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Común Tierra presents...
TierrAmor: Family-Scale Permaculture
Good morning, October 1, 2010, a new visit here to our farm…
Site Design
This project is a work-in-progress, it’s a family project that we began on-site
in 2002 when we purchased this land, which is just over a half-acre.
Work on-site began at the beginning of 2003. We spent easily a year and a half
working on the design,
that is, making plans, revising the plans, re-designing the plans…
This careful design process helped us a lot to reduce the construction time of the house.
In the end, we built this house in 9 months working-time,
which was actually 12 months because we had to stop for 3 months in the middle
of the process.
A ‘Permacultural’ House
The house is designed and built using local and traditional materials and
techniques... We used Adobe, which is very typical
here in this region. At the same time, the design of the house
is modern, we didn’t just replicate a traditional house,
Actually we combined new design strategies with the traditional materials
and techniques.
Of course, we considered the placement of everything, where is the sun, and how
the house sits on the land. We placed the house in the center of the property where
there is a down slope behind the house to be able to process our gray and black
water here on-site and recycle their fertility.
Reusing Gray Water
The rainy season has just passed, which produces a lot of biomass.
So I collect green material and fill up this ditch here, which is about 1 foot deep .
Our gray water is piped directly into the ditch in these PVC pipes, which I’ve
painted yellow so they stay cooler under the sun.
This water, carrying soap and organic matter from the kitchen, passes through
1-1.5 feet of organic material. This attracts bacteria who digest the nutrients
in the gray water. This works like an organic filter, which
ends up feeding the plants located below the ditch,
in this case a pear tree, rosemary, epazote, and this one is a lime tree.
Rain Water Harvesting
I’d like to present our second cistern, which was constructed this last January,
2010.
This cistern is smaller, it holds 12,000 liters, capturing rain water from part of
the main roof of the house.
This time I installed a filtration system a bit more involved, as we would like to
use this cistern for drinking water in the future.
Here you see how the water is captured…
This is a type of filter. For the first 2-3 weeks of the rainy season, we let the
water drain out here, washing away the dirt from the roof. After those first couple
weeks, we just turn this around, and the water enters into the cistern.
Inside, the water passes through a simple filtration, a layer of rocks, and a layer of
sand, And then the water is stored here, it’s
already pretty well filtered, and then before drinking we’ll pass this water
through an activated carbon filter, to be able to use it in the house.
Rainwater is generally the cleanest water source available, and depending on
where you are, it’s probably the water source we can trust the most.
Rotating chicken pens
Here we are with our friends the chickens, we have one rooster and ten
chickens, which produce 5-6 eggs every day, with the natural diet that we give them.
We actually have three chicken pens, the first one, where they are located right
now, and two more where we rotate the chickens, who spend 3-4 months of the
year in each pen. The chickens scratch up the soil, fertilize it, and clean it up,
and 3-4 months later we move them to the next pen, where they’ll do the same
work for us, and in that first pen we plant a new garden.
Right now, the chickens will be in here another month or so, and then we’ll move
them here, as soon as we’ve harvested everything here, we can see there is still
an abundant production of squash and other plants. We’ll harvest everything
here, move the chickens, and then plant another round of crops in the first pen.
This system works really well for us, it’s a great way to have veggie gardens
without working too much. Recently we’ve had some serious grasshopper
plagues, and at a certain time in the year, we have to cover all of our crops so that
they don’t get devoured. Since we already have the structure of the chicken
pen over the gardens, it’s really easy to close it with a few fabrics to protect the
plants, so that has also worked really well for us.
Let’s take a look at the third pen.
Here you can see exactly what I just said... inside we have a great crop of
lettuce growing, and everything is protected with these fabrics to protect it
from the grasshoppers.
Conclusions
The main motivation for this project was to try and really live aligned with our own
values. What I can say after all these years is
that yes, permaculture works. We are able to sustain ourselves quite a bit from
here, from our modest but considerable production of especially veggies,
medicinal herbs and fruits, And also from consulting and courses, as
we now feel able to help others design or create something similar to what we are
developing here.