Swale digging, tree planting and grafting pistachios

I love the work we did last weekend.. implementing permaculture design with wonderful knowledgeable people and finishing all the tasks we planned.

Olive branches

The first job was sawing off the broken branches of the olive trees – many trees were damaged by a 60cm snowfall back in January. These branches were then used to make a fence along the far edge of the terrace we are working on. A barrier to keep the wild boar in the forest and not snuffling around our newly planted trees. 

swale

We dug a swale along the lower half of the terrace which will fill with water run-off from the road. In the past we’ve had problems with these swales getting immediately full of mud and silt coming down with the water, so we dug a silt basin at the entrance to the swale. This silt basin will need to be emptied (dug out) fairly often – after almost every storm! But it means that water will get all the way to the end of the swale, and hopefully the swale itself won’t need to be dug out for a while.

The design for the whole terrace is two long swales reaching all the way across this terrace, with about 25-30 fruit trees in total.

This weekend we dug the first 5 metres of the swale and planted four fruit trees – 2 apple and 2 apricot. 

fig trees

We will take “suckers” from the fig trees and plant them on this terrace as another useful, and under appreciated fruit tree that grows abundantly in this area. We were going to dig them up and stick them in the ground, but on the advice of Nat from Flores de Vida, we have left them in water, with some of the bark stripped away, to grow some roots for a while. Some of the suckers we took were cut, and some were dug out with a small amount of root still attached. We will leave them, making sure they don’t get dry, for a month or so, then replant them near the apple and apricot trees.

Grafting

Nick from Cova Fullola found 3 male and 3 female branches from Pistachio trees and we have taken around 20 female buds and 20 male buds and tied them to shady spots on branches of “pistachia lentiscus” trees that grow naturally and abundantly here. 

On the larger tree we pruned around the branches we grafted, but left most of the tree intact to provide shade. On the smaller tree, which had shade from a nearby olive, we took almost all the branches except the two that we were grafting. In each tree one branch is grafted with male buds, and one with female buds.