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Grow With Us
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:
- Leveraging existing resources and activities
- Attracting people to the land (as participants or volunteers)
- Creating a volunteer pipeline
- Thoughtful development of their 2.5-hectare plot
What's with the name?
From Wiktionary: alō (present infinitive alere, perfect active aluī, supine 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...
Bricked one of the irrigation controllers for the second time, luckily solvable by a factory reset.
Bricked one of the irrigation controllers for the second time, luckily solvable by a factory reset.I've been developing and testing some code to generate and upload irrigation programs to the controller, and it seems to reliably cause it to get stuck in a boot loop 😢
Microsprinkler irrigation sectors working again.
Microsprinkler irrigation sectors working again.
The irrigation system has been unavailable due to works to the tank and pump.
The irrigation system has been unavailable due to works to the tank and pump.This was not great with the rising temperature and constant wind.The work is not done yet but as of today there's a workaround in place that bypasses the tank until the new pump is ready. We...


