Category: Rovira Regenerativa

OFIW (On Friday's I write) Rovira Regenerativa

Responding to the crisis (OFIW)

Post author By Lou
Post date November 22, 2024
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Responding to the crisis (OFIW)

Lou is feeling inspired by ideas of "Holistic Fundraising through love and connection" and also reflecting on collapse, hormones, and the usual Boodaville and Rovira Regenerativa updates.

When I have spare mental capacity my mind always wanders back to the Rovira Regenerativa project and how we are going to make it possible, in a beautiful way, and bring many people with us on the journey.

One of the ideas bubbling around is that we find a few “big donors” who, prior to launching a crowdfunding are committed to adding €5k to the campaign. Then I saw a post on facebook from an old friend Roger Munns, who along with another local friend John Smith have turned their passion for the ocean into amazing documentary footage of the incredible life on our planet. They are both very successful, some of the best on the planet at what they do.

I got to thinking that maybe one of these “big donors” could be a collective from Cornwall; as well as Roger and John, and all the inspiring friends and family I have there, some other people come to mind – Chris Jones and the beavers, Tim Smit and the Eden project, Val Grainger permaculture, Hannah at Ecological Land Coop, Tim at SAS… and more… I got lost in the idea of organising an event next summer and imagining us all in a sharing circle talking about our projects and passions. Then I had the book idea..

How about as part of the crowdfunding we also create a book “Holistic Fundraising through love and connection” in which we share our methods, design and values, and also have pages sharing projects we are connected to via the campaign. Photos of the amazing ocean life and the people who made is possible for us to see it, shared visions from other ecological projects, wildlife shots of the beavers returning again to our ecosystem. I imagine a truly beautiful collection – which we could sell on site for the next decade!!!

I’m managing to feel good in spite of the state of the world this month. I’ve realised that working in ecological design and being inspired hour after hour by Holistic Financial planning, ideas of adding fungal spores to chainsaw oil, ways of regenerating soil by planting the right seeds…. I will not be slowed or dampened by the way things are going.

But it’s really catastrophic now. Humanity noticed briefly in 2019 that there was a planetary health emergency and we were going to break the systems that keep us alive, but then collectively the powerful people in the world did basically nothing. And now about 90%* of rich people just ignore what’s happening. I wonder if my pals in the UK have considered their future if the ocean currents collapse (I’m gonna ask Roger Munns what he thinks about that!!). I see death and then lockdowns in Spain because of Climate Change Adaptation FAILS. I mean 5 years ago we were worried about the rise of Eco-fascism – but who needs eco? The noise about environmental issues was smothered and we just get plain old fascism.

This rant is not helping, or helped by the rushes of hormones that have left me raging this week! I usually start these pieces with a reflection on my own health, and it is incredible how these surges of wanting to smash things come along when the bus to school is stuck in traffic. A wonderful friend of mine has been learning about raw food recipes, and managing hormones that way. He made me think, and insipred me to focus on bringing loads more organic raw food into each day. I was craving thinly sliced white cabbage at 4am this morning when these ideas were flying around my head!!

And now onwards with projects, community and vegetables that keep me thriving.

*completely invented statistic

Boodaville finca and rovira regenerativa

Boodaville Finca is getting tidier and tidier! It’s an amazing place for permaculture living, connecting with nature and regenerating. We are working on an idea “The Boodaville Experience” to share the space (it would have to be for very limited numbers of people!).

Nick came and fixed the drain and we are moving to finally finish fixing the roof. (After the rain we had a better idea of where water gets in, so we know what weak points we want to work on)

We had an amazing weekend with Angela, Sam, Priya and Lou talking about the design for the vineyard. We talked a lot and turned that into a solid plan – we are going to implement a “Seeds as Fertilizer” experiment and get manure down in the fields before the end of the year. I’ll be sharing more about this via Instagram and the Web – and there’s one lovely conversation with Sam about how to use pruning in Syntropic Agriculture that we’ve uploaded already.

I am moving forward with the Sponsorship Mission to make time to get on with accelerating the overall Rovira Regenerativa Project. I hope that many of you will join in as a sponsor to help make the project bigger!

my permaculture / eco activities

I visited Vidalia to participate briefly in a Permaculture Teacher Training course for refugees. It was a wonderful experience – the highlight was talking to a Palestinian Permaculture Olive Framer with 3000 year-old trees who sells the oil to LUSH.

other Boodaville projects

We are offering a Biochar workshop on 21st December! We’re very happy to work with Jordi and Nick again and saw SUCH impressive results using the biochar to help our little trees survive the drought.

The Boodaville volunteers Alessandro and Olivia are nearly half way through their 6 month stay. They went to the whole course at Vidalia as volunteers and rated their experience 9/10.

The next Erasmus+ event will be in May 2025 near Boodaville – RegenerAct. We should have a meeting to look at getting more events for next year in the calendar.

overall admin of the Asociation

The financial situation is sound and thanks to some hard work by Lou we are close to having an organised, transparent, accounting system that actually tells us the funds available four our wish list : seeds, a good strimmer, animal poo without medicines, getting the next report to finalise the persmissions to open legally as a rural classroom, and much much more!

The website continues to have issues and we should move the WHOLE thing over to a new server. Add to previous list “Pay Arnau or Adam to move the website”

We have applied for the Kit Digital grant!

I actually have lots of lovely photos to add to this post – but technical issues have frozen the media gallery…. so see the previous post “12€”, or keep up on Instagram!

Lou

Lou - I started on the Boodaville path when I bought the land in Matarranya in 2008 and have dedicated an incredible amount of time, and not very many euros, to building up the project over the years.

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For just 12€ you can help Anna Louise bring Rovira Regenerativa to life

Post author By Lou
Post date November 14, 2024
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For just 12€ you can help Anna Louise bring Rovira Regenerativa to life

Anna Louise has a mission to accelerate our Regenerative Agriculture and education project : Let's be up and running and awesome by March 2025.

The long-term vision of the project is to offer community learning experiences in a rich green valley of biodiversity, where farmers employ regenerative agroforestry and syntropic agriculture techniques to grow healthy, abundant and varied produce, including a thriving vineyard.

Read more about the project

Will you sponsor me 12€ (2€ a month) to complete my “SPONSORSHIP mission”?

MISSION to march:

Find 300 sponsors and spend one working day a week on these tasks.
Identify viable ways to raise 60k with: research, networking, calls, conferences. Decide which one(s) and do it.
Communicate the vision and mission for the 60k project
Coordinate ongoing activities in the shared drive; keep current activities moving and produce a HIGH QUALITY design for the 8ha of land; visit projects to learn best practices and strengthen networks.
Update the blog and Instagram

Many people have already contributed and it is so appreciated!

With family life and other projects I can’t make time to do these tasks unless I have compensation. I still do all the practical work, events and a lot of design and networking for fun.. but more time is needed if we want to really increase the impact of our work.

You can follow the project on the Instagram account @roviraregenerativa and on the webpage boodaville.org/rovira-regenerativa

Many of you sponsor me because you love the land and have followed the project for years. If you would like lots of information and regular updates then please join the Telegram channel. You can see the list of sponsors and I’ll give weekly updates on where the time goes… I believe in Radical Transparency!

Please OPT OUT if you don’t want your name to be included in the list of sponsors, and if you have a specific name you would like to include then tell me!

To keep this efficient I am receiving money directly and you can choose which is easiest from four different payment methods. I’m not going to put them on a website, so If you haven’t received them – please send me a message!! (I’d love your support even if we don’t know each other yet!)

If you would PREFER to make an official donation to our non-profit Boodaville Association then that’s ok too. A gross payment of 17.50€ will lead to a net income for me of 12€ after social security, admin costs, and tax.

Let’s end with some photos from the project! And here’s to completing the mission, buying the vineyard and becoming a farm as well as an education centre!

Thank you!!!!

Lou

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OFIW (On Friday's I write) Rovira Regenerativa

Strimming and screens (OFIW)

Post author By Lou
Post date October 4, 2024
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Strimming and screens (OFIW)

Lou's weekly update includes adventures, accounting news, ESC project applications, and some actual farm work with the strimmer at Rovira Regenertiva!

I’ve been all over the place since last Friday – teaching at Wildlab then an amazing drive round the back of Monsterrat that ended very badly, after a beautiful sunset, with a missed junction and a 40 minute detour on a dark motorway, before arriving feeling very exhausted at Monkey Business festival.

I lasted just under 24 hours at the party before crashing out at Caseres on Saturday night. We laughed a lot about people’s reactions to me being there “Oh, we didn’t expect you to actually come, it’s lovely to see you” as I staggered around feeling old, wearing the last clean t-shirt in my bag (I’m still basically living out of a suitcase since the trip, but that’s another story involving bed bug scares and a toxic fumigation). I’m glad I went, I had some fun, it was great to participate in a workshop run by young people for a change.. they call it “Erotic Ecology”.

Then I had a few days in the village, an afternoon making a community garden at the Cooperative housing project I’m in, and then back in time for homework, cuddles, and Kira’s weekly Cello experience. Maybe you saw her buzzing through Barcelona on the back of a moped with a Cello last night. What a life for a 10 year old!!

Boodaville finca and rovira regenerativa

We had a visit from Priya and, together with the volunteers living in Caseres, she worked to clear out silt and level an infiltration irrigation ditch in the Thyme Terrace project where we planted 100 tiny Almond Trees before a drought. (Some of them are alive. We’ll see how it looks when the rain comes back).

I finally got to use the strimmer on Tuesday to keep up the plan to chop and drop the wild fennel and grass growing between the vines in the Rovira Regenerativa vineyard.

I’m also really pleased to report that I’ve raised the first 108€ in my patreon style “Would you give me 12€?” campaign, which means I can spend some hours raising the next bit, and taking the first steps with growing the project. Thank you to my first supporters: Kerry, Mark, Elaine, Ruth, Manu, Rob, Jessica and Priya you are wonderful humans!!

my permaculture / eco activities

I’m looking at the calendar for October and November and wondering what impact it would have on the world if I got into the “Impact Week” rich people’s investment, “let’s bring tech to Africa”, conference here in Barcelona. I’m very interested by the presence of Stockholm Resilience Centre who I’ve seen on the Donut Economics Action Lab. The Global Donut Days are the same dates, maybe there’s some synergies emerging here.

Looby told me she wants my voice in her book and likes the story I wrote! To fully participate in that publication I need to write up the Permaculture Design I did for the trip in some kind of readable format.. which gets me thinking about whether I should move forward with a Permaculture Diploma at one of the national academies that exist. I also want to design the food forest and vegetable garden at the Housing Coop (La Fabrica de la Transició)

Here’s a stunning quote from Dougald Hine about statistics… I’m still enjoying his book and following the project A school called HOME

“The patterns that can be traced when lives are reduced to statistics do not reveal an underlying truth, deeper and more trustworthy than the evidence of our own experience. These patterns are the footprints left on a beach across which we have walked. Read with care, they have things to tell us; but are silent about almost everything that mattered about the day we spent together on that beach.”

other Boodaville projects

We’ve applied for another project coordinating the next 2 volunteers who will live in Caseres, and very much hope Catalunya has enough money to fund it. In theory, with the accreditation we ALREADY have this approved, but times are hard and budgets have been cut (or badly planned). This is very important as these projects pay a large part of the Association overhead costs, and fund the flat in Caseres.

We are still looking for young people to join the latest Solidarity Project, and this application will be sent in the next few days. We will organise a series of practical work days and encourage a community of young people, from rural areas to get to know each other by attending several events around Southern Catalunya during 2025.

We are taking the first steps to oranise an event in November near Caseres, as part of the Rio Algars solidarity project. We are looking for co-organisers and ideas!! There’s a small budget available for this one..

Sergi at Mas Les Vinyes asked if we want to do another youth project at their place, this time with me doing more teaching! That felt great and made me smile.

overall admin of the Asociation

And finally…. boring but very important..

WE GOT PAID!! and have moved the money on very quickly to pay 27,333€ to people who were waiting. Thanks so much to everyone for their patience!!

I have also been reminded that the website doesn’t work properly. I know this, but need to be pushed into action sometimes. I’ve added a new plugin to try and solve the problem, and must move forward with the Kit Digital to get an ACTUAL paid web person. For me.. like the computer.. it’s just a tool. I can’t get into how it works or how it breaks!!

Well that felt pretty complete.. now it’s time to get back to the job list. See you next week!

Lou

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Data: Food forest study and soil analysis

Post author By Lou
Post date September 14, 2023
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Data: Food forest study and soil analysis

Results of our Food Forest Productivity Study and the anaylsis of the microbiology of the soil by Sam Miller

Sara passed me the results from measuring circumference and height of our Food Forest trees.

Overall 49 of the 68 trees included in the study are still alive. But we have to recognise that 20 of these haven’t got through their first year yet.

When trees reach full size it will be important to switch to measuring productivity of fruit, rather than height. Only one tree we planted is productive, and we didn’t collect data on the original 3 olive trees and 4 almond trees – we probably should!

A conclusion is that we should focus on enriching the guilds that are still alive rather than adding new ones, and we can see how things improve when the wind break grows. At the moment.. it’s alive but not growing very much.

SOIL ANALYSIS

Our wonderful friend and recently qualified soil microbiolgy expert Sam Miller took a sample from the Food Forest and a sample from the Thyme Terrace project. (Search either of those terms on the blog page to find out more)

For the analysis 25 fields of view are considered from a one drop dilution under a microscope slide. At 400X there are over 2000 possible fields of view available to look at, so it is inevitable that it is not 100% accurate without taking hours and hours of work per sample.

For the Nematode analysis, the whole slide is scanned at 100X magnification so I took the opportunity to document some of the organisms that I saw during this part of the analysis. The magnification of the photos should be indicated in the title of each one. Click on the images to get the full sized view and the title.

In summary: Both places have bacteria and nematodes, but the food forest has no fungi and the thyme terrace has some.

This is what I expected as the Food Forest is an attempt to recuperate highly ploughed dead soil, but the Thyme Terrace is a place that has been left alone for over thirty years and has undergone natural succession and regeneration, and has many more bushes and trees.

You can see the spreadsheets for these studies if you want to go deep here and you’ll find some photos and the latest map in there too!

Lou

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Update from Rovira Regenerativa (3)

Post author By Lou
Post date July 28, 2023
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Update from Rovira Regenerativa (3)

Updates from Rovira Regenerativa, our valley scale regenerative agroforestry / community ecosocial transition / education project! Energy and guidance from Permaculture Design.

Monday 5th June Anna Louise had a meeting with our Vall Rovira neighbours Ana and Milu, and Manolo and Ilu. The five of us talked about our passion for regenerative agriculture, and how we can promote it and work together in the valley. Everyone was happy with the idea of forming an Association of neighbours, which is something we can do when we have more capacity. We’d like to be a reference point for anyone buying land in the valley.

The idea of hosting youth groups, camping or in dorm style rooms in the valley for overnight stays is not something we have a legal situation for at the moment, but if the local council are open to the idea of allowing it at the local Casa Rural, they are open to the idea of hosting groups.

We are hoping to organise a Permaculture course in November in collaboration with our neighbours and we would like to offer the practical work during the course at Ana and Milu’s farm. We can host 14 people with accomodation and full board in the local Casa Rural and more people can join the course without accommodation. We need to set a date and plan the budget, price and promotional material for this.

Manolo suggested that the different types of farms and fields in the valley could provide a rich space for educational activities. We need an inspired regenerative thinking farmer to take on the day to day grind of agricultural work.

Towards the end of June, the three volunteers held a “soap exchange” at the local village market in Caseres. Less people than usual attended the market because the fruit and veg stall that usually turns up was not there. However, despite the reduced number of passersby, the event was still quite successful as several people requested our soap in exchange for buckets full of their compost. Not only this, but they offered to keep doing this for the foreseeable future, i.e. to put their organic waste aside for us. A few days later, a bag of compost appeared in front of the garage door with a sign on it which read, “Para compost”; we have yet to identify the mysterious benefactor. For the three volunteers, the whole experience left them feeling that they were starting to be embraced by the village and become part of the community.

Another development was Marc’s father showing Sara where he piles up the grass on his fields. A few weeks earlier, Sara had gone with the other volunteers to collect it and now they have all the ingredients (and in the right amounts) to start a compost pile! Sara really enjoyed the exchange, which allowed her to chat with some of the local people, get to know them better and give them the chance to get to know the volunteers better too. Fostering synergies!

Meanwhile, Klif has been helping Ana the neighbour with finishing the roof of her house; previously Ana had been dragging tiles back and forth all on her own, but now she has the help of three generous neighbours. She has also expressed an interest in providing the now idle part of her olive farms as a place where Rovira could hold workaways or carry out permaculture experiments!

After a meeting with Ana which involved some brainstorming about the future of Rovira, someone suggested getting in touch with the founders of the Transition Network to see if we could maybe create a transition hub somewhere in the local area. Transition is a movement that has been growing since 2005. Community-led Transition groups are working for a low-carbon, socially just future with resilient communities, more active participation in society, and caring culture focused on supporting each other. For more information, go to: https://transitionnetwork.org

Lou

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Update from Rovira Regenerativa (2)…

Post author By Lou
Post date June 9, 2023
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Update from Rovira Regenerativa (2)…

Updates from Rovira Regenerativa, our valley scale regenerative agroforestry / community ecosocial transition / education project! Energy and guidance from Permaculture Design.

New team member, James, visited for a week, staying at the house in Caseres. He met Alex and Sara, who gave him a tour of Boodaville and the surrounding valley. Although James was working online in the mornings (giving private English lessons), he helped out with a few gardening tasks in the afternoons. These included:

– Digging a trench next to the tree saplings alongside the (dried up) river and adding a mix of biochar* and compost tea. ** Given the months long drought, the ground was absolutely parched, but as luck would have it, it rained virtually every day after their labours. This should help incorporate the organic matter into the soil and aid its transportation through to the trees’ roots.

– Cutting back some of the dried up wild fennel stalks, for future use as mulch.

– Collected hay and manure from the donkey and horse living in the valley. Alex pointed out that we’ll have to check that neither animal has been treated with particular medication, e.g. antibiotics, which means their faeces could have a deleterious effect on the soil.

Alex and Sara continued the Regenerative Agriculture course at Gandesa. Both feel that the course remains fun and informative, if a little overwhelming at times. Sara was interested to learn that land which has been farmed conventionally for many years requires a transition period before it can be farmed in a fully regenerative way, e.g. soils which have been consistently tilled should not be suddenly subject to a no-dig method. Instead, they should be gradually tilled less often and to a lesser depth over a period of about five years. In this way, the incorporation of organic matter and deep rooted green manures can better improve the soil’s structure, drainage and biodiversity.

Finally, Sara removed one of the mould plates from the two quadrants in the edible forest. The rice contained within the mould had turned a few different colours, predominantly grey, but some grains were orange and green. A wider range of multiple colours would have indicated a more fertile and biodiverse soil, so there’s clearly work to do. Meanwhile, the other plate had mysteriously disappeared! Initially bamboozled as to what could have happened to it, Alex suggested that a search of the site might be in order. Sure enough, the plate turned up about fifty metres away, perched on a wall next to the path running down the valley. The mosquito net in which the mould had been wrapped was also nearby, ripped to shreds, and the plate contained a little remaining rice, but the mould was gone – presumably snaffled up by a local fox or wild boar. Something to bear in mind when releasing the chickens from their pen, or leaving the door open to the house!

* Compost tea is a liquid produced by extracting beneficial microorganisms —bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, and micro arthropods—from compost using a brewing process. A true compost tea contains all of the organisms that were present in the compost before brewing. The brewed water extract should also have soluble nutrients from the compost. Compost tea is a good overall plant health booster (a little like vitamins for people), and healthy plants are better able to resist pests and diseases.

** Biochar is biomass (wood, leaves, straw, or other biosolids) heated at high temperatures without oxygen. This process, known as pyrolysis, concentrates carbon in a form that is very resistant to biological decomposition. When applied to soil and other products, a large fraction of its carbon content is sequestered for 100+ years.

Lou

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Spring Equinox at Boodaville Caseres and being exhausted in BCN (OFIW)

Post author By Lou
Post date March 24, 2023
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Spring Equinox at Boodaville Caseres and being exhausted in BCN (OFIW)

This week Lou shares wonderful images from Spring at Boodaville Caseres and the project Rovira Regenerativa is coming back to life..

All the images this week are from Sara, our volunteer in Caseres. I am taking time to enjoy them now as I post, and imagining myself being there with them at the beautiful Spring ceremony Jessica organised up at La Gessera. I’m taking a few breaths and wondering when I got so busy and stressed during the last week that I forgot to stop, stretch, breathe, or go to the park for a cup of tea.

offloading and reflecting (maybe ignore this and skip to the next section)

Well, the renewed vigour of the drilling next door, the interrupted sleep and diarrhoea from Joanna, the homework demands and nits from Kira, the high stress work situation of Bernat, the lack of movement on my own to do lists and upcoming report deadlines have quite a lot to do with it. Plus the EU still haven’t transferred money owed so Boodaville needs to take out another loan to cover payments, and of course, this is the week after the passing of Bernat’s mother which was intense, emotional and all engaging from Tuesday until we got home after the funeral last Saturday night. Even today I find myself thinking about how I can make way for Bernat to avoid the worst of the high stress situations in his life this weekend, and piling up my own stress and workload in order to do that. When I say work here, I am talking about child-care and household management as well as Boodaville.

I think we are all doing too much.

On the bright side

I am incredibly lucky to have access to a loan and am so grateful for that. I am also pleased that my effort to help with Kira’s habitat homework has had brilliant results – she has taken some of the Biochar from our workshop to school today as part of her presentation on the Amazon rainforest habitat!!

As well as answering the questions from her teacher she included two “curiosities”:

Firstly as she was told by Nick Park in the workshop–

The people of the amazon used biochar in their agriculture hundreds of years ago and because biochar stays in the soil and helps the soil long-term, it contributed to the forest growth. Humans helped the incredible rainforest ecosystem become what it is!

Secondly as she was told by me and the Eden Project giant rainforest bubble–

The trees make their own rain. They make their own clouds because of transpiration and then it rains.

I didn’t go so far as to mention that if too many trees are cut down, they will no longer have this ability to make rain, the rainforest will reach an irreversible tipping point and will stop being the habitat that it is and will turn into a grassland. This is why the Amazon is a concern for all of us, and a World Heritage site – “the lungs of the earth”. But you can hardly even google information about it these days, at least in Spanish, because all the results are about the company with the same name.

UPDATES ON 2023 OPPORTUNITIES

The places for the Youth Worker Training in Portugal are now filled.

We still have places for the two youth exchanges in May (Active Permaculture at Mas Les Vinyes and RegenerACTion in Portugal). We have a few applications for volunteering in Boodaville Caseres but we want more!

Sanilles in June- we don’t have funding approved yet, but we really need to find participants to “save the date” as we expect a successful outcome.

Site Manager – we have the site manager role covered until August with Alex currently in the role, and Sara ready to take over if he moves on before then. We are looking for applications for the role of Site Manager and Volunteer Mentor starting in September 2023. We will make a new appointment based on the best person for the role between all the applicants. If you are interested in coming to live and work and manage Boodaville Caseres please get in touch to organise visits and training before August to see if you role is for you!

ROVIRA REGENERATIVA COMING BACK TO LIFE

I looked back at my plan for the year and am amazed to see that the vague idea to get back into Rovira Regenerativa in March became a reality without any pushing from me.

After getting the trees from LifeTERRA I was invited to a meeting with Kathy from Transfer consultancy (the same organisation as Volterra who’ve run Life projects forever). I had floated the idea of being a beneficiary in a larger project – I was hoping to open a door to receiving a donation of up to 30 000 euros to be a small part of a much bigger project. BUT the door I opened was nearly a hundred times bigger than that. This was the meeting we were trying to get back in 2020 when we had a draft of a valley scale regenerative agriculture / community resilience / education Life project and were looking for someone to write and coordinate this BIG IDEA project.

The door is open and it is a little overwhelming, but also amazing. This fills the gaps in the 2020 proposal. The next step is to look again at the what we wrote, find out who wants to be involved, share the information sent to us by Kathy (which is a lot) and then have another meeting to see how our project could work. Transfer consultancy will help us find a coordinating organisation and other partners and then write the project.

The project never really stopped in practical terms and we’ve just updated the instagram with descriptions, videos and images of the planting and regenerative agroforestry work we are doing and how it can be scaled up with more resources.

Please see more on the blog page and fill in the form if you want to get involved in what could be a valley scale, integrated, regenerative cultures and soil restoration project.

We will have a meeting next week on Thursday 30th March, time to be confirmed. If you want to join and find out more please fill in that form!

BOODAVILLE CASERES AND BOODAVILLE BARELONA

No progress on fixing the roof or getting permissions
No rain yet to fill the new balsas
Great photos and spring food forest work at the Boodaville Finca
Sara and Emma were together for a week in Caseres enjoying bike rides, river paddling and getting on brilliantly with all their tasks. (and participating in the online on-arrival training from INJUVE)
Alex is staying another three months and we had a meeting with Klif who will be joining Boodavillle Caseres 6th April
Baloo will be leaving Boodaville Barcelona in April
The Barcelona accomodation situation is solved for the current volunteers.

Lou

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Workshop : How to make your own biochar!

Post author By Lou
Post date March 15, 2023
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Workshop : How to make your own biochar!

On the 12th March from 11 - 16h in El Pinell de Brai we ran this workshop making Biochar. See fotos and info here!

What is Biochar?

Did you know that this charcoal-like substance improves soil structure, increases water retention and aggregation, reduces acidity and improves porosity?

Biochar is a charcoal-like substance that’s made by burning organic material from agricultural and forestry wastes (also called biomass) in a controlled process called pyrolysis.

What are its benefits?
Enhancing soil structure, increasing water retention and aggregation, improving microbial properties, decreasing acidity, improving porosity, regulating nitrogen leaching, improving electrical conductivity and more.

Here’s a video!

On Sunday the 12th March

11:00 Meet at Jordi’s Farm near El Pinell de Brai, Terra Alta, Tarragona

11:30 – 15:30

– Manifesto “Soil4Life” the importance of our soils (Anna Louise Gurney)

– Theory session on soil : maintenance and regeneration (Nick Park)

– Practical session – light the fire, make biochar step by step together.

We will eat a picnic lunch during the day. We will be in a rural site without any installations, so you need to bring your picnic, drinking water and everything you need for the day. We recommend folding chairs if you have them!

You can’t cook on the biochar fire!! haha (but we can keep warm)

15:30 Close the day and tidy up.

If you want to join for the weekend you can arrive in Caseres on Saturday 11 March, or Friday 10th March, and stay in the flat we have in Caseres village and travel to the workshop in a carshare with Alex from Boodaville.

Videos from the day here!

Lou

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permaculture Rovira Regenerativa

Syntropic experiment 1, and wishing you a Happy 2023 (On Fridays I write)

Post author By Lou
Post date January 13, 2023
No Comments on Syntropic experiment 1, and wishing you a Happy 2023 (On Fridays I write)

Syntropic experiment 1, and wishing you a Happy 2023 (On Fridays I write)

Happy 2023! Lou is back with details of our syntropic agriculture experiment and updates on other activities over holidays.

I’m back! and catching up after the long Spanish holiday. With King’s Day on the 6th January, the first day back in the office (read : kids back at school) was 9th January! Alex has moved in to Boodaville Caseres, the cats have mostly moved out, and the place is looking tidier than ever after some intense days clearing out the yearly build up of random stuff.

The children are healthy, energies are restored and I’m even feeling in many ways “back to normal” and my motivation is similar to the good old days. On Monday we are meeting to put projects and objectives into a plan for the year. Any input / ideas are welcome over the weekend.

pooless

Before I say any more about the syntropic agriculture experiment, first I have to make the kind of comment i don’t usually make.

“Never mind what I’m doing with that stick, look at my hair! Doesn’t it look amazing!!”

That was my first thought when I saw the above photo and now I can share with the world that I haven’t washed my hair with shampoo since June 2021. Inspired to action by Paul Wheaton and Shaun Klassen-Koop’s book “Building a better world in your backyard” and the fact I was pregnant and not going to be going out very much, I stopped washing. It took 15 months, but now I never need shampoo again. I use a comb to clean my hair, a nailbrush to clean the comb, and it really does look and feel great. Hooray for reducing the number of chemicals in my house, reducing costs, going the natural way. Not to mention savings by avoiding packaging, transport and prodcution embedded energy, water, fossil fuels and quite probably buying from a huge multi-national company participating in a degenerative economic and financial system. But mainly – it’s easy and it works!

syntropic seeding experiment 1

“Plants grow in community, just like the human beings in villages, and the ground seeks to protect itself from the sun, just like a person at noon wants the shadow of a tree.” – Emilio

We seeded a forest! The theory is that nature decides, based on incredible wisdom and ecosystem knowledge, when the seeds will germinate.

The different species are ready to fill roles in the natural succesion, soil restoration and ecosystem of plants growing together. We are creating conditions for life and more life. The more science based element of the experiment is to see what two adjacent fields will look like in ten years – one with all species planted from seed (although we did put some tree cuttings in there) and the other with the “normal” method of planting trees from a nursery.

The theory is that growing from seed, in company, gives the bushes and trees such an advantage that they will “overtake” the bigger trees next door within ten years. I love learning about theories that are so deeply based in designing as nature with a holistic approach to ecosystems of soil, plants and all living beings. Not only is it beautiful, and regenerative, but we hope to demonstrate how effective these ideas are in practice.

We have a googledoc with exact details of what we introduced. See the titles of the photos and the map below that show what we did.

This was a joint project with seeds and cuttings donated from Sam Miller, Jessica, and Anna Louise at Boodaville. As always we are infinitely grateful to Sam for his brilliantness and generostiy. We did most of the work on 29th December 2022, and will continue to add seeds to the area as they are in season, and whenever we can. On the 4th January we added more seed balls with various species of edible plants thanks to Jack and Jacqueline.

ants

We’ll keep you updated on whether ants take the seeds or not! so far not.. but you don’t see so many of them around on these dark days of winter.

Lou

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Tags barcelona, boodaville, design, nature, permaculture, permaculture education, regenerative agriculture

Rovira Regenerativa

The new almond grove and a beautiful idea (On Fridays I write)

Post author By Lou
Post date November 4, 2022
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The new almond grove and a beautiful idea (On Fridays I write)

This week Lou, founder of Boodavile, presents the new almond grove and earthworks plan, plus a beautiful idea and reflections on life this week.

I still have the feeling that every day is like three days. Life is amazing and rich when what you do is in service to a more beautiful world – although day to day meetings, emails, not sharing on social media when you should do and accounting is still work. In parenting this week I have been sleeping slightly better and had three days of healthy children over the Samhain / Castanyada / Halloween long weekend. The last four days included fever, snot, a lot of coughing, diarrhea, nits, conjunctivitus and mild constipation among the children. I journeyed back from Caseres just me and kids in the rental car, we left two hours late cos I accidently wrapped up my wallet in the duvet while packing up and had to find it again. For some reason Joanna decided not to sleep and to cry all the way home. But somehow you rock out your superpowers and the three of us dealt with it together.

You get to be human

I had a tea with the lovely Betsy Reed yesterday. She messaged me before we met and refered to it as a Power Hour (she’s American). I wanted to talk about Rovira Regenerativa and what to do next, because I’m a little on stuck on whether to try and bring the non-farming members of the team out of the slump/minibreak, or to start afresh and create a structure and find new people, with clearly defined roles. Any advice or inputs of energy such as offers to chat and bounce ideas around, are very very welcome!

Anyway she said something nice about how humans are always obsessing with time, but we are not machines and mustn’t treat ourselves as machines. I like that, we are way better and more complex than machines, and everyone knows that productivity is not linear. Having a quiet cup of tea can help us get where we need to be. Plus we are all part of complex dynamic systems and things shift and solutions present themselves. She also quoted a management/business guru who said “80% of problems are structural” which I really like. A structure, with space to be human. That’s how we could function brilliantly.

meetings

During the long weekend I managed some positive meetings with Antonio who might get our permissions moving, Jessica who has agreed to help out one day a week at Boodaville, Nick and Silke who are awesome human beings and we mapped out the earthworks plan, Jordi who is interested in helping with site management and volunteer mentoring next year, and Manel who showed me a shed for sale in the village with beautiful views, that could, maybe, be a place to build my dream house. More on that another Friday.

the new almond grove

I also managed to find time to walk up to the almond groves we now have permission to work. There are no almonds at all due to the surprise April frost in 2022, but they are beautiful terraces surrounded by woodlands. The idea was to find a spot to build one 3m diameter 30cm deep hole to be a seasonal reservoir. Thinking about the logistics of bringing up a digger I’m confident to do a reservoir on each of the three terraces, as soon as possible. This blog post will now be shared with the Rovira Regenerativa agriculture design team and we’ll make a plan for this area to create healthy soil, thriving ecosystems and an abundance of produce from different fruit and nut trees, perennial vegetables and aromatic plants.

You can also see in the photos the position for the reservoir in the new vineyard just next to Boodaville, and a map of canals we want to dig. We are still discussing whether these are irrigation channels, or whether we want to adapt to make them on contour swales. The terrace seems to have a high point at the top at the back near the red brick shed, and then in the southern half of the field it slopes downwards as you walk towards the higher terrace. These are just estimations right now, based on the keen eye of local farmer Jordi from El Pinell! I think there’s enough space in between the rows of vines to do the ditch in between the rows, and we don’t need to remove any vines. Nick do you agree?

my beautiful idea

This is a work in progress. And actually I will give this text to the Boodaville Barcelona volunteers later to see if it makes sense, and see if anyone’s interested in developing it further.

As I was walking around Poble Sec appreciating the two species in our street that have amazing autumnal colours in their leaves I thought – What about an “Autumn in Poble Sec” photo competition to engage neighbours in a lovely project that might connect them to nature. Keep reading because this keeps on developing. Then the next version I thought of became; how about instead of entering photographs we make the competition about “Actions”. What about Autumn in Poble Sec Action competition : share with us something you have done which helps to create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

Now how to explain what an “Action” competition is? I imagine that entries could be “I picked up beautiful autumn leaves and took them to nursery for the kids to play with” or “I organised a birthday party for my friend who was having a hard time and it was joyful and made everyone smile” or “I made all the halloween costumes this year out of recycled, natural materials to promote zero waste and circular economy”.

Let’s move on to the final version of what the “competition” could be. The final details are firstly that I don’t like competition, because in a beautiful world we are more about collaboration. But I don’t know what word to use instead to attract entries. Then, and this is the really good bit, to think about prizes. My idea is that we budget this at about 600 euros, and spend maybe 400 on prizes. The prizes are good enough to encourage participation. The prizes can be vouchers for different ecosocial shops and services around the neighbourhood. We could have several prizes so it’s less like a “competition” and we can decide which businesses to speak to. The Eco Social map of Poble Sec would be a great place to start but we can bring in different people and cultures and age groups to the “competition” by choosing other locations as well.

Imagine that you go into the shop that sells stuff for old people, or the barbers where there’s usually young men, or the supermarket specialising in chinese produce and you say to the person running the business “we are running a competition for people in the neighbourhood. if we get more than 100 people entering the competition we will buy a voucher for your shop with a value of 70 euros and give it to a winner.” The person running the business has a poster about the “competition” and knows that if less than 100 people enter they won’t make that 70 euro sale. Am I imagining it, or will this create a situation where the person who runs the business talks to the customers about their chance to get a 70 euro voucher? And the person who goes to that shop thinks hey, maybe I should take a look at this “competition” because 70 euros is a decent prize. The rest of the budget is for many many posters, design, planning and social media.

Reasons I like this

opportunity for intersectional approach to a neighbourhood activity
abundance thinking to receive goods and services without money
creating connections between different people in the neighbourhood and promoting Boodaville Barcelona and Aula ambiental
The entries will be shared bit by bit over time on Instagram and social media and will bring joy to people
Everyone who enters engages with beauty, joy, love and ecosocial design in their own lives.
Hopefully many many people are touched by the entries and actions shared, and inspired to do something themselves.
could become a yearly activity
could have events linked to it
note : organisational work on how to present entries, make sure we get enough information from participants, data laws, transparency on how we “judge” the entries (in the SMALL PRINT is it transformative? is it inline with ecosical and regenerative design?)
the important thing is the action itself, NOT how well it is presented.

Ok, so we’ll share the info when the competition is live, jaja maybe in autumn 2023!!