You can't plant trees and hope them to survive if you don't look after them in the dry season, but yoiu could plant tree seeds, they will do alright without water though the place is drought prone, the seeds put down a long tap
root when they grow that allows them to survive the summer. If its a desert then you would have to plant different seeds.
I used to collect the robina false acacia seeds, that is an American tree, from the pavements of Madrid and grow them in pots on my balcony and they grew and they are leguminous trees so would increase the nitrogen in the soil. I have grown a few things from seed i have collected but can't grow things from bought seed. I collect and plant lots of seed so if some fails some will take.
In Spain trees grow incredibly well. Every bit of land that is left bare a while fills up with trees junipers and oaks and sorbuses. They like the heat i think. If the land is bare ti is because it is kept bare for fear of fires it is not extreme desert here.
There used to be a lot of land left empty here in Spain because people, nearly all of them, left the villages and went to live in the towns.
Most of what i have just grew, elms that died again, wild plums and willows a buckthorn and jasmine and a privet tree there are privet heath I have read here, poplars and sloes, only i wanted fruit trees too and one or two other things so i have had to plant and help on some trees. It has taught me a thing or two.
If you put in micro drip system it
should not be too hard to water them in summer. Some trees i have planted have survived nearly without water in summer. A lot of others have died when i did not work hard
enough watering them.
If you buy ground and
fence it off and stop others overgrazing it or using it for wheet till they have spoilt the soils so much that they can only grow things if they add fertilizer. If as I said you buy land and fence it off, I think there is a fair chance that you will help green things up and better soils, that your soils will better and things will start to grow on the land you have bought without your lifting a finger. So many of the problems with land are our fault ntha tjust protecting it from humans is enough.
I have watched an old cowboy film the landscape they rode through was full of junipers, they are trees that bare heat and drought, are they still there, in California I suppose, I wonder.
It does not seem to me to be difficult to be a weekend betterer of soil. It is trying to better soils while you live off them that seems to me difficult. How do you better your soil if you want and need to
sell the grain you grow and the
straw, so you have no part of the crop left as mulch to better soils with. If you need to eat part of what the soils grow you can't just let the soil right itself.
The other part of being a permaculturist is to prove that you can be productive without chemicals so that others believe in you ecological methods I don’t think I can do that as a weekend gardener. Maybe I will in the end. Still though you don’t sell stuff or live off it, others can see how in your bettered soils grass for example weathers the summer drought for longer. If others don’t have a p9ositive sentiment to you they wont see anything good whatever you do.
Maybe the above is not right, if you are there on the land all the time you can look after things much more so that though you have to live off the soil your soil can get better faster than it can for a weekend gardener..
Sill here in Spain there is a lot of land that does not seem to be being used though it is spoilt by over clearing for fear of fires and if
permaculture type people bought it they coild do a lot of ecological good though they were not helping socially, they would only be covering half of permacultuer ends then. If those who bought it wanted to prove how important mulch is, if they could afford to buy mulches and covered the land with them so the soil would better faster, then all to the good, anything to prove the point that soil need looking after and organic matter helps it. Agri
rose macaskie.
