We are a vegetable garden, located between Baleal and Ferrel, near Peniche, Portugal, in a plot where we live offgrid, growing food for personal consumption.
This garden is:
- One part, rows with a more traditional mindset, using automatic drip irrigation system with solar panels and battery to pump from a pond.
- And another part, with tree guilds, with lots of mulching, chop&drop, doing experiments and comparing with the rows, while irrigating by hand.
This plot had very poor soil that was used for traditional monoculture agriculture for decades.
The garden was started 4 years ago.
About 7 trees were planted around that time, and others have been planted throughout the years. Some were planted from seed in pots in a previous home, most were bought, and some were offered by visiting friends with gardens of their own.
The perennials are something we are always looking for because it's not easy to find them in Portugal, so most of them have been bought online from other countries, or, are being grown from seeds.
Annuals are usually grown from seeds in hard plastic seeding trays, but this last season we mostly bought the seedlings.
There is a lot to know about us, so after reading all of this, feel free to reach out and ask anything.
Find us at:
https://vonmap.uk/vonmap/listing/oh-its-green/
https://www.makesoil.org/map/site/9avyreG-oh-its-green
We are not selling courses, physical or digital.
We are, looking for people/communities, gardens/farms, who are looking to learn how to implement vegan organic ways to grow food!
It makes no difference if you are starting a new farm/garden, or if you want to transition your current operation to a veganic. If you need help, if you have questions, if you need inspiration, reach out! We are eager to help!
We are no experts, but we have experience, and we have advice to give.
And super important, we also want to learn!! Reach out to us!
We are looking for building a community where we help each other. It doesn't take a village to take care of a garden, but it's so much easier, and fun, to do it together.
A practival view of what helping each other means, would be to get together in one garden/farm and do what needs to be done, and then the same group goes to another garden/farm and do the same. That may be weeding, seeding, collecting materials for compost, turning compost, pick what is growing, etc.
Seed exchange, extra seedlings giveaway, knowledge sharing, abundance sharing, and everything that comes with having a community besides the help and helping, is what we are looking for.
Do you want to be our friend? :D
Do you want to see what we do and how we do it? We are thrilled to show you!
Veganism is about making what is possible to avoid animal exploitation.
Organic farming, or ecological, or biological, is an agricultural system that uses fertilizers of organic origin such as compost, green manure, and places emphasis on techniques such as crop rotation and companion planting
Veganic (Vegan and Organic) farming seeks to de-link plant farming from animal farming and produce plant-based food in a sustainable manner without exploitation of animals.
This means we don't use any kind of animal manure, blood meal, bone meal, etc. We also don't have any kind of vermicomposting done, but we do try to make the right conditions for the worms to come naturally and choose to reproduce and live there.
We use green manure, that is, grow crops for the biomass and soil regeneration. This added to a no-till aproach.
Annuals: Sweet Potatos, Garlic, Onions, Leeks, Ox Heart Tomato, Black Krim Tomato, Cherry Tomato, Watermellon, Butternut squash, Pumpkin, Zucchini/Courgette, Fava Beans, Peas, Purple peas, and other that some years we grow and other years we forget or don't have the time.
Perennials: Yacon Potatos, Strawberries, Taro/Inhame, Bell Peppers, Padron Peppers, we also started this last season Asparagus from seed, and next season we will start Rhubarb from seed.
Annual Herbs: Basil, Coriander, Parsley
Perennial Herbs: Thyme, Oregano
Trees: Bananas, Avocado (still young trees), Pomegranate, Persimmons, Apples, Pears, Peaches, Plums, Loquat, Figs, Oranges, Barbary fig, Wallnut, Almond, and a few more
There are so many things we want to grow. We want diversity!
Do you have these to share with us? Or do you want to support us and buy them for us?:
- Sugar Cane: https://www.olx.pt/agricultura/q-cana-de-acucar/
- Jerusalem artichoke: https://www.olx.pt/agricultura/q-tupinambo/
- Canna Edulis: https://www.planfor.pt/comprar,canna-comestivel,8388,PO
- Turmeric: https://www.planfor.pt/comprar,curcuma,8282,PO
Do you have any other suggestions and plants, to share with us?
Do we have anything that you want us to share with you?
We have a pond with rain water, that must hold about 50 or 60 thousand liters.
Unfortunaly sometimes is dries out in the summer, so we had years when the anuals dried up, and we watered the perennials and trees anyway we could using an IBC 1000 liter tank and other containers with rain water, that we save just in case the pond dries out.
We will be transfering water from a neighbours well to our pond, per the neighbour suggestion, in case it happens again.
It all depends. If the rainy season ends in June, we'll have water for the summer, but if it ends before that, it will not be enough.
We collect kitchen scraps from:
- A restaurant 2km away, 2 or 3 times per week
- A family of 3, 5km away
- A family of 2, they deliver it at our door
- Our own kitchen scraps
- Garden scraps
We are always accepting more donations, from households, restaurants, schools, or any place that has kitchen scraps.
We also collect:
- Coffee grinds from the same restaurant, 2km away
- Pine needles from the nearby Pine forrest, 1km away
- SeaWeeds from the ocean, 400meters away
- Woodchips from fire wood sellers by the road, 4km away
We have one compost pile made with only plant based material.
We have another humanure compost pile made with what we collect from our dry toilets.
At the moment we have about 200 Comfrey (bocking 14) plants all around the garden to chop&drop everytime they are big enough.
We also have Vetiver plants all around the garden, cut, let them dry, and then use as browns in the compost pile or just chop&drop.
We also cut and spread all the green growth from weeds with no seeds and leave the roots in the soil. This is our main source of mulching at the moment.
We mostly make our own liquid fertilizers into 100 liters water barrels with these separate "flavors", and then mix 1/10 ratio with water:
- Seaweeds
- Various weeds
- Comfrey (bokking 14)
- Tomato leafs after pruning them, to water them with their own nutrients
- Stinging nettles that grow all around our garden, in the plot and neighboring plots
We collect our urine, in 5 liter water jugs, that we also mix 1/10 ratio with water.
We also buy, "Potassium Soap", and Kelp/Seaweed extract, and mix both for foliar spray.
As said before, we do a lot of chop&drop with comfrey, weeds and cover crops.
We make our own plant based compost, that we try to get to 50ºC.
And we also buy Alfalfa pellets that we just trow around in the garden beds/rows and guilds.
As said before, our soil health is not good, and it was not tested.
The first two years we bought bags of soil, with some % of non vegan origins like manure. This brought a lot of unwanted weeds, was not a long term solution, was not aligned with our vegan lifestyle, and was expensive.
Since two years ago, we decided to stop bringing in soil from outside, and starting building soil, using regenerative aproaches, and of course always with a vegan midset.
We are working hard for the Soil food web, with chop&drop, doing cover crops, etc.
We know this will take time, so there are some crops that are not performing as we wish, like watermellons, pumpkins, corn, etc, so our expectations is on waiting to have better and better crops through the years.
Legumes grow as expected, so our stapple food and protein, is Fava Beans, that grow like crazy. This season we are planting even more than before so we can have them blanched and frozen, and also dried so we can then make flour and Falafellllllll :D
We are in the process of collecting old windows, to reuse them and build a greenhouse, so we avoid using plastic. More about that in the future.
We avoid using plastic like covering the rows, or nets around the trees, etc.
We do use plastic with long term solutions like the 100 liters barrels for the making of liquid fertilizer, or the drip irrigation tubing.
So many things we didn't list here, but this is enough for you to know what we do and what we stand for.
Want to know more? get in contact with us, on the links above.