{"id":740,"date":"2022-05-02T05:46:32","date_gmt":"2022-05-02T05:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aloland.v.paler.net\/2022\/05\/02\/the-wind-a-new-challenge\/"},"modified":"2025-04-30T15:51:12","modified_gmt":"2025-04-30T14:51:12","slug":"the-wind-a-new-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/the-wind-a-new-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"The wind: a new challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a year and a half of living here, it feels like the wind never stops. Its temperature and intensity vary, but most of the time there is a noticeable breeze. And now, we\u2019re learning a new lesson: many of the young trees don\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n

March and April were warm and with reasonable rainfall so the garden is taking off. The wind keeps blowing as well, and it doesn\u2019t always feel warm. It recently doubled in intensity for a few days.<\/p>\n

The plants are visibly suffering. I expected bent trunks but it doesn\u2019t seem to be and issue so far. Instead, there\u2019s burnt leaves and branch tips everywhere.<\/p>\n

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Tall chestnut trunk upright despite all the wind, but with browned leaves.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even the the almond trees, tall and skinny and \u2013 some of them \u2013 burdened by fruit, seem to be holding on well. Except for their leaves.<\/p>\n

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Almond tree with fruit and burned leaves.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Many (most?) species seem affected to various degrees. They each deal with it in their own way.<\/p>\n

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Beech tree seeming to shrug off the wind damage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Avocado tree fighting wind damage with vigorous new growth.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Meanwhile, we\u2019re trying to figure out our own response. It\u2019s tempting to let it be and use it as a filter for what\u2019s going to thrive in this environment. The trees are not fully established, though, so they might thrive anyway if we just help them out a bit. In the overall design there are a couple windbreak tree rows that should help \u2013 in a few years, once they\u2019ve grown. For now they just suffer like the rest.<\/p>\n

Giant reed grows everywhere around and people often use it as a windbreak. It\u2019s however a very aggressive spreader and it\u2019s close to impossible to eliminate without chemicals, so we don\u2019t want to introduce it in the garden. Bamboo is promising but can also spread, and is quite expensive if starting with plants that are of an useful size already.<\/p>\n

Agriculture in the area seems to employ tall windbreaks of semi-permeable green plastic netting. It seems to work well enough for them, but it\u2019s a lot of plastic that might sooner or later break down and crumble all over the garden.<\/p>\n

What we settled on for now is hessian cloth windbreaks: hopefully as effective as the plastic (though more expensive) and fully biodegradable. Now let\u2019s source it and build some windbreaks before it\u2019s too late.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a year and a half of living here, it feels like the wind never stops. Its temperature and intensity vary, but most of the time there is a noticeable breeze. And now, we\u2019re learning a new lesson: many of the young trees don\u2019t like it. March and April were warm and with reasonable rainfall […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":730,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1229,1230],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-homestead","category-permaculture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32770,"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions\/32770"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alo.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}