The permaculture process puts an emphasis on knowing your land through observation and local knowledge. As luck would have it, my good friend Fernando, who now grazes his sheep in the valley, has known Lavandeira all his life and told me that when Lavandeira was apple orchards, over 35 years ago, a pipe was run from the river to the top well and used to irrigate the orchard in summer.
After mulching the broom, my second project was to install new pipe along that same route (600m of 50mm, 10kg pipe) from the river to the top well then down from the top well along the west sides of the top terraces.
This pipe was to form the backbone of the irrigation system as set out in the map below:
The terraces all slope west to east and many have levadas at the back along the walls so can easily be flood irrigated using gravity from the top well.
In the first, year we have focused on the productive area marked in green. Here we built 5 swales, all of them flood irrigated during the summer from taps in the main pipe. In addition, we installed sprinklers in the alleys between the swales. These two watering systems turned the summer from a survival time to a productive time and certainly saved the many trees that we planted in November 2023 in the swale system.
Back to my roots 