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Grow With Us

Where Regeneration Meets Community: Experience sustainable living in a family-led food forest on Portugal’s Silver Coast, where your participation directly contributes to building a resilient multi-generational ecosystem.

Alo Land Strategy Summary

Alo Land is a regenerative initiative by us – Petru and Inês. We are former tech professionals who moved to Portugal with our two children. We currently manage a 1-hectare plot with a food forest and own an additional 2.5-hectare undeveloped plot nearby.

Vision and Goals

  • Land restoration using regenerative practices
  • Supporting holistic well-being (physical, emotional, spiritual)
  • Cultivating eight forms of capital (financial, material, living, social, intellectual, experiential, spiritual, cultural)
  • Building community resilience

Current Challenges

  • Overwhelming workload maintaining the food forest
  • Potential for more social connections, particularly for the adults
  • Gaps in food production despite potential
  • Restrictions on travel due to land care responsibilities

Strategic Approach

The family has shifted to an incremental growth strategy that focuses on:

  1. Leveraging existing resources and activities
  2. Attracting people to the land (as participants or volunteers)
  3. Creating a volunteer pipeline 
  4. Thoughtful development of their 2.5-hectare plot

What's with the name?

From Wiktionary: alō (present infinitive alereperfect active aluīsupine altum or alitum); third conjugation

    • I foster, I nourish
    • I raise (as a child, an animal, etc.)
    • I feed, I maintain, I develop

From our visual diary...

Turning the compost and mixing in biochar.

Turning the compost and mixing in biochar.

Turning the compost and mixing in biochar.The char is not compostable material but it's going in to get inoculated with microorganisms. It might slow down the composting process a bit but there's no hurry.The modular compost bin continues to be very handy but it's...

Crushing and hauling biochar out of the pit.

Crushing and hauling biochar out of the pit.

Crushing and hauling biochar out of the pit.It's the first time so there's probably some optimization to be done. For now I just used the shovel to smash the char while in the bucket every three shovelfuls or so.Yield: two full wheelbarrow loads of reasonably fine...

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