we are in Aegean Turkey, steep costal hills, summer drought, heavy winter storms.
our neighbors decided to try to gain some money by illegally turning their (protected and ancient) olive orchard into little “hobby gardening plots” to sell for a higher price. their construction (seen on pics 1&2) consisted of completely killing everything on their land, turning the whole soil upside down to flatten and “clean” the place. they then built very cheap roads and cheap fences and thats how they tried to sell everything.
of cause they failed miserably, nobody wanted to buy anything in this steep place. after the first fall storm, half of their fences fell over. it’s all a huge mess, nature will eventually reclaim it.
but our land lies partly below their land, it’s an unfavorable cut-in, but we were fine with it because our plot had many other advantages (for example having the valley, where there is flat parts, meadows and space for water retention ponds.
but the border region between their land and our land is still pretty steep and we could not yet find a smart solution for the new problems that arise since the shitty destruction of the nature above us:
these fotos (screen shots from a video) i just took, show the situation when there is “just a short (10mins) medium rain”, this not even the heavy storm. it’s the third time our fence is down and i don’t really know how to tackle this other than spending a lot of money and building a concrete wall with big pipes in it. (we need a fence because our animals escape, while fox, street dogs, coyote and wild boars enter…)
further down where the road is, i fixed everything already several times with my backhoe but after every rain, it is destructed again. i need a serious solution how to move this water safely into the valley/creek bed. i feel dumb in a region that has drought issues all the time, to carry the water with big pipes without “collecting” it. but the hillside is so steep, it is not possible to build a swale or terrace or pond large enough to effectively collect these amounts that come down there. it’s unfortunate because this little valley had very beautiful almost flat “meadowy” spaces, before this shit started.
well… now you know.
