Berber van Beek, our first intern, is a professional photographer from Curacao and did her Permaculture Design Course in Spain. Her project was to build a mandala garden that would minimize walkway space and maximize production space while only using one sprinkler. The mandala was to be an intensive system to begin making  the farm self sufficient in food.  
The site of her mandala was on a piece of land that had been bulldozed flat a couple of years ago to put in chicken pens. The soil was hard gray clay with a couple of millimeters of topsoil. We had no choice but to plough the compacted soil and rotivate it to build the the beds and then start from scratch rebuilding the soil with manure, limestone and thick layers of mulch. The progression pictures speak for themselves. Photos courtesy Berber  her website: www.beroots.com