In this post I will be sharing a project we have been working on for the past ten months. What I will be demonstrating here was all achieved on a part-time basis, whilst maintaining a full time job. This is a realistic look into a work-in-progress permaculture project in the drylands of central Namibia.

Here is a short but descriptive overview of what we have done so far and what I have learned in the process, followed by a few before-and-after photos from locations within the garden. In future posts I will then write in more detail about some of the individual projects we have done here.

That being said, lets start at the beginning:

Right at the start of winter, early June 2023, we moved from Mexico to Namibia. Here we took on a managerial role of a 500 hectare guest farm. Our job here entails the overall management and running of the farm, the hospitality enterprises and the supervision of construction and maintenance of various infrastructure during the absence of the owner.

As a part of the deal, we are provided with a house and garden to live in here on the farm. This is where we have been spending most of our free time over the past 10 months, developing and implementing the start of a drylands permaculture garden. This is the place I will be covering in this post.

The house consists of a 3 bedroom home, which the granddad of the current owner built into one of the large sheds here on the farm, for himself to live in. We have nicknamed it “The Barnhouse”, and it is a really lovely home, with a NNE orientation, making for comfortable living conditions all year round.

To the front of the house, we have the garden, the total size of wich is 3400 m2 (0.84 acres).
1300 m2 of the SE section of the garden was used as a cattle pen for the little calves until just a few months ago, and as such nothing much has been happening here.
A further 700 m2 to the NW of the garden consists of Zone 5, wilderness, and serves as a privacy barrier between us and the main farmhouse.
That leaves about 1400 m2 (0.34 acres) that we where actively working on.

When we moved in, the garden was in a bad state of neglect, since the house had been uninhabited for quite a while. A few fruit trees and some grapevines where just about alive, and besides that the place was quite bare.
Most of the yard is situated on bedrock, with very shallow, poor and limestone/calcium rich topsoils full of gravel, and these where, for the most part, heavily compacted. There was hardly any organic matter or moisture in the soils, and as such, soil life was almost non-existent.

As we arrived here just at the start of winter, we decided to focus our efforts on some infrastructure development and upgrading.

The first project was the construction of a chicken coop. This was totally unplanned, but as our neighbour gifted us 5 chickens one Friday afternoon, we had to create a safe and comfortable space for them as soon as possible.

We then started work on the water systems. At first we installed a water-softener for the house, since our well-water here is extremely hard. Then we also increased our water storage capacity, renovated all of the freshwater plumbing of the house, and installed a grey-water system for re-using the water from the kitchen sink in the garden.

Due to the location of the bathroom/laundry, we where unfortunately not able to direct the grey-water from here to the garden by using gravity, and as such this still flows into the existing septic system. This will be a future project.

We also renewed and optimised the irrigation systems in the garden, replacing old pipes and fittings, adding more taps and setting up drip-irrigation in certain areas.

Next, we constructed a long retaining wall out of stone, and filled an area of approximately 100 m2 with higher quality top soil which we collected in a little valley about 100m from our home. This formed a 0.5 m high terrace.

We created 3 swales in strategic areas of the yard. Two are located towards the west of the home, and capture most of the rainwater runoff from the roofs of the building.
The third is quite central in the garden, and here we located the main soakage area for the grey-water from the kitchen, and combined this with some large composting pits.

Another larger earthworks project we did was loosening the top 80cm of ‘soil’, wich consisted of 85% of extremely compacted gravel. This was done over a large section of the original driveway, about 80 m2, and the work was done with a JCB.

Towards the middle of the winter, we started working on the construction of a 62 m2 shade-house, intended as the main nursery and vegetable production area. The structure was 95% completed half way through summer, but due to time restrictions, it has not yet been used besides for a few nursery plants.

As for the plants, our main focus for this first summer was to get the large majority of the garden covered with plant life. We pruned the existing trees and grapevines before the spring. Additionally we planted a few fruit bearing plants such as citrus, granadilla, gooseberries, as well as a whole bunch of ornamentals and flowering plants, to attract more pollinators. We also planted a number of shade trees as well as nitrogen fixing trees throughout the garden.

Right in front of the house, the lawn has regrown by means of irrigation and addition of aged cow manure from the farm. Whilst we are not very keen on growing lawn, it serves a valuable purpose, and that is the reduction of dust that enters the house. Besides that, the weekly mowing of the lawn results in a good amount of organic material that we spread as mulch and helps reduce evaporation in areas with bare soil. As such, it is not all bad, and whilst it does require a fair amount of water to maintain it, we feel that it is worth it at the scale that we have it established now.

The majority of the ground however is now covered in a wide variety of local and self seeded grasses and other vegetation, many of wich would be referred to as weeds. We decided that this is the fastest, most cost-effective, low maintenance and natural way to develop soil cover and get a climate-appropriate soil ecology started. The only input in these areas was water in the form of drip irrigation. It has been incredible to witness how fast everything came alive, despite the poor soil conditions and a very dry and hot summer.

As the soils condition improves, more valuable trees and other plants will be introduced, with a much higher survival rate than we could expect if we had planted them into the poor soils and harsh conditions right at the start. As the system evolves, more and more of the plants will be selectively chosen to support our human needs, as well as those of other living organisms found in our garden. The goal is to create as much diversity and natural balance as possible.

Here are a few things I have learned over the past 10 months of part-time permaculture work in our drylands garden:

1) In these drylands, water really is the primary consideration, and a lot of planning and a smart design will go a long way in optimising the use of this precious resource.

2) Small, intensively planted and managed areas establish and develop much faster and require less water and other inputs than having the same amounts of plants/trees spread over a slightly larger area.

3) Grey-water re-use in the garden should be prioritised in all dry-land permaculture gardens and projects. A well designed, passive grey-water system is a very cost-efficient addition to homes in the dry climates of the world, and the results can clearly be seen in the plant and soil life that develop because of them.

4) Nature can do absolutely incredible things if we can alleviate the limiting climatic factors even on a very small scale. In our climate, the simple addition of a small amount of additional moisture in the soil provided on a regular basis has resulted in an incredible abundance in plant growth over large areas that where almost completely devoid of all forms of life, and this was achieved in just one growing season! It really does not take much effort to start the process of natural succession.

5) Having a mainframe design to work with greatly simplifies the decision making and developmental process when implementing these systems. By determining the location, size, number and importance of the main infrastructure of these permaculture systems before the work starts, you will definitely minimise both financial and time costs during the developmental phase, and everything comes together so much faster.

6) Design systems in such a way that they require as little time and/or maintenance as possible, or else they will hardly ever work at their full potential.

Here are a few pictures of the progress over the past months:

Thank you for reading about our progress here at The Barnhouse. Should you be interested in finding out more about some of the projects we worked on, then do check out the upcoming posts, where I delve into several of them in more detail.

See you on the next post!