giorgos vallis

Hello Nancy,
thanks for the quick reply ! well to be honest everything is a bit mixed up in my head and heart after the disaster.

Well there is let s say 2 projects that can be done

1. around my farm there s another 4-5 family units that are interested to find ways for water management, rainwater catchment and flood prevention.
we are at the foothills of surrounding slopes and since I first arrived here I was fantasizing about a sepp holzer style of  terracing and ponds that can help us have more water for the summer months. Now after the fire, these slopes that are planted with olives take all the runoff of the mountain since there s no trees to slow down the rainwater. So this dream has now become a need for us. What I am trying to find is a way to get a hydrology expert to visit and make a plan for the works that are needed, and then find a team of volunteers and machines that can help us implement the plan. For getting the expert here and for the machine work we need funds, so that is the second need, and I am asking here to see if anyone can point me in the right direction for the funding.

2. Scaling up the first smaller project I think permaculture style landworks could work very good in the wider area that surrounds the village of Rovies, but I guess for that matter, local government and forestry department has to be involved. I think this is a very long term goal that can, though, be inspired by the positive outcome of the first small scale project.

Hello !

I couldn t quite place my post in the right forum, i hope resources is the right one !

I am an olive farmer in Greece for the last 10 years

In august 2021 we were hit by an enormous wildfire that burned almost all the forest in the once beautiful and green island of Evia. My farm suffered a great deal with loss of material 40% of the olive trees and also damages to the house I live in. The worse however was the loss of a beautiful pine forest that dressed the mountains and hills surrounding the little village of Rovies.

This summer was the hottest ever with temperatures of over 40 C for at least 15 days in the row in late july.... just after this, september 7nth and also 4 days ago we had storms of more than 400mm in a day for both occasions... the damage is quite devastating. Besides all the obvious and very heavy damage on man made structures which have a great economic impact, we also suffered from major erosion of the mountains taking tons of topsoil to the sea and creating huge gutters in what was, before, dirt roads, but also in parts of the olive grove that were on the path of the water torrents.

Authorities tried to prevent this after the fire by dropping tons of cement in multiple dams across the streams, some of which broke and many got filled in with rubble already from the first flood.

In my opinion only well planned landscape works and planting fast growing and deep rooting trees can bring a real solution in the long term.

I am writing to you to ask your opinion about how to go about this issue. The scale of the project is too big for a small team of interested farmers to be able to fund, plan and carry out. Would you be able to point me to the right direction for finding funding and experts to help implement such large scale landscaping ?

Thank you very much !

Hello all,
finally I join this community from which I got advice many times before, thank you for that.
now I live in a homesteading farm in an island of Greece and as expected the land was an olive orchard, which i m trying to permaculturize a bit removing some rows of trees and planting other production trees and at the same time include animals in the orchard. There s very little out there about how to do holistic management in orchards with old, big trees !
so i m writing to you to ask for an advice on fencing between trees ! the idea would be that sheep eat the grass, brambles and even young shouts from the roots of the olive trees and at the same time fertilise the place. It is a 7 hectare land with around 1500 trees in rows of 30 trees approx.
https://oldwatermill.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/design1.png
so after reading a bit i m thinking that 5 lines of high tensile wire would serve to hold in the beast of a ram that we have, but i m not so sure what to use as poles (put wooden ones in the ground, maybe make bases from tires and cement...) and how to lay them out in the orchard... not sure how to go about making something practical and with not such an overhead to rotate their grazing and at the same time not to disturb the orchard works (harvest, pruning, irrigation).
Please if you ve seen a similar scenario or even better you tried something like that in the past, give me some hints !
all the best and many thanks