Permaculturing in Portugal

This post is a preliminary enquiry to see if there is likely to be enough local interest to make it worthwhile planning and running this construction as a series of workshops. The construction will be going ahead anyway. (If you’re interested, please leave a comment below rather than responding on eg. Facebook. Comments on this page won’t get lost or superceded by more recent news.)

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Thanks to Matt and Kirsten over at Quinta das Abelhas lending us their beautiful Dodge truck conversion when our prospective caravan fell through, we’ve been able to welcome our first WWOOFers to the quinta. Helen and Pepe joined us 5 days ago from a long stay at Quinta das Abelhas and have already made a huge difference to the amount of work we’ve been able to get done.

The Dodge

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Bill Mollison’s 1979 classic Permaculture Two: Practical Design for Town and Country in Permanent Agriculture is currently changing hands on Amazon UK for nigh on £100 a copy, whether new or used. For anyone who’s been unable to source a copy of this seminal work, or to afford it, it’s now available online at Scribd.

The book does still appear to be available direct from Bill Mollison’s Tagari Press for a more modest £18/€20 (£37/€42 including shipping to Europe), but this presents something of a dilemma. You can’t give something back to one of the guys who started it all without giving an equal amount in support of an insane use of finite resources to deliver a book half way round the world. What to do? At least there is now an alternative to lining the pockets of Amazon booksellers …

UPDATE: This has now been removed due to copyright infringement.

We’d been on at Andy & Sophie to come and see our quinta since the day we shook hands on the deal last November. Somehow they were either always too busy, or we were. But this time it looked like it finally might happen. I’d texted to say there was a possibility I might have the platform ready for the yurt the day they were coming, but I wasn’t putting 2 and 2 together when I got a text from Andy to say 9 of them were arriving with lunch. Expecting only a social occasion, I was even thinking to myself “Damn, well I’ll not get much work done on the platform today then …”

I’d already realised I hadn’t made a big enough wastage allowance in my calculations, so had ordered up a dozen more lengths of flooring in the morning to collect from the woodyard in Coja at 4pm. This was going to eat into my construction time too.

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I subscribe to TED Talks and just received their latest selection of video links. Biologist Willie Smits started off with the goal of trying to save the orangutans of Borneo, but along the way he has succeeded in creating a viable recipe for regrowing the rainforest, turning around the lives of the local population, and even changing the local climate. The orangutans are doing fine too.

Though he doesn’t mention the word ‘permaculture’, he’s achieved this by applying permaculture principles. This is a really inspiring talk.