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Eco123 Revista da Economia e Ecologia
Saturday the 15th August 2020
If the weather is not too hot, the cabbages for Christmas should be planted now in August and the ground prepared for sowing and planting in autumn. It’s also a good time for drying fruit (figs) and vegetables (tomatoes). Watering the young trees well and covering the land around them with straw, mulch or dry grass…
It was at the beginning of this year that the agroforestry almanac known as Plantei.eu started in Montemor-o-Novo. Its seed was the desire to disseminate knowledge and useful information about sustainable agricultural and forestry practices. Available both in paper and digital formats, the almanac offers you a planting calendar and a list of things to do, exploring a different theme each month. What should we do in August? The almanac suggests the following: preparing the ground for sowing and planting in the autumn; sowing beets, broccoli, onions, cauliflower, kale, chickpeas, strawberries, chillies, radishes, rocket; planting lettuce, leek, beetroot, broccoli, onions and cauliflower; and harvesting onions, carrots, melons and watermelons…
“I felt like doing something in the vegetable garden, and I felt that the information was very scattered, I needed to search in lots of different places,” recalls Isabel Pinto Coelho, a member of the Cooperativa Integral Minga and the project’s mentor. “Some sites have information about trees, others about flowers, others about vegetables. There are some very interesting articles, about tree propagation or seed collection, all lost and hidden in the website of the Institute for Nature and Forest Conservation. I fell in love with the information that my biologist friends gave me, and I felt the need to bridge the gap between these people and the general public. To simplify the technical information and make it more attractive.”
Just as she harvests her mint, Isabel collects stories about people and agroforestry, techniques, photographs, videos, articles and plant records, with which she feeds the site and the social media. Plantei.eu is the fruit of the hands, minds and hearts of the members of the Minga cooperative, together with the participation of the biologists Bernardo Sá Nogueira and José Mateus and watercolour illustrations by Miguel Schreck. The support of AMI’s No Planet B! programme also helped to pay part of the costs of what is essentially voluntary work.
The almanac circulates for free in schools, associations or cooperatives, and can be purchased online. With this revenue, the idea is to continue to produce content, create more educational materials and finance concrete actions, such as training in agroforestry or the creation of plant nurseries.
“More sustainable food production practices are urgently needed. We need to create more forested areas, which will allow for greater biodiversity. The soil is the basis of all life. Through it you can understand the health of a landscape. Today our soils are dying. More than half of Portugal is facing an extreme risk of desertification,” says Isabel.
Agroforestry offers us an answer, by combining forest production with horticultural production, and helping to regenerate the soil. In Montemor, Minga works with producers and is helping to transform the paradigm of monoculture and the use of chemicals, resulting in a greater variety in production, especially in relation to forestry. “From aubergine to walnut wood, from aromatic herbs and the essential oils of sage and lavender to the berries that grow on shrubs. It allows for a greater diversity in production, in various extracts, and greater profitability.”
The aim is to recover and maintain the health of soils and plants, to take care of nature. “Understanding that all the different elements are an essential part of the whole process, that they are all needed. From the bat that eats insects, to the ladybird that eats aphids, and to the mushrooms that communicate with each other…” says Isabel. This is, after all, the main inspiration for the project: “to realise that the human being is just one more of these elements. Just one more worker, among the many different workers of Nature itself.”
