Cork doesn't grow on trees, right?
12th edition; 30.03.23
As the first day of Jackie’s now job approaches, I take stock of all that we’ve accomplished. Of course the to-do list never gets smaller, it consistently gets bigger. The task of keeping the list under control is challenging, to say the least. With one parent working a full time job, the other trying to balance childcare with farm work and the house renovation project continues in the background. The daunting day of my immigration appointment is now also in sight.
That is the day - in theory - that will decide my fate in this country. I’ve been waiting a very long time to get the chance to sit down with a bureaucrat and sort out my papers. I’ll need to bring several documents, including a police report from Germany. I posted the paperwork to get the police report over a month ago, and though I expected it to take at least a few weeks, I was getting nervous since it still hadn’t arrived til this morning. With just one day to spare before setting off to Guarda for my appointment, we finally have everything that we need. We leave on the day that this edition is published and the appointment is on Friday.
We took a brief overnight trip to Porto this week to collect a computer from Jackie's new employers. We arrived in the afternoon, went walking on the beach, which was an amazing first experience for the toddler, and then got an early bedtime in a guesthouse.
The next day we arrive at the company office building, a sleek glass block situated amongst parking lots in the middle of a traffic island. A few minutes after Jackie walked inside, she returned. There was a communication issue between departments and the IT guys had no idea that she was coming, so we drove all the way back home empty handed.
It's always interesting to see different parts of the country, but it felt very nice to get back into the Serra. There was a stretch of motorway that passed through hundreds of hectares of burnt out plantation. Mile after mile of Eucalyptus trees that must have burnt just last year or no earlier than the year before. Since the trees were damaged, a messy tangle of new shoots sprouted from the base of the trunk. That will be a gigantic job to clean up.
Another major effect of that fire was that the ground beneath the trees was devastated by erosion. After the fires last year came torrential downpours during the fall and winter. I saw ruts in the ground that were large enough to engulf cars. An enormous amount of top soil sediments were lost in the areas effected.
I've been checking on the oak saplings that we took from the roadside clearcut and transplanted in our own forest. I was delighted to find that some of them have survived the transplantation and now sport new spring leaves! Others appear to be budding but need more time to know if they'll make it or not.
I was truly heartwarmed to see those green leaves. I also spread some wheat on that spot and enough of it survived the birds to provide some ground cover this summer, which is nice.
News from the new oak pollards. With the advent of spring comes the new shoots on the oak trees that I cut during midwinter. On some of the trees there were dozens of new shoots. Most are just a centimeter or two long at this point so I thinned them out by rubbing some of them off by hand. I picked the ones that grew highest on the trunk to be the new parts of the tree.
Seeing these shoots gave me a truly warm feeling on the inside. It's a sign that the new system in this part of the forest is working. Back in the old days, it was used for olive production, post abandonment it became an oak area, and now both kinds of tree can thrive on the same spot, they'll just have to take turns to dominate the canopy.
Some years will see the olive trees basking in the sun, and then there will be a period of time that the oaks shade them out. Then I'll come through to collect firewood and the olive trees will gain the sun again.
Speaking of the olive trees, the ones in the pollards have been pruned now, which brings the total of pruned trees up by thirteen. That essentially doubles our olive production. Though some of these trees are outside of the pollarded section of forest so get much less sun during summer growing time.
That being said, last year we got the nicest olives from the wild growing trees in the forest, it's just that those trees never gave more than a handful of olives each. Now that we have pruned many of our trees, the yield and quality of the olives should improve in all cases.
Cutting and shaping trees like this may seem wrong to some people, but it is part of a larger system. For olive trees that are already being managed, it’s important to keep pruning them, otherwise they will become very tangled and this could cause problems with the tree, and unlike certain other trees, olive bushes will not produce a useful amount of fruit unless it has been pruned.
When it comes to the wild growing olives and oaks, I chose to trim them so that they can support us in some way whilst we work to clean the forest and establish balance between the various forms of plant and animal life that exist here.
In the One Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka wrote about his experience developing the “do nothing” method of farming, in which he learnt several difficult but valuable lessons; in his early years, he experimented with his fathers citrus trees by no longer pruning them, the long story short is that over a hundred trees died when the carefully balanced system that had been practiced was abruptly broken. (There happen to be several dead olive trees in this area that were heavily tangled and overgrown, though I can’t definitively say what killed them.)
Fukuoka later grew citrus trees very successfully without pruning them, but those trees were grown in this way from seedling. I can attest that citrus trees do not need pruning to produce fruit because there is a tree just down the road from my house that was abandoned and neglected for many years, it was damaged in a fire but grew back in it’s natural form, producing copious amounts of oranges. There are also several abandoned olive trees that grow on the road near that citrus, they on the other hand favour growth over fruit, so if you want olives, you need to cut them.
Speaking of Fukuoka, he tended to philosophise over many of his decisions. Now that I find myself out of the city and with the responsibility of managing land, I find that every decision is a complex one. It’s hard not to philosophise on my interactions with nature. Every action has consequences and it’s impossible to fully understand how nature will react to our interventions, I often find myself contemplating whether I even have the right to be here, meddling with the natural lifeforms.
Then I see that the whole environment is a reaction to generations of human intervention, and to simply step back and let nature take care of itself is a logical fallacy because nature has long since been dismantled and replaced. In order to return the land to a condition that most closely resembles nature, more intervention is needed, careful and conscientious intervention. In some parts of the land, like the oak forest, it’s minor forms of intervention that are needed; such as undergrowth management and animal grazing, some light pruning to replicate the larger mammals that would have roamed the forests in times of antiquity.
On other parts of the property, a serious and chaotic form of intervention is needed; the plantation must be removed and replaced, for the pines it will be relatively simple, cut the trees and plant new ones, but the eucalyptus is such a resilient tree that truly removing it is almost impossible, they will need to be uprooted or continuously cut for years, scale is the challenge. It’s a process that will take years to even get started, but that’s better because we can learn the difficult lessons and make more manageable mistakes during this time period.
The other day I got a WhatsApp message from a local guy - who at 21 just so happens to be the youngest Portuguese person in the whole area - and he wanted to come and see our cork trees. He came along the next day with another young guy who was born English but grew up here. Between the three of us we communicated quite well, I'm getting better at understanding Portuguese, particularly when it regards the forest, and what I couldn't say or understand the "Anglo-Portuguese" neighbor helped by translating.
We agreed a price for the cork on the trees that are ready for harvesting. I won't say just how much we agreed on, but I'm aware the it was not the "correct" price. The major challenge for foreigners who buy cork trees in Portugal is that understanding the cork market takes a lot of time, insight, experience, and trustworthy contacts.
Last year, some men appeared at our place and offered us a price for the cork, but since we were overwhelmingly busy at the time and about to leave on a trip to Germany, we declined the offer and left the trees for another year unharvested.
The thing is, I could well have called up a number of different cork harvesters and had them all come out here and accept the highest bidder's offer, but is that really the fair thing to do? Some context; cork harvesting is hard work and there is not much profit in it. The real money is in the value added industry where the cork is transformed into usable products like bottle stoppers and postcards…
I fully believe that I should profit from my own labour, but who am I to demand from these men that they give me such a big part of their own profits? The cork harvesting trade is an under appreciated craft that is passed down from one generation to the next.
Meagre wages are something that harm the industry, there is only a short window of time in the year that the bark can be stripped from the tree, for the rest of the year the workers need to do other jobs to support themselves. In the modern world, it’s often easier to just migrate away. When this happens, a skilled worker is lost and they are not easy to replace.
Thanks for reading. No new video this week of course, but we will be making an update video at some point.
Thank you for this - always an interesting read! Totally agree with you about 'letting nature do its thing'. We've already interfered too much. Manage nature sensitively, and try to destroy as little as possible is perhaps the best we can hope for. Here, I have to fight back constantly against the march of trees. Native trees such as ash, hawthorn and elder, but in a few years they would engulf the garden and in a few decades overwhelm the house too. I like your approach to selling your cork, as long as your buyer realizes why you are choosing to accept less. And finally, fingers crossed for your immigration dossier. Look forward to your update video when you can publish it.
Great article. Forgive my ignorance but how is cork made into post cards?