At the end of winter II - first shapes

The beginning of the mandala garden:

A small "fountain" from the area. Very useful for planting trees and bushes, an activity that requiers  buckets of water.

In that place we put some radish and rucola seeds, along with pieces of garlic (to keep animals away with the smell). We added dried manure found nearby, to make the soil more fertile.

At the end of winter

Since the warmth of the last weeks was a deceiving one (a cold front always comes at some point in march, maybe even frosting the lands), we focused our energy on planning, observing the land, working at the natural fences.

For that last matter, Peter created about 30-40 m ribbon of blackthorn dug up from nearby, in which we planted some wild rose fruits (hoping some of them might grow into bushes, sustaining the spiny fence), we brought some blackberry twigs and put them also on the border of the land to create roots and some willow branches, that we put in the ground with the same purpose, on the lower borders of the garden, were is more humidity in the ground.
 An interesting thing about plants from berry and currant families, but also willows, is that they don't need to be taken out with roots, it is enough to break a twig and put it in the ground, and it will have roots in a few weeks. The main condition is to do that in the early spring, before the plants develop leaves, and maybe in the late autumn, after the fall of the leaves (personally, I recommend the spring-time, it really worked for me).

 Other activities: Peter dug some land, preparing it for plantation with seeds; some of that land is destined to become  a mandala garden and I planted some onions I had in the house that were beginning to sprout. Some of them are there for more than a weeks and they're doing great. I also colected many bags of  dry animal dung from the grasses, which will be used as a fertilizer, and we dug a hole for making compost from our kitchen scraps.

Introduction

All around the city of Cluj-Napoca ( located in the heart of Transilvania), just like in many other romanian locations, lies plenty of agricultural fields, many of them abandoned, were wild bushes grow and wild-life starts to thrive. Last month, we received a piece of that land, about 1,5 hectars, in which we plan to try a different aproach from traditional agriculture: a permaculture project.
We chose this name because after the place was abandoned by previous farmers, the land is slowly colonized by blackthorn, a plant we find very useful for our permaculture purposes. For start, we work to create natural fences that offers protection to other plants seeds and to small animals.

For now, we've seen some herds of deers, a few pheasants, rabbits, but we're sure there will be many other surprises :)