Flores Permaculture

Last year I had a good Sweet Potato harvest, but not nearly enough to keep my family fed through the winter.  This year I have cleared more land and planted about 500 slips of 5 different varieties. Above the forest trees are cut down and then the exposed roots are cut to kill the tree.  As it dies and rots it will feed the soil for me. Above is an experimental patch using recycled cardboard as a pathway mulch and fresh cut grass to mulch the Sweet Potatoes.   Another forest patch above. Above is the Super Bowl garden with Figs and Banana on the hillside and Sweet Potatoes on the drier level areas before the land drops into a boggy Taro garden. A row of a new experimental variety is above. The tools of my trade.  I am an OG (original gardener) .  A mattock and a hoe are all I need to take virgin forest land and transform it into fertile beds, just like my ancestors before me. A steeper garden cut into the m...

Jungle clearing is a labor and time intensive process to do correctly. The goal is not to kill the jungle, but to make it a useful space. This land was abandoned to nature over 50 years ago. Below, the dark forest is seen in the background of the fallen giant.  With no sunlight available, not much vegetation occurs under this canopy. The first step is to cut all the smaller incenso trees (pittosporum undulatum) and canna ( Hedychium gardnerianum)   plants from the area, in order to expose the fallen trees blown down in previous years. The insenso is then stacked for drying and future fire wood use.  Below, a nice stack is prepared.    Below Beatrice separates the branches into one pile and the logs into another for drying and compost. Thank you Beatrice for helping to collect and stack all this wood! The giant eucalyptus trees are carefully cut one at a time, as seen below.  With the inceso cut to a meter above grou...

So far we have cleared about 15% of our available land so far.  It is difficult and dangerous work. Below Kristina gives some perspective to the scale of our jungle. After clearing out the underbrush, we can find the larger trees that need to be cut down to compost over the next years. The smaller trees that are in good health can be left for future firewood harvesting.  We remove all crooked or damaged trees as we clear. Finding cliff walls and old retaining walls made of stone helps to illustrate the value of this land for agricultural use. Below Stan tackles one of our worst invasive species, False Tobacco.  It is a plague on our ecosystem. From inside our Zone 3, we can look out to our Zone 2 and the Wwoofer Cabana across our valley.

Maarten stayed on our farm for a month and had the opportunity e to learn about tree felling and how to correctly handle a 'motor saw'. Nearly all the trees are down now, including this lovely Acacia.   After cutting the large trees, the small underbrush was cleared and burnt. This is a south facing amphitheater that we have been slowly clearing for about five years now. With the help of Renault and Maarten, we burnt all the undesirable plant material to return to the soil. The young men enjoyed the opportunity to build massive bonfires that raged into the early morning hours. On the other side of our valley, alongside our Banana Plantation, we cleared and burnt a large swathe of land that is nearly flat and has a micro-climate that is much warmer than the surrounding lands. We now have two young ladies from Germany planting the areas with all manner of edible and delicious plants that were started in our greenhouse.

After eight years of steadily clearing the forest behind our house, we are now free of potential killers. Read our blog post  Tree Felling Adventures  for a backstory. Phase one involved sending Maarten up a tree to fix the lines. Phase two, Filippo,Maarten and myself strung a steel cable across the valley to attach a winch to a stump to control the falling direction of the ~30 tonne giant. Working in the jungle is always a challenge! But after a day of rigging safety lines, the giant came down exactly as planned. Now our house is finally safe from danger and we can begin building  a solar tracker in the new safe zone!