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  • From: "ontignano" <ontignano@tiscali.fr>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [permaculture] Emelia Hazelip Quote re entropy
  • Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 19:05:17 +0200

Hello Larry, the photos on the website come from Les Cormettes, Provence,
France. Emilia constructed the garden herself; she believed that once the
raised beds are formed they should not be tilled again. Unfortunately,
despite initial success the garden was not continued after Emilia's initial
2-year involvement - I don't know the reasons.

While Emilia had the intuitive ability to encourage many different soils to
fertility (her work at Solaria, Italy and here in the Corbières confirms
this) such skills are beyond the simple explication by a group of
techniques. It is this factor that is often ignored by people from other
soils and climates when they read Fukuoka and ignore the non-practical
aspects of his books.

What we do to the land is always already present within us before we ever
start work. We concentrate too much on techniques at the expense of
observation - and this observation works both ways - at nature without and
within.

We're back in France again, the project in Italy undergoing some teething
problems.

Jamie

-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org]On Behalf Of Lawrence F.
London, Jr.
Sent: Monday, September 20, 2004 6:36 PM
To: permaculture
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Emelia Hazelip Quote re entropy

ontignano wrote:

> Fukuoka makes it abundantly clear in
> 'One-Straw Revolution' that soil, left to itself, becomes more and not
less
> fertile.

This is probably true as long as erosion doesn't happen.
When I bought my land in 1978 it had been fallow for many years. After a
rain I could walk out
into the fields and as I stepped on the wet soil I could hear popping and
snapping sounds as
air was forced out of the soil porespace by water that had soaked into it. I
could see countless
places where air emerged at the soil surface, bubbling through shallow pools
of water.

> Very simply Emilia believed that given the appropriate use of rotation and
> succession in market gardens (truck farms) and broadscale field crops,
> returning all unused parts of the crops back to the field, then annual
crops
> can be grown in a soil that becomes progressively more fertile: This she
> called Synergistic Agriculture.

In pictures in this page: http://www.seedballs.com/hazelip.html there are
many raised beds
shown laid out in parallel with paths. What sort of tillage methods did she
use and did she do
this work herself?
Have you seen the book: "Intensive Culture of Vegetables - French System" by
A, Aquatias?

I guess you are living in Italy now?

LL
--
L.F.London
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech
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