A Regenerative Agroforestry course here at Ortoforesta last week. This time, I tried a different format, with more interactive moments and a group pruning session to observe the management of an already established system in its various components: fruit trees, shrubs, support trees, and herbaceous plants.
For those interested, we will repeat the same course during the autumn pruning, on September 20th. More info at cortesedario.com/corsi-presenza

Four landscapes. Four continents.

Tell me that you got everything you want.

There is a huge chunk of poetry that is only accessible on a grey morning, on a diet of Youtube videos and almond butter.

Tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is.

I look around myself and I see decay - powerful, dramatic, soul-crushing. A green light flashes. An answer is in the making, for the question I thought of and couldn’t hold on to.

It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out.

Thinking of a friend, of harmonies come and gone - of threads, voices, crippled arpeggios and wonky chords.

And nothing to get hung about.

The dishwasher in the corner, the sun shouting in the background. At the slightest turn of my head, I get showered with life.

You’ll say you’ve seen seven wonders, and your bird is green. Your bird is green.

When you’re looking for God, He is in the look of your eyes - they say. That’s why it’s unwise to wear glasses. Or listen to what they say - for that matter.

I walk through the garden and the trees smile at me. I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

And your bird can sing. Your bird can sing.

It's mid-May, at last the night temperatures stop dropping below ten degrees and the garden lets out a long sigh of relief. Spring, around here, always arrives late and a little reluctantly, and by the time it does it already has one foot in summer. It feels like the right moment to take stock, to set down what the field has taught me — and today I'd like to do that on a subject that has been with me since my very first day here: support plants.

Support plants are the species we include in an agroforestry system not for what we harvest from them, but for what they do for the system itself — producing biomass, shading the soil, suppressing weeds, hosting pollinators and predators, cycling nutrients, opening up compacted ground, stimulating ecological succession via strategic disturbance. They are the invisible infrastructure on which the productive species depend, and in a well-designed system they often outnumber them by a wide margin.

What follows are observations gathered over three years of trials (and errors), with no claim to completeness or authority. They are starting points more than conclusions, and I'd be glad if they opened up a conversation: on this subject I still have a great deal to learn.

https://en.cortesedario.com/post/support-plants-for-temperate-cliamate-agroforestry-a-few-observations

When syntropic agriculture arrived in Europe, it took on a very specific form, codified around a course that Ernst Götsch taught in São Paulo, Brazil, about a decade ago. Speaking to an audience of non-specialists, Ernst showed how one could plant all the stages of ecological succession from the very start, in a single row holding plants meant to populate the system's various layers (emergent, high, medium, and so on) over the short, medium and long term.

Lately I've been paying close attention to the excellent work of Scott Hall — mostly on his paid platform, Syntropia, but also in what he shares on YouTube and social media. Scott has developed a syntropic approach that mimics natural processes more closely; and in nature, clearly, ecological succession doesn't unfold "all at once" but in stages — in his words, through successional accumulation. He's the first to point out that he hasn't invented anything: this is syntropic agriculture, much as Ernst and various farmers in the north of Brazil practise it, and as you can read in Götsch's early writings. He has simply taken a fluid application of those principles and put it into a form that can be shared.

I'll try to sum it up here, weaving it together with my own way of reading succession and with a few observations made in Mediterranean and temperate climates. With no claim to being exhaustive.

https://en.cortesedario.com/post/successional-accumulation-a-syntropic-strategy-by-scott-hall

On 17 June 2026 the European Parliament gave final approval, at second reading (431 to 201, with 29 abstentions), to the regulation on New Genomic Techniques — NGTs, or in Italy TEA, tecniche di evoluzione assistita, “assisted evolution”.

Whenever something like this comes up, I hear people take very strong positions — often understandable ones, but emotional, and almost always cast the same way: what I think is sensible and good, and the opposite is reckless, dangerous, a disaster. On a question this tangled, ethically and biologically, that isn’t a frame I trust. So I’ll try the duller route instead: set out what happened, then the case for and the case against as fairly as I can, and only at the end what I make of it — with no pretence that my view is especially enlightened. My customers and fellow growers can read it and know where I stand, and I hope it starts a conversation.

https://en.cortesedario.com/post/ngts-and-gmos-what-happens

This video was shot in the early hours of the morning, a few days ago. This is OrtoForesta, an agroforestry market garden in Florence, Italy.

Our journey here started 3 and a half years ago, in February 2023. This was little more than a parking lot full of rubble, derelict polytunnel frames and brambles.

That a place as difficult as this can become a productive ecosystem is a testament to the importance of working with natural processes.

OrtoForesta feeds 40 to 50 families from May until Christmas, hosts 6 regenerative agriculture courses a year. However, it is, first and foremost, an open-air experiment of connection with our deepest nature.

Can we produce food without overstepping our ecological role? If so, agriculture will have to look like a continous back and forth between accumulation and disturbance.