Permaculturing in Portugal

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Growing things

"I truly believe that as long as we have not found peace with the soil, we won't find peace above the ground. That as long as we justify the exploitation of an organism, other exploitations will follow and we will remain parasites, consuming more than participating and spiralling into entropy until we commit mass suicide."
Emilia Hazelip

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Traditional agricultural knowledge and techniques have already created a productive environment of this quinta. It remains for us to design in the gaps and places where tradition has lapsed into dependence on harmful chemicals or perpetuated long-held beliefs that permaculture has found questionable, aiming for a fertile partnership between permaculture principles and the best of local knowledge. Our most notable deviation will be in practicing "no-till" methods as far as possible, aming to restore the natural fertility and life in the soil by what we grow in it and spread on top of it, rather than what we dig into it., and following the example of Masanobu Fukuoka in his "Natural Farming" methods.

It will take us time to get to know the land in all its seasons – where the light falls at different times of the year, where the water flows, where the wind blows, what grows where, what thrives, what doesn't, what changes, what stays the same – so we will be taking mostly small steps, with lots of observation and research and even more trial and error.

Terraces

At the moment, the terraces are planted with fruit and nut trees and vines throughout. Since we've yet to live on the quinta full time year round, we've yet to fully discover all of what we've got growing here (or work out what we're going to do with quite so many grapes – a neighbour reckoned we've probably got about 1,500 litres of wine growing here).

Many of the younger fruit trees (and many of them are very young) are not particularly vigorous and look like they've suffered from being overwhelmed by bracken and brambles. Some are suffering from peach leaf curl (Taphrina deformans). The priority to begin with will be keeping the bracken and brambles down and ensuring the trees have sufficient water, supportive companion plants, and a good nutritive mulch to help them recover and grow more strongly. We'll also be sowing a lot of white clover and other leguminous nitrogen-fixers about the place.

We presently have only 9 widely spaced olive trees which is unlikely to be enough to provide for eating, self-sufficiency in oil, and enough left over to make all our own soap and such, so we'll be interplanting on the olive terraces and creating a new olive grove on the east-facing slope north of the larger of the two buildings. We have no pomegranates or figs, so both of these are planned, as are nectarines and apricots. I'd also like to try growing avocados, though they'll require some sort of protection if they're to survive winters here.

Vegetables will likely take more of a back seat in the first couple of years with the work required elsewhere getting basic facilities sorted. Our energies also need to be applied to what's already growing: pruning, clearing, working on soil and irrigation improvements, and companion planting to support the fruit trees.

We need to sort out our irrigation. The main levada and black plastic drip irrigation system for the vineyard and fruit terraces are overgrown and blocked, and the collecting ponds and terrace irrigation channels are also clogged with silt and vegetation, with the stream largely finding its own way through. Once we've got this all working again as it was designed to, we'll have a better idea of the amount of irrigation we can effectively deliver to each part of the terraces and be able to plan our planting accordingly.

There are considerable microclimatic variations across the site. The aspect varies from west through north right round to south east, though being situated one third of the way up the eastern slopes of a mountain ridge with a ridge also to the south, most of the quinta is effectively north-facing in winter and only really open to the east. There's also quite a temperature gradient where the stream pulls cold air down the valley and deciduous trees in this area are at least 2 weeks behind those elsewhere on the quinta in coming into leaf.

Aspect, proximity to the stream, irrigation reach, existing/companion planting and whether the plants themselves thrive where we attempt to grow them will determine what we grow where as much as the convenience aspects of the permaculture zoning system. (No herb spirals here! - we'll be using herbs extensively throughout the quinta as companion plants as well as growing them for their culinary and medicinal properties.)

Livestock

Chickens are first on the list as soon as we're able to be here full time. We used to keep them a few years ago before we moved and we've really missed having them. First of all though we'll need somewhere secure to shut them away at night. Foxes are a widespread problem, and mongoose have been spotted not too many miles away. Depending on how well the chickens deal with the prodigious slug population, we might also have some ducks.

We're considering the possibility of a couple of goats for milk, manure and bramble control, but this is a more medium term aim.

Forest

When they wrote Permaculture One in 1978, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren already knew, from their experience of Australian bushfires, that the nutrient-rich forests of food-producing tree species that are one outcome of permaculture design are inherently much less of a fire hazard than fuel-rich sclerophyllous forests dominated by eucalypts or pines. Not only are they less of a hazard, they are even fire retardant.

What applies to Australia applies equally to the mountains of Central Portugal. There are the same monocultures of pine and eucalyptus – the exact same species, in fact, as are planted widely in Western Australia. Australia imported the Maritime or Cluster pine (Pinus pinaster) from Europe, and Portugal imported the eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus) from Australia. And there is the same problem with devastating forest fires.

Quinta do Vale's bit of forest, around ½ hectare (1 acre), is mostly comprised of Pinus pinaster with only one or two large mature eucalyptus trees amongst them, but stands of eucalyptus are only a couple of hundred metres further along the track. The massive bole of an ancient sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) shows what used to grow here.

The consequences of being surrounded by two of the most volatile and flammable species of tree on the planet mean that for us, permaculture principles are a lot more than just a sensible and sustainable way to grow things.

For this reason, and because trees take time to grow, one of the first things we intend to get to grips with is increasing the biodiversity, fertility and moisture-retaining capacity of the forest. (I also find the whole idea of forest gardens much more exciting than annual vegetables.)

There are many young oaks and sweet chestnuts growing on the terraces and slopes between them and we'll be progressively extending this planting, adding a good mix of other species, and coppicing appropriate varieties once they're of an age to do so. There's a lot of bracken-covered slope with only sparse tree cover at present which we'll be planting up straight away, progressively working up into the forest as we thin the pines, using the spindlier trees for constructing things like compost bins and WWOOFers' facilites and the larger specimens for firewood. Pine wilt nematode is active in the area, so our eventual aim will be to remove all but a few of the most vigorous and healthy specimens of Pinus pinaster, planting some Stone pines (Pinus pinea) instead because they're both resistant to pine wilt nematode and the main source of edible pine nuts.

We aim to be self-sufficient in firewood and any timber we need for cultivation, construction, etc. Sweet chestnut will provide structural timber, and for cultivation and firewood we'll be planting a fair bit of Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia).

Robinia species were once native to Europe in the Eocene and Miocene according to the fossil record, but the genus is now confined to North America. The tree is extensively naturallised across Europe, North India and Nepal, valued for forage and timber, and is the mainstay of commercial honey production in Hungary. It has several great advantages. It grows very rapidly, survives droughts and frosts, tolerates infertile and acidic soils, and produces livestock feed nutritionally equivalent to alfalfa, It's a member of the Fabaceae (pea) family, and like other legumes, has nodules on its roots which host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, helping to restore fertility to soils which have been depleted and impoverished by the pine and eucalyptus. It produces fragrant racemes of flowers attractive to bees who turn its nectar into good quality honey. The heartwood is infused with flavonoids which make the wood highly resistant to rot – perfect fence-post and vine support material. It can endure for over 100 years in the soil. It's a very heavy and hard wood, and makes excellent firewood for wood-burning stoves; it burns slowly, with little visible flame or smoke, and has a heat output comparable to anthracite. Finally, it coppices well and grows even faster after the first cut. (Thanks to Andy Hill at Quinta das Abelhas for introducing me to this tree.)

Other deciduous trees on the list to bring the woodland into a better balance are

• Italian alder (Alnus cordata) another fast-growing nitrogen-fixer tolerant of dry conditions with edible sap and useful wood,
• Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) for its shade-tolerance and valuable timber,
• Lime (Tilia cordata) for its edible sap, leaves and seeds, and the high nutrient value of its fallen leaves.

As important as the trees themselves is the understorey. Here we're planning to grow edible shrubs like elderberry, mulberry, the local medronheiro (strawberry tree Arbutus unedo), blackcurrant, billberry, raspberries, brambles (yes, brambles!) and goji berry, and shade-tolerant mineral-accumulators, nitrogen-fixers or medicinal plants like Liquorice (Glycyrrhiza glabra), Oregon tea (Ceanothus sanguineus), Comfrey (Symphytum officinale) and Witch-hazel (Hamamelis virginiana).

There's one other "pine" I'm planning to plant here, though it's not a member of the Pinaceae. This is the self-coppicing Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis), a species over 90 million years old and one of the world's rarest trees, thought long-extinct until discovered in a canyon in Australia's Blue Mountains in 1994. There are only 100 or so specimens left in the wild.

In order to protect them (their exact location is a well-kept secret), the tree has been propagated extensively and made available worldwide with all sales helping to finance its preservation. No two Wollemi pines grow alike. It has no value for firewood, building or food, but it's a tree who's spirit I really like, and it's as important to care for the spirit of the forest as its material existence. I spent 3 months or so in close association with this remarkable tree through a homeopathic proving and got to know it pretty well. Wollemi is an Aboriginal word meaning "look around you, keep your eyes open and watch out" – exactly what we need to do in order to learn how to work with nature, not against it. It's all about survival and renewal; about knowing who you are, believing in your self-worth and taking your place in the world. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, this is "Lung" function, and the tree (as with other members of the Araucariaceae) is a great atmospheric purifier, as well as having leaves resembling gills and bark that looks like the alveolar surface of a mammalian lung.

And since we're surrounded by trees equally at home in Australia, it seems somehow fitting that a Wollemi pine should be planted here.

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