permaculture

[John Irwin <jwirwin@permaculture.net>]

Marcus -

THANKS - it's so nice to hear some good news!

Anyone else have some good stories like this?

For the Green Earth,

John

Marcus Webb wrote:

> Greening the Desert
> Friday, 15 November  2002
>
> They laughed at him and said it couldn't be done. Nothing could be grown in 
> that salt laden dustbowl. But Geoff and Sindhu Lawton had other ideas. They 
> travel the world teaching others how to repair trashed environments that 
> are beyond hope of becoming productive.
>
> In this story, Geoff talks about re-greening the deserts of Jordan. By 
> applying the principles of permaculture, they managed to salvage a heavily 
> salted environment and turn it into a green oasis.
>
> Geoff and Sindhu live and teach at their farm near The Channon, a small 
> community not far from Lismore. Geoff boasts that despite not having a 
> police station or church, The Channon has some of the most tolerant and 
> friendly people in Australia.
>
> Transcript - Geoff Lawton
>
> So we went in and had a look and we thought “Oh, no!” This is the end of 
> the earth. This is like as hard as you can get. This is hyper arid. 
> Completely salted landscape. Four hundred metres below sea level - lowest 
> place on Earth. Two kilometres from the Dead Sea. About two kilometres from 
> where Jesus was christened. Hardly got any rainfall. We’ve got temperatures 
> in August that go over 50 degrees. Everybody is farming under plastic 
> strips - spray, spray spray! Everybody’s putting synthetic fertiliser on. 
> Overgrazed with goats! Just like maggots eating the flesh off the bone, 
> down to the bones of the country. Literally like maggots ?giant maggots 
> eating it to nothing.
> So we designed up a system that would harvest every bit of rainwater that 
> fell on it.
>
> On ten acres, there’s one and a half kilometres of Swale ? water harvesting 
> ditch on contour. And when they’re full, one million litres of water soak 
> into the landscape. And they’ll fill quite a few times over a winter. And 
> then we heavily mulched those swales with organic matter which was trashed 
> from organic fields nearby. We put that almost half a metre deep. So we 
> saved that and mulched our swales which were about two metres wide and half 
> a metre deep on the trench. And then we put micro irrigation on the trench. 
> And on the uphill side of the water harvesting trench we put Nitro fixing, 
> very hardy desert trees which helped shade and reduce wind evaporation and 
> also put nitrogen into the soil. And structure the soil for us. And on the 
> lower side of the trench we put fruit trees. Majoring in date palms as the 
> long-term over-storey in the end. And then we put in Figs, Pomegranates, 
> Guavas, Mulberries and now some Citrus.
>
> Within four months we had figs, a metre high with figs on, which is 
> impossible. We done a course, male and female course. Trained up some 
> locals. And we got a translator whose working for the project. He had his 
> degree in agriculture, in the Jordan University. And he got onto his mates 
> in the agriculture department, “Well,” he said, “you (said we) couldn’t 
> grow figs. We got figs growing. We got figs on ‘em. You better come and 
> test the soil because no matter what you say, we’re either growing in salty 
> soil what we shouldn’t be growing or we’ve desalted the soil! And we’d like 
> to know what we’ve done?” They came in and the salt levels were dropping. 
> So they became interested. The salt levels were dropping around the Swales. 
> They said, “You’ve must have washed it through.” See, normaly you put this 
> huge amount of water on ‘em and wash the salt to the lower levels which 
> just makes the ground more and more salty. In the end, you’ll salt it 
> twenty metres deep if you keep doing that. And
> then it’ll take a thousand years to recover. And we used only one fifth the 
> amount of water. So the water they thought we’ve washed it all through, no 
> ? we used one fifth! That really got ‘em. When they realized how much water 
> we hadn’t used. With the same amount of water normally used on that much 
> area, we could have done 50 acres.
>
> Originally people laughed at us because we didn’t put straight lines in. We 
> went on contour with these swales. They thought, “Why don’t you, ?you got a 
> bulldozer, you can flatten the desert, you can straighten--” We said, we 
> want to go on contour, because we got a longer edge and we can harvest the 
> water passively. And then we planted more non-fruiting trees than we did 
> fruit trees. So they laughed at us. (They said,) “You’re planting 
> unproductive things more than productive things. What the point? You know. 
> In soil that wont even grow anything. And then we covered all the inside of 
> the swale with huge amount of mulch where they scrape all their organic 
> matter off and burn it, like most traditional agriculture.
>
> In the middle of winter we got a funny email saying “We’ve got a problem. 
> We’ve got mushrooms growing in the Swale. Well they call it fungus, but 
> when we saw a photograph of it, it was mushrooms because they’d never seen 
> mushrooms, because they never had so much humidity in living history in the 
> soil. And when you open up the mulch, there’s all these little animals 
> there, you know those little insects and the soil has come alive. And the 
> fungi net that’s underneath the mulch, is putting off a waxy substance, 
> which is repelling the salt away from the area. And the decomposition is 
> locking the salt up and the salt is not gone. It’s become inert and 
> insoluble.
>
> So we could re-green the Middle East. We could re-green any desert. And we 
> could desalt it at the same time. And if we can do it on an insignificant 
> little bit of flat ten acres of depth desert, if you give us something with 
> catchment, or a Wadi, or a canyon or any of those erosion gully’s, we can 
> turn it right around. Completely.
>
> You can fix all the world’s problems, in a garden. You can solve them all 
> in a garden. You can solve all your pollution problems, and all your supply 
> line needs in a garden.
>
> And most people today actually don’t know that, and that makes most people 
> very insecure.
>
> See pictures: http://www.abc.net.au/northcoast/stories/s727970.htm
>
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