Tamera Community in Portugal


Another excellent video by John D. Lui, the journalist who covered the restoration project on the Loess Plateau in China.

“The example of Tamera shows how a decentralized and natural water retention landscape can heal a disturbed landscape and create the prerequisites for modern subsistence.

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Food growing like weeds


Excellent video by One Yard Revolution YouTube channel, one of my favorite gardening channels now. This is the goal for much of our garden – all the spaces in between trees, bananas, papayas, pineapples, etc. are being planted as explained in this video. These are all robust, fast, easy to grow plants that keep growing every year with minimal maintenance. These perennials and self-seeding annuals are planted in an intensive polyculture, much like you’d find naturally in nature. It’s no surprise that gardens like this attract massive quantities of earthworms and effective microorganisms. ‘Weeding’ primarily involves thinning the plants and eating them.

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Permaculture Plants

Today’s blog post is reposted from Tropical Permaculture, an excellent site that I’ve been using lately. Sites like Tropical Permaculture and Eco Oasis that have specialized, expert level advice are invaluable. In a few hours of research you can glean important ideas that others learned over many years and use them to greatly improve your … Read more

2 Year Forest Garden Update: Forest Gardens as a Hedge Against Drought


This is my annual video update of our forest garden. I’m calling it ‘Forest Gardens as a Hedge Against Drought’ for reasons I’m about to explain. Right across the road from our garden you can see the barren, dry rice fields that are normally under water and lush with rice this time of year. Now they’re brown with dying weeds. It’s so bad that many farmers aren’t even plowing and planting. This is the worst rainy season in 15 years and yet our garden is still very lush. It’s not growing as fast as when it rains because plentiful rain softens the subsoil so roots can grow more readily, but our forest garden is still a lush oasis as you can see in the video.

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