Restoring Fertility in the Klein Karoo | Permaculture in the Desert

I'm Catherine Herbert from numbi Valley Russ and I met at University we were both studying grassland science and both of us did that as a interest in ecology and we wanted to do Reclamation work but we came out of it not really agreeing with all of what we had been taught but there was still this yearning in us to find a piece of damaged farmland and reclaim it back into its natural state after working for about 10 years we decided we would stop and we would come down to the Western Cape to try and find a piece of land and originally we were looking down in Wilderness but what we could afford to buy was only a four or five hectare piece of land and we met an agent Zimbabwean guy that was Selling Houses and properties down there how many set us if you travel over the otiniqua mountains you can for the same amount of money you can buy 70 hectares instead of full and so the next day we came across the mountain and we decided to sleep in a little tent next to the olifants river and when we slept here that night and we couldn't hear that any noise of anyone else and it no other life and we heard the Jackal calling in the mountains we bought it the next day the valley was called ma reflector which can either mean skinny Valley or Barren Valley we decided we needed to change that name both of us lived in zulilan for quite a while and when Russ was walking out in the falcher when there he noticed all the numbies and numbi is slang for breasts in Zulu so if you look outside the valley you see all the shapes of them and it brings in the fertility so it was also that idea we did the same thing with a lot of designs like the swimming pool is the shape of an egg and that was also the symbol of just inviting fertility back into the space that had been devoid of it for so long and in the beginning when we tried to grow things they they didn't want to grow at all so like a spinach plant would grow in after two months it was still a tiny little 10 centimeter plant so through the process of changing that soil we bought in a lot of organic matters and we bought up from the river we bought up the first earthworms and we'd go in Scotch underneath the trees looking for EMS so effective microorganisms the white stuff that you see in leaf litter as we saw that life starting to come back into the soil itself and things just started to respond to that and I believe that modern day agricultural systems sea soil as just a substrate and then they use chemical fertilizers to have your NPK your nitrogen phosphates and that's how they Farm vegetables but that's not sustainable because eventually those chemicals build up in the soil to an extent where there's no life anymore whereas this system of farming we're farming the soil and then we're just observing how the plants respond to that so when we have a deficiency in our plants we look at the deficiency that might be happening in the soil and normally compost is the answer so we build big compost heaps continuously and what we do is the chickens come onto a vegetable bed for two weeks they do all the fertilizing and they go through the soil and they take out the cutworms and they take out things like mold crickets and then after two weeks they've prepared that soil beautifully it's almost like a compost heap and then we pick up the chicken coop and we move it to the bed next door and then they feed on that and we feed them for the next two weeks and then we take seedlings from our Nursery which are already a month old and we put them into that bay and we're obtaining a very high yield and it's in constant production throughout the year it's just such abundance of food and it has to be that low of return so whatever we take out in the form of produce we put back in the form of compost that idea where you take Garden clippings and you put it out on your pavement for someone to take it away it's a crazy idea because we should be bringing everything back into our soils to feed the living organisms that then in turn digest that carbon and nitrogen and feed the roots of the time and that's when nutrient dense food comes from so when we're eating nutrient dense food we become healthy ourselves respond to that and that's how we live a life where we're not becoming diseased ourselves so there's such a beautiful symbiosis between the soil and the vegetables and us and the effort that we put back into that system so life generates life so we don't use any pesticides or herbicides and never have in 18 years I believe that it's a complete myth that that is needed for food production and what we've learned to do over the last years that we've been here is actually take a step back and observe what's happening and so when we get aphids on our broccoli which we do we leave it for a couple of days and after three or four days we'll go back there and you'll see that there's a little ladybird sitting on that plant eating those aphids or maybe there's a lace Wing or it could be a combic which is a little hairless bird that lives in the garden and they come and they clean up those aphids and then we'll go like three or four days after that and there's not a single effort to be found so once you have an abundant complex system things are always interacting with one another so the aphids are a food source for the lady birds and The Comebacks so if we poison those aphids and we take them out of the system then all those higher creatures don't have a food source anymore the abundance of life that has come with changing the system where there's open water source and there's nesting areas and there's never been any poison for 18 years so we've just heard now so much birds so many insects and continuously seeing new species so it's just incredible and beautiful for us to interact with that and explore that and be witness to the abundance of life that can be in the system thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Slow Traditions

Views: 21,119

Keywords:

Id: bxH0WIhYBVw

Length: 7min 5sec (425 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2023