Camazotz Cohaven

Camazotz Property & Gardens

Our latest garden tour (recorded 19 Jan 2023): 

Our current vision and approach to gardening.

Objectives (our 'reason why')

Camazotz Finca gardens are intended to support up to 300 people in the coming years as society shifts focus from consumerism and parasitism built around the very gross concept of 'Gross Domestic Product', replacing it with a diverse, localized, and fully regenerated approach to cooperative community co-living. See http://camazotzcollective.com for more on that. 

1st Prize (our 'North Star' metric of success)

• An abundance of wild growing fruit and veg that can comfortably support 30+ people on the property
• Successful garden areas in different types of condition: open soil, controlled canopy, pruned forest 

Milestones

1. Achieve reliable growing of any types of fruit and veg while building new soil conditions to support expansion

2. Build 'Garden 1' with drip irrigation and growing circles to transform the soil conditions to support a new variety of easy to manage crops

3. Extend that success fully into Garden 2 and the surrounding canopy area with extended drip irrigation and soil management

4. Extend into Garden 3

5. Extend into Garden 4

6. Expand into new garden areas 

Approach

• Using Syntropic agriculture principles we will sow seeds in close proximity, aiming to build vertical layers with a mixed variety of crops
• We will start each area with heavy cover crops (beens, sunflowers, etc) to kick-start the soil development 
• Using a drip irrigation system and gradually extending it, we may need a water softening system to reduce calcium caused by our heavy limestone content) 
• Building soil involves collecting degraded wood from the property into piles along with green and brown leaves, additional soil collected from the property, and adding in compost and manure to build concentrated raised areas with high moisture retention
• Start of our yearly growing schedule (Google Sheet).

Foundations 

1. Create new soil (break up and aerate, mix with composts, mix with manure from the neighbors ranch) 
2. Make fertilizers: Compost pile with layers of greens browns, uncooked food leftovers). Avoid adding egg shell, meat or citrus fruits to main compost (create separate space or give to birds) 
3. Build burms (collect and separate logs, green and brown matter, and mulch for hugelkultur raised beds. Lasagna-layers of hugelkultur raised beds
4. Chop and drop (brings more sunlight to the floor, adds bio matter for mulch and soil volume)

Planting

• Use germinator for seeds until roots are well established
• Transplant into healthy soil beds

Rotation

• Maintain a rotor for planting, watering, and harvesting
• Nursery system from germination to transplantation
• Chop and drop 

Challenges & Questions

• We need to understand the seasons of Yucatan for when best to plant different types of crops and how to navigate those conditions to provide for all-year-round harvesting. Research on that to come.