HortaFCUL & Permalab

Welcome to HortaFCUL

Let us take you on a trip where we introduce our permaculture garden in the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon.

Compost & Soil regeneration

The soils in the city are generally eroded and polluted, so when it comes to urban gardening, soil regeneration is one of the main challenges.

One of the main ideas behind our action here, is not to think of organic waste as waste, but rather as a precious resource. We started composting gardening debris from our spaces from the start of the project. But we dreamed on extending this vision to the whole Faculty. To achieve that, we started composting the debris coming from all green areas in campus. Before, the Faculty had to pay to discharge from these residues, which additionally had to be transported to the treatment station. Today, we have the important role of doing all of this locally. This process reduces carbon emissions and the ecological footprint of the campus, and it diminishes the costs of the whole operation. To make it happen, we designed a larger composter and made the dream come true! Simultaneously, we use worms to make vermicompost from the leftovers of some of the cafeterias and canteens of the campus.

More than plants, we grow soil in an urban environment, and we are progressing towards turning the organic food “waste” management of the Faculty into a circular process, a closed cycle, contributing significantly to the environmental sustainability of the campus.

Gardening for biodiversity

We invite you to look at Nature. Find those secret corners, pieces that were left over, the apparently abandoned spots of a garden (yours or nearby). You may be surprised by finding a web of interactions. If you look at natural systems, you rarely find plants growing in evenly spaced out straight lines – instead, polycultures are Nature’s way of cultivating. Moreover, besides plants, there is an intricated web of life and relationships between them, animals (especially insects) and fungi. In all these relations, there is competition, parasitism, and symbiosis. Nature may seem a bit chaotic when compared to most human made gardens. But in natural chaos there is an “order”. In general, what we try to do in permaculture is to mimic natural patterns and to reinvent them in a way that increases diversity of all life forms and it is simultaneously useful and productive for humans.

But so, how do we do it?

The idea is that, more than doing agriculture, we are creating ecosystems. These ecosystems are intended to be productive landscapes for people but also to other beings. Therefore, we grow different kinds of plants (veggies, bushes, trees) in different ways (swales, raised beds, greenhouse). By increasing plant diversity, we are increasing insect and fungal diversity. All life forms on Earth have been evolving together for millions of years up to the moment of now – what we observe today. By growing a diverse garden rather than a monoculture, you are growing a garden that is also more resilient.

As our project is within a Faculty which closed due to the pandemic, our garden stopped having its usual maintenance, so we are turning the problem into a solution. By embracing the interesting opportunity that arises – as we attempt to “leave this place better than we found it” – this becomes a good chance to observe how a system designed by people develops with a much lower input of human effort, and how evolves without our presence. We are hoping for this slow-motion to be as temporary as possible, and someday soon we expect to open doors again. At that time, if you are in Lisbon, we invite you to take a leap at HortaFCUL for an unusual tour and to get your hands earthy.

Social tools

Internally, we developed as an informal project that self organizes in a non-hierarchical way in an academic context. The results were great so far, much of it due to the innovative way we organise ourselves (so far voluntarily) and using decision-making processes based on sociocracy.

We designed a method for group meetings which we call the 5 A’s. It allows us to discuss many topics and have productive meetings instead of entering endless circular discussions and ending up fed up of the people that make up our group. Meetings are super important moments in which most of the active group is together – this must be praised and honoured, in such way that no it is never supposed to feel like a waste of time. Wanna know the magic recipe? Click the link below:

https://blog.permaculture.org.uk/articles/social-tools-structuring-university-permaculture-project

The gardens we built since 2009, are more productive and fertile, but also more appealing for social gathering and as a place to join the Faculty’s community and external members. While at first the focus was gardening and creating opportunities for scientific demonstration in regenerative agriculture and Permaculture, later on it shifted to how to involve the people, and therefore turning to socialscapes, non-formal education and regenerative social practices. As humans, we are ecosystem engineers. And after the experience of the previous years, we figured out that the most important is to reach the people, to develop a sense of community. We are working together in a synergetic way, bringing the sense that the whole is greater than its parts. Without thinking too much on that initially, we truly built up an intricate network, a web of people and organizations working together for the sake of our planet.