Greening the Desert: Geoffs Transformative Permaculture Project

Greening the desert's a job that we took on in a very hostile situation, in the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea Valley. And because it's such a hostile site, a result in a site like that really stands out. Where if you get a result in an area that's very lush, it doesn't necessarily stand out as being obvious. Plus, it's right in the Middle East, in a sort of geopolitical hotspot. So, greening the desert's just a small project, because that's all you need, actually. It's a little 10-acre project. And we proved that we can get a result even in incredibly difficult situations. And anybody on earth sees that as difficult, and everybody recognizes those sort of Middle Eastern locations that are so much in the news in recent history. The Jordan Permaculture Project that we're engaged with is in the Dead Sea Valley. It's the lowest place on earth, 400 meters below sea level. So it's rather an unusual climate, because at its latitude, it's actually in a Mediterranean region, but because of its lack of altitude, it's more of a subtropical temperature range with an extreme heat and dryness in summer. What we have is 3,000 square meters of hard, harsh landscape. This is not the ideal site to settle. This is the site that we chose to set an example of what a lot of people have to live with in the sediments in the Dead Sea, which are a lot of westerly, rocky slopes settled by what have been the refugee villages of Palestinians. Now, this site has been a real challenge. Very little soil, enormous amounts of rock. So much rock, we had to build rock wall, earth back, contour, swale catchment systems to rehydrate the landscape when it does rain. Now, the rains are very, very small. It's only 150 to 200 millimeters of rain a year. As usual in these hot, arid landscapes, it's crucial that you catch all the water you can and soak it all into the soils and the subsoils to avoid evaporation. This we've done to establish extremely hardy desert trees to give us extra anti-evaporation strategies of shade, wind buffering, and the production of pretty good nitrogen-rich mulch because most of these trees are going to be nitrogen-producing leguminous trees. That's how they survive. They're hardy pioneers. And we've had to be hardy pioneers as well to manage this site into a pioneering succession that's given us the ability to start to plant other trees and other crops. We started off with olives because they're one of the hardiest, then date palms, pomegranates, figs, some citrus, mulberry, carob. They're all there, and we've increased the diversity of nitrogen-rich support species as well. So we've even gone into more beneficial support as well as diversifying our food forest type assembly. It's a forest, desert forest garden. It's a food forest where we've been able to then move into crops, herbs, small animals, production of natural fertilizer, and we've positioned infrastructure that is designed to be an example of what can be copied locally, but it functions as an institute. So we have a house that doesn't have a kitchen because we need a large kitchen to cater for the students that come to learn. We have a separate kitchen. We have a separate bathroom and toilet complex, but we're demonstrating waterless toilets, compost toilets, and a shower block where we have male and female showers, a large amount of showers and toilets, but our showers, our gray water, go to a biological cleaning system run with reed beds, and the water is cleaned naturally with the roots of the reeds and can water fruit trees because it's cleaned up enough to be safe to use in the environment. It's not cleaned up enough to drink. You could go that far, but we don't have to, and we've positioned the main shower and toilet block and reed bed system high in the landscape so we can gravity water all through the project site. Now, we've also even positioned a small reed bed made out of recycled materials just to run on the one kitchen sink. We're also demonstrating systems like wicking beds made from recyclable materials. We've got vegetable systems under shade. Rather than in polytunnels, we've got special formed vegetable beds that are sunken to reduce their water use and avoid evaporation under shade to extend crops over the year. We also have small animal systems for manure and natural fertilizer creation through compost, and we have roof gardens being established. We also have renewable energy systems. There's no shortage of sun. There's plenty of sun energy for hot water production, which is easy, hot enough almost to boil your tea and your boiling water in midsummer. And we have solar electricity and a grid switching system where we don't need a generator, but we can actually use the grid to charge our batteries or run extra electricity if we need to, but most of the time, we can run on renewable energy systems. We even have specially designed buildings where we have our main house as a straw bale insulated on the sun and western side and mud brick on the east and northern side to bank the cool. So we don't need air conditioners. These are all examples we've crammed into our site so that we can show local people that there are many facets to this system of permaculture design that they can take and realize these clever little systems all put together make life easier. Even when you're on a westerly slope with lots of sun, rock, and poor soil conditions, you can still make life a lot better. And if you extend this out into better country, you can do very well economically.