighbours – could soon be literally illegal. Technically, in Portugal it already is. Sitting here stripping seed from the dried seed heads of various plants that have been hanging up drying in paper bags recycled from the padaria, I’ve found myself thinking about this often.
As mentioned at the end of the recent post on the ponds, I wanted to make the top pond larger and deeper to provide more variety in aquatic environment and a larger area of water around and in which to grow. It’s now twice the size it was, with an area twice the depth.
I have been thinking for a while now about ways to retain water for longer in its passage through the quinta. Not just for irrigation purposes, but to increase the range of environments we have for growing and to support a greater diversity of wildlife. The extent to which we can emulate strategies like Sepp Holzer’s at the Krameterhof and Tamera is constrained by the vastly smaller amount of land we have to work with, not to mention the topography and difficulty of access, but even on a much smaller scale, the principles ought to be similar.
This is the view from the top of the track down to the larger building on the quinta. In many ways it encapsulates the nature of the “Green Heart of Portugal” – forested mountain ranges cut deep by meandering river valleys, peppered with tiny white villages perched on mountain ridges, surrounded by land terraced and richly cultivated with olives, vines, fruit trees, vegetables … Idyllic.
But it encapsulates something else about the Green Heart of Portugal too – an ecological disaster-in-the-making presently taking hold in Portugal’s forests. The tree on the left is dying.
I mentioned elsewhere what an enormous difference the presence of flowers in the vegetable garden this year has made to the number and varieties of butterflies we’ve seen. Considering that the number and variety here is, even without flowers, comparable to a profusion and diversity that’s not been present in the UK for a good 40 years, then perhaps you can begin to grasp what a wonder this year has been.
One of the most rewarding aspects of starting to explore polyculture and companion planting in the new raised beds have been the effects of growing flowers – both ones we’ve planted and ones that grew themselves – amongst the vegetables. It’s not just the visual impact of so much colour in the garden. All summer long, the garden has been full of butterflies and bees.
As physicist Michio Kaku wrote yesterday, “Global warming is controversial, of course, but the controversy is mainly over whether human activity is driving it. There is almost uniform agreement from both sides of the debate that the Earth is heating up.”
More specifically, the controversy centres around whether the rise in global CO2 levels is a direct result of mans’ activities or whether this is something the planet itself is responsible for. This is seen (somewhat linearly) as the engine behind the rise in temperatures. So can both sides be right if one says global warming is caused by human activity and the other says it isn’t?
They can if the rise in temperatures and CO2 levels is the Earth’s response to mankind’s activities.
