Our land being sloping, our first mission to create the forest garden was to do earthworks. For this we had the help of a shock team, under the orders of the Grand Druid and friend Marc Grollimund. And even if permaculture in theory envisages almost no recourse to mechanization, we must admit that the occasional intervention of the excavator certainly saved us a few more stiffness ...
As luck would have it, a week after our work, the art of building dry stone walls was listed by UNESCO as a cultural heritage of humanity. In the official press release we can read: "The dry stone structures have shaped many and varied landscapes, allowing the development of different types of habitat, agriculture and livestock. These structures bear witness to the methods and practices used by populations from prehistoric times to modern times to organize their living and working spaces by optimizing local natural and human resources. "
The work was really hard, especially because of the weather conditions which were unfavorable to us: showers, cold wind, freezing at night and then again the rain. So much rain that the earth - rich in clay like almost everywhere in Tuscany - quickly turned into clay, in the middle of which it was really difficult to move and handle the stones (not really dry) on our walls. A big thank you to Marc, Annie, Cécile, Isabelle and Olivier for their courage, their good spirit and their formidable efficiency.
