There is gold in them there hills – and it is water

It is August, well, the embers of it. It is too warm to do anything in the garden after about 9:30am. Not that there is much to do other than clear, harvest and be hopeful.

We went away to the UK for three months and came back a couple of weeks ago to a dry borehole and scorched vegetable beds.

What can you do but dream and start again? The lovely people who we house swapped with did not know what to do once the borehole dried up, so not much was watered for a few weeks. Looking at what has survived has made us realise things can survive with very little water, but also it is time to reassess what we are growing. We grow some vegetables, herbs, salad leaves and fruit under cover, which reduces evaporation from the sun.

Last Sunday morning, I wandered around Santa Catarina market looking at what small vegetable plants the chatty Portuguese grower had to offer. He offered many healthy herbs and a couple of varieties of tomatoes, along with peppers, cucumbers and alface (lettuce). They are a possibility, that would kick start our efforts. I chose four tomato plants and some lettuce. I plan to sow seeds, possibly mange tout and some spicy salad leaves and rocket, along with that wonderful dark green bushy headed parsley.

But what about the water? Reducing water even more is something we are just beginning to tackle. One major decision for us now is how to get a consistent water source. We are asking ourselves shall we try and get town water? Shall we repair the borehole pump? Shall we get the engineers to bore deeper? Our borehole is currently 120 metres deep. The guys tell us there is water at 180 metres. But what does that mean if we have a few more very hot summers? Some reports say June was the hottest since records began. June was not that hot in the UK, where we sat out a total of one time in the garden on a warmish day. I know we are spoilt living in the Algarve where warmth and what the weather is going to be like tomorrow is not a preoccupation – because it will be sunny. The level of heat here now has our attention.

What we are thinking is that boring deeper for water does not guarantee a water source forever. We have had our current borehole since 2001, so we have had free water all that time. We are not complaining about the borehole drying up. It has made us look at sustainable options. It has also made us look around at what others are experiencing. We are told, by the usual source of information, (neighbours and the cafe owner) – that most boreholes have dried up this year on our hill and further down into the valley.

Along with the extreme hot and dry weather, there seems to be one other factor that may have contributed to the demise of water running into our borehole and that has to be laid at the feet of orange growers.

We live and grow vegetables on a very rocky hill between Tavira and Santa Catarina. Until recently the hills around were covered in carob and olive trees.The trees are ancient, require no water, are evergreen, provide shelter and silently produce a harvest, without fertilisers or pesticides. But that did not stop the Spanish co-operative and our farming neighbour, ripping out and replacing majesty and history with “Johnny come lately” lemon trees.

The change of use of the land began about two years ago. For months, the hill next to us was penetrated by large mechanical dust and noise creating machines. The machines left scars and terraces. Then came the black pipes ready for neat rows of lemon trees.

A borehole was dug (some say it was dug deeply and illegally for which they were fined). Lemon trees were planted and sprayed. The workers wore masks. No warning was given about what they were spraying. On the spraying days, it was best to stay indoors.

Last winter, watching the leaks in the black pipes billowing water was distressing. I went and talked about the water wastage in the cafe. The cafe owner called the farmer. Of course, I wondered if planting hundreds of new trees and just leaving them to an automated watering system would affect the water table and boreholes, but dismissed it as an unnecessary worry. I should have called the Camara (Council) and REN – the environmental agency..

Today the trees look healthy. No lemons yet. My trees and plants look hot and stressed. My trees were used to a 3:00 am injection from the irrigation system for 15 minutes twice a week. Now we use watering cans once a week.

Will the oranges on the hill next door be picked if and when they produce fruit? Who knows? If the co-operative cannot pay workers to pick oranges, they will just fall on the ground to rot. We are seeing this across the Algarve. The farmers gets European money to terrace and plant but are given nothing to harvest, so given the glut of oranges and lemons, that you cannot even give away when they all arrive together, the fruit drops, rots and is wasted. – So here is just a short message to European funders and agricultural agencies, please stop giving money to Spanish Co-operatives and Portuguese farmers to plant more fruit trees. Think about sustainability, not short-term gain. Think about the balance of what is and what works before introducing what does not. When the farmer’s borehole dries up, will they run to Europe for money for water? Probably. Will they get money for water, who knows? If they do not get money for water, the trees will not survive without it, unlike the carob and olive trees which will take a couple of generations to replace. The farmers will then start again excavating hillsides, removing old trees and planting fruit trees, fed by yet another new borehole. The fruit trees are a testament to unsustainable thinking and practices.

So, what are we going to do? We now think we will try and get town water and leave our borehole as it is, dry, dusty and waiting for the winter rains. We have had a quote from Tavira Verde to take water from a pipe located down the hill. It will cost more than my first mortgage, but as a grower, I cannot imagine not being able to grow. So we will find money from somewhere to get the water into the house and garden.

Over the last few weeks, we have had water delivered, which certainly makes you think twice about how much water to give lettuce, let alone avocado, lemon and orange trees. At 96 Euros for 10,000 litres, we are reassessing what we should grow and how.

We were always careful, now we are re-working how we will garden with even less water. Getting town water means we pay for every drop. We cannot get agricultural water where we live, but Tavira Verde (who provide town water) has said we can have two water meters, one for the house and one for everywhere else. We will pay less for water that goes into the garden.

We think we have been pretty creative about water conservation. We make our own liquid feed from seaweed and comfrey. We put the concentrated feed 1-10 parts into large 500 litre water butts that are housed near the vegetable beds. We mulch well with horse manure, carobs leaves and whatever we think will give the ground some help. We will mulch even more now.

We plan to try and capture more water in the winter – when it rains – we hope that will be soon, but realistically it may not rain till October. In the meantime, I am happy to plan, to take photos, to record and to watch this landscape creak and eventually flourish into life.

This short video about Agroforestry by PurProjet sums up the imbalance and the solution.

Same video in Portuguese