Agroforestry ecosystem

In parallel with writing, Erik Zakhia has always been passioned with planting, gardening and ecosystems, landscape shaping, and building things with his own hands.

It is in August 2020, when Erik settled in Amchit, his hometown, that he had the opportunity to reconnect on a daily basis with the garden he had started planting in 2006.

In August 2020, the "Fantasy Garden of Ylliriel", name Erik gave to the garden belonging to his parents, counted more than a hundred trees: fruit trees, but also flowering trees, and other trees that just provide the garden with shade, and timber. Many of these trees had been planted by Erik when he still went to school, a little more than a decade before.

Therefore in August 2020, the garden produced a variety of fruits, but no vegetables or salads. Erik decided to self-learn how to cultivate all the vegetable plants that he could never cultivate in the past as they require daily care and watering, and a constant presence. However instead of cutting trees as people usually do, to provide vegetables with the high amounts of sunlight they need, Erik decided to find a way to cultivate vegetables in between trees, according to agroforesty and permaculture principles.

A long research and quest started. Erik daily dedicated in between 4 and 8 hours of work to the garden, including on weekends and holidays. For some months, Erik decreased his writing output, to focus on the garden, which he suspected could become a crucial element in the novels he would co-write.

Erik conducted all sorts of experiments in the garden, and in the time lapse of one year, he found creative ways to cultivate many varieties of vegetables, salads, and fruit plants, that drastically increased the total yield of the garden. You can read more about all these experiments on https://yllirielfantasywriter.wordpress.com/

The specialty of Erik, that allowed him to cultivate large and small vegetables and fruits with success in between tall trees was among others, a raised bed of his own invention, burying dry and green leaves that abund underneath trees, with kitchen wastes, and ashes, in between large stones, covered by a thin layer of soil. Also, Erik never makes use of any chemical or biological product in his garden; combining many types of plants allows to decrease ailments, and if one year certain types of plants do not yield well because of climatic conditions, they are compensated by other plants which growth is on the contrary favored by these climatic conditions.

In the picture below, Erik poses with one of the large organic pumpkin he cultivated in a raised bed of his invention.

Erik, however, did not limit himself to planting. He built stone paths in the entire garden, thus dividing the garden in sections. He also learnt everything he could about wild plants, and wild edible plants, favoring those, in order to diversify the garden's production. There are wild edible plants that are delicious, and which are not found in supermarkets because their leaves rapidly wither when they are cut; however when a salad is freshly picked, that problem is resolved.

Erik also tackled water management issues in a creative way, increasing the capacity of the garden to store water by around 5000 liters. He did so by building with his own hands small dams on a canal that crossed the garden, transforming that canal into several series of ponds. He built several other ponds across the garden, and he also found the way to collect rain water in a tank. In that way, whenever during the driest weeks of the summer the watering needs become very important, Erik can use those extra water reservoirs in order to irrigate the most sensitive plants that wouldn't otherwise outlive the summer.

The most ambitious project in terms of engineering Erik undertook is the construction of a stairway in a "medieval" style, making it hold with the weight of the stones. There was an old building inside the garden, the barnhouse, which rooftop is at 4,5 to 5 meters height - entirely inaccessible, except with a ladder. Erik decided to build those stairs on his own, with his own hands, without using any mechanical means. He solely used materials he could find inside the garden, large rocks and stones, old piles of rubbles, old sacks of concrete, and he also collected some stones he could find on the beaches along the sea nearby his family house. Erik worked on building the stairway to the rooftop of the barnhouse from April 2021 to September 2021. It took him six months to build the 12 steps that would allow to access easily and in a safe and comfortable enough way the rooftop of the barnhouse. The estimated total weight of the stairs is of 10 tons, and Erik only used 150 kilograms of concrete, solely to cover the top of each step. Almost three years afterwards, the stairs is still as safe and comfortable as it first was, meaning that Erik's project was successful, despite being very daring. Underneath you can see the plan of the stairway Erik drew. The main challenges of the stairway's construction were: the weight of stones and finding ways to make them roll to get them up the stairs; determining the architecture and shape of the right stones to use at each stage in order to make the stairs hold; the construction of superelevated reinforcements all around the stairs to make them resistant to time and flooding rains.

Erik also built and restored various objects in the garden, including old wooden tables, etc. Moreover, Erik worked on researching the "perfect" raised beds' architecture, in order to guarantee the solidity of the raised bed, and the best growth of plants.

Underneath you will find a series of seven short, informal, spontaneous, non-professional videos where Erik briefly shows and discuss the Fantasy Garden of Ylliriel and the stairway he built. In future, these videos will be recorded again in a more professional way, once the garden is in its final shape, in order to encourage other persons to start taking care personally, and with passion and creativity, of their own garden, and showing them that even in tight and constrained spaces, and even underneath trees, it is possible to plant a thriving vegetable garden.

Planting, gardening and seeds keeping is one of the causes Erik plans to advocate for in the historical-fantasy novels he is co-writing together with Annelies Broeders. Indeed, human beings have mostly forsaken their roots, forgettting that plants are at the basis of life. Agricultural exploitations right now are huge, and most of people buy everything they consume, having lost the ancient knowledge and patience of how to plant. Industrial agriculture has negative consequences for the Earth and for the health of human beings. And human beings are too busy with their time consuming jobs, and digital life after their studies and work, to ever get interested in plants. Our bet is that a lot of the problems of humanity could be solved if people, instead of appreciating costly and polluting activities, could fall in love again with plants and planting. Plants have a lot of secret wisdom to teach, and they offer a quality and peaceful life to those who know how to appreciate them and take care of them on a daily basis. Plants are infinitely creative, and form fantasy worlds of themselves.