Regenerating a Sicilian hillside, one season at a time
Permanido sits at roughly 600 metres elevation in the Nebrodi Mountains of northern Sicily, just outside the village of Tortorici. It's a place where Mediterranean warmth meets mountain weather: hot, dry summers give way to cool, wet winters with occasional snowfall on the peaks above us.
The terrain is steep and south-facing, carved by centuries of rainfall into natural terraces and gullies. On clear days the views stretch across chestnut forests to the Tyrrhenian Sea. When we arrived, the land had been abandoned for years. Compacted clay soil, invasive bramble, and little sign of the productivity it once held.
What drew us here was the potential hidden beneath the neglect. Good elevation for airflow, a reliable spring, ancient olive trees still clinging on, and a microclimate capable of growing an extraordinary range of food. The land just needed someone to listen to it again.
We don't impose a plan on the land. We read the landscape and work with what's already here. Our design follows permaculture zoning: high-use annual beds and herbs closest to the kitchen, then orchards and food forest layers, and wilder edges where nature manages itself.
Water is everything on a Sicilian hillside. We've carved swales along the contours to slow and sink rainwater, installed gravity-fed rainwater harvesting from every roof, and mulch heavily to lock moisture into the soil through the dry months. No irrigation pumps, no mains water for growing.
Our food forest is planted in layers: canopy fruit and nut trees over smaller stone fruit, with berry bushes, herbs, and ground covers beneath. Companion planting and no-dig beds keep the annual vegetable garden productive without turning the soil or breaking fungal networks. Every element serves at least two functions.
The list changes with the seasons, which is the whole point. Spring brings fava beans, artichokes, wild greens, and the first strawberries. Summer is tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, courgettes, basil by the armful, and more figs than we can eat. Autumn means olives, pomegranates, persimmons, and late-season greens. Winter gives us citrus (lemons, blood oranges, mandarins) alongside brassicas, fennel, and root vegetables.
Our food forest includes over forty varieties of fruit and nut trees: almond, walnut, mulberry, plum, peach, apricot, cherry, and several heritage Sicilian olive cultivars. We grow edible flowers for the kitchen (borage, nasturtium, calendula) and a dedicated herb spiral with rosemary, oregano, thyme, sage, and mint.
A small flock of chickens roams the orchard, turning fallen fruit into eggs and scratching pest larvae out of the soil. They're part of the system, not separate from it.
Regenerative agriculture goes beyond organic. We're not just avoiding harm. We're actively rebuilding soil health, water cycles, and biodiversity with every decision we make. The difference is measurable: darker, spongier soil, more earthworms, more insect life, and stronger plants year on year.
Composting is the engine. Kitchen scraps, animal bedding, prunings, and cover crop residues all go back into the soil as compost or mulch. We grow nitrogen-fixing cover crops (clover, vetch, fava) in every bare space to feed the biology underground. No synthetic fertiliser has ever touched this land.
We manage pests through habitat, not chemicals. Hedgerows shelter predatory insects. Owl boxes handle rodents. Diversity itself is the best defence. Monocultures attract pests, polycultures confuse them. Every season the system gets more resilient, requires less intervention, and produces more food.
Reading about regenerative farming is one thing. Walking through the food forest, picking lunch straight from the plant, and feeling the difference in the soil beneath your feet is another thing entirely. We welcome visitors who want to experience it firsthand.
Join a farm tour or cooking experience to see how the land feeds the kitchen. Book a stay at Permanido to live the rhythm of the farm for a few days: morning harvests, afternoon shade under the olive trees, meals made from what we picked that day.
If you want to go deeper, our volunteer programme lets you spend time working alongside us: planting, pruning, composting, building. You'll leave with practical skills, dirty fingernails, and a changed perspective on where food comes from.
We rely on natural processes, companion planting, biological pest control, and healthy soil biology, to grow food without synthetic inputs.
Swales, mulching, and rainwater harvesting mean we work with Sicily's dry summers rather than fighting them.
From pollinator corridors to predator habitat, every element is designed to support the web of life on and around the farm.
Kitchen scraps become compost. Prunings become mulch. Nothing is wasted. Everything feeds the next cycle.
Book a stay and experience regenerative agriculture firsthand, from soil to plate.
Book Your Stay →