First sod

Here’s a first:

Allen and Sors dug a hole to plant the first tree in our Old Land regeneration programme:

It was fairly hard going: as can be seen, there is little vegetation around, and the soil is cement-like, fine and dense. We will need to mulch a lot to increase friability, and moisture retention.

The plan further is to:

• plant three rows of leguminous (nitrogen fixing) trees in each plot, with …
• five trees per row, (in this camp, which is smaller) spaced 10m apart, and …
• shrubs between trees

Then we will alley-crop between these rows, planting either cereal grasses like barley and oats, or cucurbits and other seasonal vegetables.

It’s not really a first of course: every farm in the Karoo is seen from far away because of its trees. Not along ago, we asked ourselves

“when do people plant or when have people planted new trees on Karoo farms?”

The gums and cypresses one finds seem to have been on these farms forever, perhaps planted by the first or early farmers. Partly because of that, we are taking this step, but not only that … regenrating Old Lands is a direction toward fertility and production rather than shade only. Shade is important for livestock, and we have also discussed planting trees on our bare patches.

“Brak kolle” (bald patches) are a feature of Karoo veld, and we plan to treat these as an opportunity to provide shade for livestock, taking advice fon which are the best species to propogate in that soil profile. We have considered producing our own “seed bombs” (seed rolled into balls of clay) and asking our horseman to take a bag to scatter on to brakkolle when they are out herding.

Karoo Guerilla Gardeners.