Chinampas- naturally irrigated indigenous wetland permaculture technique & sustainable swamp gardens

[Music] uh [Music] hello friends and welcome to another episode of ontario permaculture i'm bryce merfarians i'm misty we wanted to talk to you today about chinampas chinampas are one of the permaculture techniques that we get the most questions about and perhaps need the most explanation because they're a little bit different than what a lot of people have been doing and very few people are in fact aware of chinampas chanapas have a long history and i'd like to pass over to misty who heard about shinova's first to discuss a bit about that okay thank you bryce so i read about chinampas in university i was studying anthropology and uh i took a course on aztecs and incas and on during the aztec portion of the course uh we read about the chinampas of mexico basically uh there were several tribes of people who were vying for power in what we now know to be central mexico and there was a group that basically got pushed out of the agriculturally beneficial parts of mexico and so we're kind of relegated to the swamps and instead of folding as a culture they developed a type of agriculture that worked in their climate indigenous wetland agricultural techniques which are capable of producing vast amounts of food in what would otherwise be unusable areas and with many many additional benefits including irrigation as well as transportation and transportation for the produce made on these things there is a region in mexico city today i believe it's such a milk i will look that up and i'll point it out here so spell that for you uh but there's a region in mexico city modern mexico city that is still chinampas and while it is rapidly being modernized and upgraded there is a significant movement for maintaining and preserving the chinampas down there in mexico city mostly due to the fact that they are abundant production systems capable of turning standard wetlands into productive and capable zones well having read about it in university i kind of tucked it away in my brain but then later when we bought this property we found that there was very little upland planting areas where you would have a conventional garden and because we have grazing animals we want to prioritize that space for grass and grazing so we have put a lot of work into our wetland areas so that we can produce vegetables for ourselves there there's a few benefits that we see in what way first of all being in the wetland the large creatures don't want to get into it so whereas you put a normal garden with corn or things like that in it and the critters see it and they're really keen to get over the fence and push it in and whatnot in the wetland they basically leave it alone they don't see it as a place that they should be going so it's useful in that way we also found that we finally could have some ripe corn because the raccoons are not looking for corn in the wetlands it seems hooray uh it is also incredibly productive of squash we found that the three sisters uh corn beans and squash amazingly grow in north american conditions with traditional north american plants so there's only so many squash that you really need but it comes out with such adorable varieties and these were all squash that we planted down from true varieties but by being grown in the open with open pollination you get mixes and matches and over the years you get a bunch of interesting results we found that we if you grow plants like uh tomatoes or squash in the sort of feral situation you tend to bring out the genes that are a little bit more like the wild type so for example the grape tomatoes grew great on the chanumpas they're very very similar to a bittersweet nightshade which grows naturally all over the chinampas and then you get white squash a lot more often because white is closer to the wild type and we think that it looks a little bit like jack skellington's head jack the pumpkin king so what are chinampas well chinampas in short are raised irrigated garden beds in wetland zones they are irrigated by nature so they would take an area which is damp some or most of the year and we build it up our first layer is a woody layer so we use waste twigs that are not suitable for firewood but are coming off of the lumber that we're harvesting or are clearly cleaned up out of the forest from being fallen or being pruned off for paths we lay that down usually in places that are grassy we're not putting things in flowing water though the mexican chenilles are in a lake bed they have created actual rivers that they can pull along in in boats ours are more the places that get flooded in the very wet seasons of the spring and the fall but would otherwise look like kind of a field of grass in the summer there is quite a lot of water right under the surface and we can't graze our creatures on it because the grass that grows in wetlands is very high in something called oxalic acid so it makes it poisonous to creatures it doesn't have much use for us except for fiber so we lay down the twigs then the next layer we bring in waste hay so we feed our creatures on hay and all the stuff that falls on the ground and doesn't get eaten uh by them but gets soiled by the rain uh goes on to the chanel buzz in a nice thick sheet this is very similar to hugo culture where you're creating raised beds of twigs now of course we have surplus hay as a byproduct of having large animals but if you're doing it in your own wetlands and all you have is the razor grass that grows on the site as you lay out your twigs you cut down the razor grass and the grasses that grow in there and you lay them on top and they will serve as the same bedding for you to then put your top soils on top of of course in all natural situations nature provides so all you need to do is lay down the willows that are growing in the wetlands pin them down with some of the muck that'll form a nice edge along which you can focus everything else once you have your solid edge defined and established you can pull the muck up out of the wetland place it on that edge and inside of it and everything that you place in will compost and spot and will form a good basis of the beds of the chenombas wetland muck is very fertile and self-regenerating in very short period of time and if you continue to dig underneath this muck you'll find clay rich soil and you can watch some of our other videos to see some of the many uses for clay rich soil just like hugo culture or lasagna gardening you can also use basically anything that's biological so it will rot and is high in carbon so you could use waste paper as long as there's not anything poisonous in it waste cardboard uh waste bits of wood hulls uh plant residues uh fallen leaves mowing clippings and things like that would go in the middle layer and essentially you want to build up the twigs so that there will be no standing water for the growing season within your crop water the high water mark so if you're building it in spring that's easy it's the highest water so you build your twigs up until you're out of the water then you're putting your hay on the hay is keeping the soil from just washing through the twigs and it's going to add to the compost action and give some nice habitat in there as well and then we come along and we put compost on top now you could use any kind of soil that you'll be growing in but i caution not to try to use potting soil it is very very high in peat and peat has no fibers holding it together anymore and it will simply float and wash away so you can use topsoil or even some amended subsoil you could use compost from your compost bin what we like to use is composted manures when it's turned into nice black soil then we cap the garden off with that and you grow as if it's just an ordinary garden above the soil the only difference being is that the plants once their taproot is in can tap right into the water table flowing wetland water which effectively makes it into a hydroponic system now it's not just water that's there it's water plus all of the nutrients that are leaching out of the plants and roots and all the stuff that is composting so it's essentially compost tea is flowing underneath your garden and that means in the driest times of the year there is water available this also means that our garden beds are exactly adjacent to our stream so that we can actually water by hand if the upper bed actually gets dry enough now misty talked about soil erosion one of the important techniques to mention here to reduce and eliminate soil erosion is using essentially what amounts to basket weaving to make the sides of your your chinampas by placing vertical structures straight up and down in the mud and then by placing twigs weaved in between those you can create a solid bank which you know is basically a vertical bank and that will keep the the soils behind it and allow the water to come up to it and essentially never erode or leach away those precious topsoils which are so important for maintaining your good gardens now in keeping with the permaculture principle use small and slow solutions one of the experiments we've been doing for the last couple of years is using small baskets in our wetlands first by nailing in stakes an odd number will help out with the weaving here i've used nine and weave your twigs back and forth around these stakes you can ultimately connect more and more of these baskets to make larger growing areas in your wetlands in this way you can really maximize your edge effect if you have the ability to do this in fast forward i highly recommend you use it this basket was begun over a tuft of grass already sticking up out of the wetland which means it'll stick up a little bit further when the soils are on top of it these grasses will knock it in the way of the plants that you wish to grow on top they will simply compost in sight as part of the chanumpa itself once the baskets are ready you can simply line them with locally collected biomass or with readily available straw place our breakdown layer and then our soil layer on top of that and what we have is a nice finished product perfect for your three sisters guild or anything else you'd like to grow in a wetland so another point on avoiding erosion is that roots are what is needed for soil to go in so once you build your chinampas and it's important to build them in a season where you're not going to have too much flooding but that you have a high water mark to to work from so late spring is a great time to do it because the water level is high as i said and but it isn't likely to be strongly flooded out and that you get something covering the garden straight away so that the roots on top of the soil will hold it in so if you are going to grow something that takes a little bit longer to establish to also put down sort of a cover crop lettuce or spinach we found that amaranth and all of its wild cousins the kennepodiums love to grow as a surface cover we also found that uh gallon soga or gallant soldier likes to go across and that's nice because then you've got edibles straight away while you're waiting for things that take a little bit longer such as the tomatoes so let's have another look at the permaculture principles chart one of the foremost principles of permaculture is to observe and interact with systems when planning any garden it's very valuable to observe the natural flows that happen in the area you're going to install a garden for chinampas you specifically want to pay attention to the water level and what it does in the various different seasons observing through the seasons also gives you an opportunity to check out what species may be naturally occurring in that area here are some of the species that you'll see in wetlands situations naturally in ontario [Music] here are some of the species we've had good success with planting on chinampas on the center of the chinampa we grow annual plants like tomatoes sunflowers squash and leafy greens many of these things come up self-planted after year one having seeded themselves down on the edges of the chinampa we grow perennial fruiting bushes and things like that that need a little bit more soil now let's take a tour shall we big so [Music] so that brings us back to the chart permaculture principle obtain a yield as bryce said chinampas are gloriously productive in spring we're harvesting greens then comes a succession of fruits throughout the summer some of which we're enjoying fresh in salad and sautes the surplus we dry and preserve some species like the cannapodium are eaten from first thing in the spring all the way through to the seeds at the end of the year the end of the growing season for us about september we get to bring in all of our overwinter storage items like squash and corn with a good mix of annuals and perennials and a good succession you can be eaten from the chinampas all year long now let's go a little deeper into why chinampas and we'll do that through design from patterns to details given that we can go from baskets in the wetland to systems that can spread all the way across an entire lake which are capable of feeding a civilization of 200 to 400 thousand people and all within a fertile transportation network which still stands to this day feeding what is still one of the largest cities on earth i think that if we as a culture and society can learn to use edges and value the marginal and apply that to systems that actually benefit people in society imagine the possibilities talking about systems it's important to point out that the chinampas of mexico not just agricultural fields they were neighborhoods there were dwellings even today the chinampas support transportation networks and floating markets it makes me think that some of the things we see in cities that don't help support thriving might look different if we were to value the margin if we see problems as opportunities to rise to new ideas smart people come along and they connect the dots filling needs with surpluses turning waste into value around the world there are thousands of examples of natural dwellings like ours made from the natural surroundings from the thatch the wood and the earth on site whether it's danced as cobb in the traditional devon sense or made into bricks as they did in hretron netherlands the venice of the netherlands where they have a canal system instead of roads we can look at all of these systems from a permaculture perspective and integrate rather than segregate when we design our new communities community is designed to share space with the biodiverse community around us communities built with low carbon input and designed to maintain a low carbon lifestyle ones surrounded by environments of abundance chinampas food forests and earth-based housing all in a mutually supportive lifestyle so i hope you can see why we're so excited about the possibilities and potentials of us i want to give a big thank you to our supporters our gofundme and our patreon supporters thank you very much a big help and a blessing throughout this [Music] i hope we showed you something in this video that inspired you because after all anything you can imagine you can create take care folks

Channel: Ontario permaculture

Views: 27,299

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Id: 0QVucw8wNfA

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021