In October 2023 I spent 5 days learning about syntropic farming, a form of agroforestry, created and practiced for 40 years by Ernst Gotsch. Most farms in Portugal have olive trees and I wanted to add to the half dozen at Lavandeira. Was there a way to plant olive trees using his syntropic design methods? I wanted to move away from the typical olive monoculture that we see all around Portugal and avoid fertilisers and pesticides.
As is his way, Ernst told us the story of when he visited Palestine in 1978 or thereabouts. Each family owned olives of up to 9m high, each producing 200kg of olives or more (Portugal 20kg or more depending on a lot of factors), each olive was the centre of a guild comprising figs, citrus, grapde vines, herbs, vegetables, beans and wheat. We saw exactly this later in the year in Ourigane in Morocco. Indeed, olives let 50% of light through to the layers below and the companion plants thrived. Often the guilds were surrounded by prickly pears to keep out the goats.
At Lavandeira, in February 2024, I bought 85 8 to 20 year old olive trees of the picoual and quebransosa variety for 12.50 EUR each. The owner who lived near Viseu wanted to change his trees for Galega variety to get better production. I asked some experts in our area and discovered that Viseu, due the Caramulo mountains to the west of us, has 30% more rainfall than Oliveira da Hospital and, in addition, his and was flat and often water-logged, something that his two varieties of olive do not thrive in. He hoped that by chnaging his production would increase by 50%.
6 trips in Xavier’s truck over 3 days and we transferred the olives, some weighing 100kgs each, to Lavandeira where I had already asked the digger to make large holes. Over a week with volunteers and they were all planted!
Transplanted olives will all lose their leaves as they seek to eliminate evaporation and not having the root system to feed their photosynthesis with water and nutrients. The olives focus on redeveloping their root system from the sugars (energy) stored in what is left of their roots and the branches. Branches will die back as the resources are used up, you can see this by pruning back a branch gradually from its end until you get back to a green cambium layer. Having checked our olives we can see that they are all alive! 10% of them have now budded.
Back to my roots 