- Hi.
Geoff here.
I'm at the Greening the Desert site.
And I'd like to take you for a little sort of
tour of intimacy.
Things that I really like
that are now happening around the site.
I think they're indicators of a system working well.
When you can see tiny bits of beauty everywhere that really,
you just love the aesthetics.
First off, I'd like to take it outside,
and then come in.
Cause um,
you just have to keep reminding yourself
that you're in a desert.
So that's the representation of the
normal landscape around the project.
And the only trees that grow well here
are really hardy legume trees, like Presopas.
Presopas is a very, very hardy tree.
It'll stand all kinds of abuse,
and it'll handle really dry conditions.
It's roots go down many meters underground.
So there's another one outside here.
We would've planted these.
I like to work with these hardy characters.
Start a project off in dry lands.
So then as I come down the road,
a lot of the representative landscape's the same.
And so you've just got to remember that
when we step through the door,
because everything changes on the other side of that wall.
Let me show you.
So here we are.
There's the West Bank in the, in the background.
The City of Jericho's right there,
we can see it clearly.
So we're geopolitically pretty significant right here.
And there's our door.
I'm walking straight in,
and immediately you start to see more green.
And you step inside now,
and it's like this.
But what's also happened is beautiful little subtleties.
Like we introduced ground cover succulents,
and they've even come right out over the sandstone paving.
Look at the soil creation under there,
little habitat.
And we can extend these plants very easily.
And at the end of winter
we even have quite a lot of herbage.
So there are beautiful subtle little flowers,
and there's a lot of flowers here now, actually.
And again, there you go.
There's that curtain of succulent ground cover.
These are almost like a spineless cactus type plant.
They're full of gel,
so I'll let you see the gel.
Oh, let's see the gel squeeze out of it.
So gel is an interesting thing,
because it's a liquid that behaves like a solid,
and it really resists evaporation.
And anything that reduces evaporation is a great advantage.
Now we've got those extended out in lots of places.
There's one coming out from a little
date palm plant in there.
Now these plants in here are in the sandstone pavers.
So they've got even more
thermal mass heat gain to deal with.
And that ground cover,
that insulation from the gel ground cover,
is a real asset.
Incredible asset to the fungal
net in the soil,
because you don't, you don't get much fungus in the soil
until you've got moisture.
And if you're trying to grow trees
you want a fungal dominated soil ecosystem.
So you want to make sure you've got fungus,
and you, so you need wood chips.
You need to add wood of some type.
Look at these beautiful Aloe Vera flowers.
Now that Aloe Vera flowering in amongst the,
the herbage ground cover,
it's almost like a herbal ley in there.
Very, very beautiful.
And here we've got another assortment of
little flowers coming through.
And one of my favorites in the world is Singapore Daisy.
It's another ground cover,
not a gel ground cover,
but it's pretty lush.
And again, you're are insulating the ground
away from evaporation.
(chuckles)
We even have roses growing here.
So the ladies all love a rose.
We've got quite a lot of 'em.
There's tiny little assemblies,
right above is a coppiced or pollarded Leucaena.
The nitrogen fixers are still here.
Right here,
a little Hibiscus about to flower.
And hidden in amongst the rampancy there's a Papaya.
So there's a, an edible coming out of the middle
of all the chaos.
Let me just tiptoe in here.
We've just harvested some of these.
These are lovely mulberries coming through.
Mulberries are a great desert tree,
and they're lovely looking mulberries.
They're a kind of pink mulberry this one.
I just want to point this out.
Just look at the density of the ground cover in there,
that's, I'll put my hand in there.
That's quite a depth insulating that plant in there,
for that, mainly that one date palm
and a big coppiced legume Leucaena right next to it.
Lovely looking thing.
Okay.
I'm going to walk on,
and just pick up little spots here and there.
More flowers here.
That's your pink geranium,
and a few other beautiful little sections.
We're going into summer right now.
So we're coming out of winter.
The best time of year for growing, I must admit.
But it's still gorgeous.
Roses.
And we go on through,
nursery's looking great.
And ah,
everywhere there's little flowers again.
So when we start to go up through
the food forest contour foot paths,
I just pass each foot path,
it really is quite shady and green now.
Another Aloe flower.
There's a section here it's just green chaos.
I've got the Singapore Daisy really taking off,
reducing the evaporation.
It's taken a while but it's really going now.
And this area is sheltered from the outside wall.
So we're just inside from where we walked down the road.
(chuckles)
It's ridiculously green for a desert.
It's yeah, you could definitely say it's ridiculous.
Yeah.
So Moringa are a large part of the site now.
We have quite a lot of Moringa,
and some are quite big.
There's a Moringa pod coming up in front of us,
hanging there.
So we've got Moringa mixed through the whole system.
And there's a few hammocks,
probably should be a permaculture icon,
the hammock.
Lazy gardener.
Oh, look at that.
Look at that cascade of ground cover.
Haven't actually seen that before.
Look at that.
That's just cascading over that rock wall,
and it's taken off up the top there beautifully.
Oh yeah.
There's a, a Poinciana here, but it's bare.
Poincianas lose all their leaves in the winter here,
and then they come back full shade pretty soon.
That's a very beautiful tree when it's in leaf,
now it's bare.
But that, that's impressive.
That cascade down there.
Whoa.
Okay.
Everywhere also there's volunteer food.
So this is Marshmallow plant.
It's one of the local people's favorite spinach.
It's called Habazia here,
cook with onions, garlic and tomato,
and make it like a spinach.
It's actually volunteering everywhere.
So we've got volunteer food happening now.
Again, we've just got
a huge amount.
And so,
our main nursery lady here produces everything here.
A lot of recycled coffee cups out there (chuckles).
A lot of compost and sharp sand potting mixes.
And I know what she's doing actually.
I can see she's just up there.
She's about to plant out the first dragon fruit
that she's propagated,
the climbing cactus.
I've just done the instruction.
Ah no, she's cleaning up around citrus tree.
But we're going to start planting dragon fruit on
the Leucaena pollards.
So we're going to plant dragon fruit
at the base of the Leucaena.
And we use the pollard re-growth
as the top trellis
that makes the dragon fruit grow downwards.
Once the dragon fruit starts to,
once the tips are going down,
they flower and fruit.
A lot of people put 'em on tea trellis, commercially.
I think we've got enough mulch.
You've got your own mulch?
- Um-Hum.
- Your own mulch.
- Mulch. Oh, here mulch.
- Cabia mulch.
There's lots of mulch.
Cabia.
Just picking her own mulch and Habazia.
- Vandora
Ah, tomatoes.
Volunteer.
Oh, oh, oh.
Oh look.
Where is it?
Oh.
There's a subtlety.
Look at that.
- Vandora.
- Ah.
Oh.
Very nice.
Vandora and citrus.
- Yeah.
- Oh.
Look at that.
Hm, food forest.
Oh (chuckles),
they're just popping up everywhere.
(chuckling)
- Yeah.
Food forest tomatoes.
Very nice.
Okay.
We've got a whole load of egg laying chickens here
about to go out to projects.
These are ISA Browns,
more than we normally have in here.
They're on their way out to about 20 or 30 local gardens,
because we have community extension projects going on.
Now people see what we've been able to do.
They just need a bit of time to get it up.
So, ah.
The little foot paths wind around the system,
and ah,
you kind of get lost in it all now.
Although it's only 3000 square meters in total area
it feels a lot bigger,
cause there's so much in here.
That's what it is.
There's a beautiful looking Carob.
Look at the red on the tips of that.
That's a Carob.
On it's way up into the food forest.
And so these,
these topped trees,
these Leucaenas which fix so much nitrogen,
they're actually a main component of long term fertility.
But we started off with the really spiky legumes
before we got into these sophisticated legumes.
And um,
right next to this here
is a big pit of mulch,
about two meters deep.
That would span at least two meters,
and that's full of spiky legume branches at the bottom.
Ah, look at that.
I see something now,
just got to walk around and find things to show you really.
Look at that, that's amazing.
That is a big Moringa in the middle of the forest there.
It's flowering at the same time as the olives.
Olives are flowering here as well.
Considering we haven't had Moringa going that long,
it's pretty amazing to see big mother trees like this
that are producing so much seed,
and extending out around the community.
(rooster crows)
And I might close on a classic here,
cause I could just keep walking and walking actually.
If you want me to let me know,
I'll keep doing this sort of thing.
But there you go, that's olive,
and that's your classic olive in flower.
And it looks like we're going to have a great year this year.
We get buckets and buckets of olives off
this little project,
and we make our own olive oil.
We get it pressed.
And of course, it's gorgeous.
So ah,
(rooster crows)
olives are just in prolific flower,
and interesting to note they're flowering at the same time
as the Moringa.
All right.
So,
there you go.
A report from the food forest.
Rough cut.
Pretty rough anyway.
Just walked around.
Inspirationally showed you what I came across.
Nothing planned,
just something informal.
Before we go into more details
about desert strategies
that really do work,
cause we're walking around in reality here.
Okay.
We'll talk to you soon.