The making of an African food forest - Part 2, Earthshaping

And so it came to pass that the bulldozers, once feared and despised by the eco-minded as war machines bent on the destruction of the natural world, rolled on to the 20Ha of pristine grassland surrounded by indigenous mistbelt forest, not as the enemy this time but as yellow, diesel fume belching, earth sculpting tools. 

The sight of the dozer prompts me to instinctively reach for my bolt cutters behind Mandy the Landy's seat but I check myself. Today we don't follow them to their den and cut hydraulic cables, today we cut soil for what will become a working model of integrated food production systems design based on nature's genius blueprints.   Gratitude for the opportunity to create this puts the last of my dozer unrests at ease and I step out to meet the driver...... 

Earthshaping is an exciting phase of a project. It is the first moment when the design takes flight from paper and pixel and becomes something tangible.  What started out as an ethereal concept woven from many ideas and thought experiments was anchored in 2D on paper and screen and now expands into full 3D smelling like diesel and dust. 

Prior to this poetic moment though, a whole lot of walking has to happen as the entire site has to be plotted. On contour paths' and swales, ponds,  diversion ditches and residence platforms has to be surveyed  and pegged out using a laser level. Permies love contours for a reason. One of the primary design objectives is to slow down and trap as much energy as possible in our system. Contours will intersect energy flow across the land at a perfect 90 degree angle and, provided some form of catchment is in place, will divert it evenly and equally across the landscape to achieve the goal stated above. Exquisite symmetry and efficiency. 

Surveying the site took 5 full days; 

The site has quite steep aspects which is troublesome for a TLB to work on. For this reason, a bulldozer is used to level an access road for the TLB which will then be able to work efficiently at digging deep, wide swales and creating a berm on the downslope side; 

4 days later... a view from the opposite side of the valley shows the swales (or rather the clearings for the swales), paths and residence platform; 

Usually those bulldozer scars across Gaia would have become blacktop access roads to little brick boxes on the hillside but the tables had been turned. The dozers paved the way for what will become veins of syntropic support. An energetic grid of diversity on which to assemble our food forest. 

Next week we will complete the swales and start construction of dams and catchment ponds.

Thanks for your time and hope to see you back soon!