b. Fertility

Starting with land fertility but looking at all cicles: ultimately what is important is the total yield of the Finca, meaning usable (+effectively used) surplus of production over inputs.

Eg. within a year we had over-production of everything growing (garden vegetables, eggs + fruit & almonds), but this isn’t effectively cycled yet so overall we actually have mis-production.

Watching and thinking ...

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Finca Luna

Earth Fertility & Neighbours

The finca borders some interesting elderly neghbours (all down-hill) who spray herbicides and chemical fertilizers on their soil, which makes for a very didactive contrast - for the students but also for me: I’d never actually seen this close up.

(Terraces on the left in the picture above are the west-neghbour’s land).

Within a year we had gently managed to persuade 2 of our 3 immediate neighbours + 2 others to let us ‘help them with cleaning’ their land by picking their plentyful weeds for our chikens in spring (importing fertility + spares them the work of spraying herbicide).

This is quite time-consuming but also multi-functional and so far it seems worth it (they then also offer us other ‘chicken food’ like fallen fruit in summer, food scraps occasionally).

We noticed some years ago that our chickens loved our open-bucket simple compost-toilet a lot more than the warms did (whenever the chickens escaped they went straight for the bucket, the worms on the other hand died).

We found out that local ‘primitive’ toilets were placed on top of pigs and chickens quarters, so now we (very controversially: another yield) feed our shit (+sawdust) to the chickens - preferibly after breeding maggots with it (just not possible in winter).

No essential minerals are lost with this system and 20 chickens make 50 litre buckets of human waste + sawdust completely disappear with in an hour, so we are assuming there are no infection dangers left also.

The 6 ‘MoonGardens’ (crescent shaped) were already very fertile (called ‘nateras’ here because they passively ‘skim the cream’ = collect the water + fertility of the little valley they are in).

Each now is fenced as a chicken tractor (2mths in each garden, roughly 40m x 6m at widest points).

Fences multiply edge a great deal.

We are planting deciduous fruit trees in the gardens after experimenting lush summer production using shade netting (most people stop gardening in summer here and there is no tradition of mixing trees with annuals).

Many 50 litre ponds are dotted around each garden (8-10 in each) made quicky with buried tough rubber all-purpose farming buckets.

We need the greenery for the chikens in the summer + hope the frog and fish population will increase as much as the water-plants have.

Slopes and Swales - water harvesting is dealt with in a finca luna wiki page: a most important and still under-developed aspect of the water harvesting, terraces are traditional here so there isn’t much slope left.

About 1km of drip irrigation pipe has been layed out in two of the gardens + most of the ‘food forests’ (which are the ‘tails’ of the crecents in the map).

Only about 10-20 trees with accompanying bushes have been planted in each of the 6 food forests in order to observe before planting others, but also in order to leave much to the initiative of people who take on their own intensive ‘mini-farms’.