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Rovira Regenerativa presentation at the BiorNE conference!

Agroforestry design for a vineyard

Rovira Regenerativa presentation at the BiorNE conference!

Many thanks to our amazing volunteer Javier Regidor who took our design for Agroforestry in a vineyard to the BiorNE permaculture conference. Read the comments and feedback we received!

The full design in Spanish and English is here

COMMENTS ON THE DESIGN:

(These comments come from the consultation at the BioNE conference on 5th Sept 2021, and a consultation with the owner of the land on 18th August 2021)

Plant 50% Robinia / 50% Rotondifolia (sweet acorn, indigenous)

In the vinyard the soil is not very deep, the trees can have difficulties.

Think carefully about watering at first – occasional watering through a tube can be a good idea.

Pass by with animals before you start?

It is important to work the vines, pruning etc.

Frosts have fewer bad effects on PLOUGHED vineyards, unploughed vineyards are high risk.

Robinia, or many species of acacias, are prohibited by a forest laws about “exotics” – (speak with the forest agent Angel 682118582)

Recommended instead of Robinia: citisus, broom, ginestas that do not shade the vines.

Better to have un ploughed vines on the north face, so that they blooms later (? Sergi’s comment if we want more information)

Paulownias need a LOT of water.

Contact in Gandesa: Pili Sant Martin – little by little they have converted to unploughed vines.

Have “people” at the center of the design – include local people in the process. Social actors that support the project.

Ideal dates: Finish the design Sept 2021 / Create crowdfunding Oct 2021 / Launch crowdfunding Nov 2021 / 1st Step summer / fall 2022.

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Consultation on the agroforestry design for the Rovira Regenerativa demonstration site

Rovira Regenerativa design layout

Consultation on the agroforestry design for the Rovira Regenerativa demonstration site

In this post we share the initial designs for converting a vineyard in the Vall Rovira into Regenerative Agroforestry and share our plan for consultation sessions. We aim to complete the design at the end of September 2021.
LINK TO PRESENTATION / ENLACE A LA PRESENTACIÓN

 

When I go for a walk by the river then sit down doing nothing, I end up thinking about Rovira Regenerativa. This is the project that I want to be working on! In this document you can see the ideas for implementing the plan we made in June, and the proposed dates for the consultation meetings, and other project actions during 2021. (The document is in Spanish)

Below you have images of the design so far!

Follow us on Instagram @RoviraRegenerativa or on the blog boodaville.org/rovira-regenerativa/

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Rovira Regenerativa weekend and inspiration from “Cultural Emergence” (On Fridays I write)

Potatoes in the guild

Rovira Regenerativa weekend and inspiration from “Cultural Emergence” (On Fridays I write)

The Rovira Regenerativa team visited Boodaville last weekend for planting, and two very successful COVID friendly workshops on plant associations. Hooray! It IS possible to DO things!

My first thought before writing today was “Has it been a week already?!?” But on reflection I realise that a LOT has happened this week. I’ll focus the post on the big weekend at Boodaville, and sharing wonderful ideas from “Cultural Emergence” by Looby Macnamara. But it was also a week of Erasmus+ grant writing and the second trimestre ultrasound, during which our new baby tucked up and hid their heart. We will do another scan and more grant writing next week.

We also went to a concert!!! The other side of COVID this means being seated, slightly concerned about people around you who uncover their noses, and pretty hot and uncomfortable with your own mask on. But it was worth it for the experience of being in a large crowd sharing an experience and clapping together.

You find yourself wondering, “Was this song written before or after COVID?”. It’s such a huge shift in everything. I am pretty hopeful about outdoor concerts during the warm months though – there will be more music!

weekend in the vall rovira
planting

Our team gathered at Boodaville midday on Saturday to plant more species in the food forest, and to get our nursery of support shrubs and trees started.

We didn’t manage to get blackberry or gooseberry bushes to plant (a shame as the gooseberry from last year is doing well!!) but we added 3 cape gooseberries from Nick’s nursery. We also added some nursery sweet potatoes, potatoes from Anna’s kitchen, and swiss chard from the garden centre. These are not the perennial vegetables we dream of cultivating, but the chard often self-seeds and is mightily drought resistant, and the potatoes will break the soil (and we have them!)

We also have a Sumac tree, dug up from Nick’s employer. Read more about why permaculturists love this tree here. We have planted it where we need a wind break.

Mia demonstrated his holistic vision brilliantly when he looked around the green and lush garden and said, “Wow, we should do something about the hot wind from the south that will dry all this out in summer”. We have worked on the wind break before, with species such as hackberry, italian buckthorn, prickly pear, but without much success. In 2021 we will bring the focus back to this part of the design.

In the nursery we planted cuttings of Rosemary and Eleagnus (also good windbreak material) as well as tree seeds – Honey Locust and Black Locust, flower seeds (more marigold), and some bushes – Caragana, Tanaceto, XXXX two more from a seed exchange Jessica went to last year.

The grafting of pomegranate on the Lentiscus tree isn’t looking great.

To add to this work, and to add to the abandoned terrace project, we have ordered some indigenous nitrogen fixing species from Cultidelta to pick up next week.

workshops with the local community

We ran two small COVID friendly workshops at Mas la Llum, learning from Mia about plant associations, and communities of plants. We looked at local plant communities as a basis for the design of a resilient system (NOT just planting one productive plant). With Anthropogenic Agroforestry you can also replace the elements of the community with a more useful / better adapted species. So for example we will aim to replace the spiky oaks, with the edible oak variety, and can graft fruit onto the “Espino negro” which is already growing.

Mia also showed the ideas behind companion planting in a vegetable garden. By rotating different families in the same soil, and mixing plants with different sizes and functions you can have a packed full garden with NO BARE SOIL!

After the workshop we presented the Rovira Regenerativa project to the group and had our first chance (since the original programmed meeting in 2020) to discuss the needs of the local community and how we can integrate our project into the area to promote regenerative cultures at a social, economic and environmental level.

Thank you so much to Mas La Llum for hosting us in their stunning straw bale and bioconstruction country house. It was a chance to strengthen a wonderful connection with their inspiring project.

It was an amazingly positive and empowering experience to DO something in these crazy COVID times, and we are energised by the weekend.

visioning the regenerative future of the vineyard

On Sunday the highlight was a session looking at a monoculture vineyard and imagining the change that regenerative agroforestry would make. The planned strategies include

  • putting in windbreak hedges formed from food producing bushes and trees which increase biodiversity.
  • replacing half of the vines with a mixture of different species of fruit and nut trees,
  • replacing the bare soil with cover crop and smaller cultivations.
  • adding support species and nitrogen fixers to regenerate the soil.
  • making the most of the microclimates available to cultivate different species at the bottom of the valley
  • and most importantly adding edges to every terrace.

We discussed the planning for easy to harvest lines of trees how to plan the timings of the harvests.

We also imagined a step by step approach, where the farm can continue generating income on many terraces, and the interventions are done firstly on just one terrace.

The conclusion of the session was that Fraser could finally finish piecing together the story of what this project is about.. so he can go and write it up for funding applications! And Anna has the job (urgent and important) of finding out how we can get access to at least one terrace to start implementing the design in September 2021.

cultural emergence

I will just share my favourite quote so far. This book addresses and explains so clearly what I am often trying to explain. It is an amazing tool. The analogies between social processes and natural processes are beautiful.

I really do think humanity is screwed and blindly ignorant to coming catastrophe, but also…. teaching catastrophe doesn’t always create effective outcomes, what if we jump straight to the real crux of the matter which is this, from p. 17

“The future also has the capacity to be more beautiful, peaceful and abundant than we can imagine”

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Swale digging, tree planting and grafting pistachios

Planting a fruit tree below the swale

Swale digging, tree planting and grafting pistachios

Last weekend we worked on the abandoned terrace project, digging a swale, planting trees and grafting pistachio branches onto "pistachia lentiscus".

I love the work we did last weekend.. implementing permaculture design with wonderful knowledgeable people and finishing all the tasks we planned.

Olive branches

The first job was sawing off the broken branches of the olive trees – many trees were damaged by a 60cm snowfall back in January. These branches were then used to make a fence along the far edge of the terrace we are working on. A barrier to keep the wild boar in the forest and not snuffling around our newly planted trees. 

swale

We dug a swale along the lower half of the terrace which will fill with water run-off from the road. In the past we’ve had problems with these swales getting immediately full of mud and silt coming down with the water, so we dug a silt basin at the entrance to the swale. This silt basin will need to be emptied (dug out) fairly often – after almost every storm! But it means that water will get all the way to the end of the swale, and hopefully the swale itself won’t need to be dug out for a while.

The design for the whole terrace is two long swales reaching all the way across this terrace, with about 25-30 fruit trees in total.

This weekend we dug the first 5 metres of the swale and planted four fruit trees – 2 apple and 2 apricot. 

fig trees

We will take “suckers” from the fig trees and plant them on this terrace as another useful, and under appreciated fruit tree that grows abundantly in this area. We were going to dig them up and stick them in the ground, but on the advice of Nat from Flores de Vida, we have left them in water, with some of the bark stripped away, to grow some roots for a while. Some of the suckers we took were cut, and some were dug out with a small amount of root still attached. We will leave them, making sure they don’t get dry, for a month or so, then replant them near the apple and apricot trees.

Grafting

Nick from Cova Fullola found 3 male and 3 female branches from Pistachio trees and we have taken around 20 female buds and 20 male buds and tied them to shady spots on branches of “pistachia lentiscus” trees that grow naturally and abundantly here. 

On the larger tree we pruned around the branches we grafted, but left most of the tree intact to provide shade. On the smaller tree, which had shade from a nearby olive, we took almost all the branches except the two that we were grafting. In each tree one branch is grafted with male buds, and one with female buds. 

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Abandoned Terrace Project (On Friday’s I write)

Abandoned Terrace before this project started

Abandoned Terrace Project (On Friday’s I write)

As part of the Rovira Regenerativa project we are experimenting with ways to design productive terraces using regenerative agriculture techniques, with no irrigation in a semi-arid mediterranean climate. This post explains the first steps recuperating an abandoned olive terrace.

This morning I woke up wondering how I can inspire our Rovira Regenerativa team, (and anyone else who is interested!) to engage deeply with the work we are going to do on the 20th February in the Vall Rovira. Last week I wrote that the “Why?” is absolutely key to learning and motivated work, and I realised yesterday that I want to share the best story I can about why we doing the following work on an abandoned terrace near Boodaville in two weeks time:

  • Pruning the olive tree
  • planting support species and fruit trees (apples, pomegranates and figs)
  • making Gin infused with rosemary
  • Grafting pistachio on to the lentiscus tree

(You can see the terrace with the olive and lentiscus tree in the photo)

ECOSYSTEM HEALTH

These are the exact words we are using to define one objective of our project. We discussed yesterday, that in order to frame Ecosocial projects like this to fit with our current capitalist mindset and therefore secure funding, we can also label Ecosystem Health as a “return” on any investment in the project. So the overall “Why?” of the project is Ecosystem Health.

how does this implementation on the abandoned terrace lead to a healthy ecosystem?

As Mia, one of our team members rightly pointed out, the very best thing for the natural ecosystem would be to leave this terrace alone. To do nothing and let nature have space to regenerate. Complete “rewilding”. 

But we live on this planet with nearly 9 billion human beings and people need to eat. Our current agriculture practices are degrading ecosystems on a massive scale, they are hugely wasteful and involve transporting goods large distances. 

We seem very far away from it here in the Vall Rovira, but in the small shop in Caseres I have found apples from New Zealand for sale. This little village relies on MercaZaragoza, a huge international hub, for provisions for the shop.

With the design we are implementing here we are working with nature, to maintain and even regenerate the soil, and to improve water retention right here on the terrace in the photo. At the same time we are countering some of the damage done by most farming.  

inspiration

By sharing the space and the project, by involving the local community, we encourage a change in consumption habits, offer hope, and ignite the imagination so people can replicate and develop these ideas.

Action

The terrace in the photo has been abandoned for over twenty years. Here is the thinking behind our planned work :

  1. We will work with nature and use the healthy elements already present in the ecosystem – soil filled with roots, organic matter and life which is in a decompacted state compared to machine farmed terraces.
  2. We will add support species to fix nitrogen, attract beneficial insects, increase biodiversity, and grow deep roots
  3. Pruning the olive : In order to produce a yield we need accessible healthy branches only. 
  4. Grafting lentiscus : This tree could have a value as lentiscus (apparently it’s very expensive and used for funerals in the Netherlands) but a pistachio harvest would be appreciated by locals. (Apparently this grafting is possible but none of us have ever seen it working so we are going to try)
  5. Support species and fruit trees : In between the life that already exists on the terrace we are going to add more nitrogen fixers and climate appropriate fruit trees to harvest.
  6. Making Gin with rosemary : Juniper and Rosemary are abundant on this terrace and we are following up some ideas and suggestions with action to see how the abundance nature offers us in the Vall Rovira can be used to make products with a high value. 
balance

A large part of what we are doing is Regenerative Agriculture, rather than complete rewilding.

The beauty of the design is that even the agricultural land will be improving the health of the valley ecosystem while at the same time providing food for humans and wildlife, and opportunities for producing products with a high value.

We recognise, however, that at the valley scale the design has to be a balance between completely natural spaces and agricultural land we we are continuing to explore what proportion of the abandoned terraces we will bring back to agriculture. This first experiment is a pilot to see how we can make the most of the natural succession that has already occurred and make a quick transition to food production.

Please feel free to add comments and suggestions below!

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The greywater system at our permaculture project

Preparing the mulch basin

The greywater system at our permaculture project

In 2017 we implemented a very simple greywater system from the kitchen sink to a mulch basin. Looking at the photos now I can't believe we didn't do more for the poor quality soil!

Greywater mulch basin – We dug and mulched a 2m diameter mulch basin (to be pronounced for ever more in the french way (ˈbeɪsən ) 😉 ) A large fig tree will be planted in September because it is a species that especially enjoys greywater (from the kitchen sink – cooking and some washing up water), provides food, suitable for the climate, and offers shade. The water runs directly onto the straw mulch which works as a filter for the soap and food particles so they don’t enter the soil – the method is described in detail by Art Ludwig.

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2019 Regenerative Agroforestry at Mas Les Vinyes

whatsapp-image-2019-10-19-at-07.58.30

2019 Regenerative Agroforestry at Mas Les Vinyes

Notes and summary of ideas from the first weekend of the Regenerative Agroforestry course at Mas les Vinyes

Regenerative Agroforestery at Mas les Vinyes

Posted on Oct 19, 2019

I finally had the chance to visit the amazing Mas les Vinyes in September. The course on Regenerative Agroforestry is three weekends in total, and I’m writing to share my impressions and some of what I learnt at the first one. The weekend was absolutely brilliant – just to see the project was incredible, and we also had Carles and Sergi facilitating excellent sessions; theory, visiting the examples on site, and a practical, plus we stayed overnight and ate amazing food with the community there.

Even though the climate and land use is very different to Boodaville – it is greener and with a lot of animal grazing and grass – the sessions were really well adapted to give information to individual projects.

Boodaville has changed direction from the original permaculture eco-village plan, and as we see the world getting crazier, with people trying desperately to cling to power and money while environmental crises are not addressed, I am getting more and more interested in soil. Building soil. Fertile, nutrient filled, rich and bursting with life. Where fungus creates connections between different plants and trees growing together into a resilient ecosystem. The new direction is developing regenerative agriculture in the valley – a tough challenge in this water scarce, soil degraded area. I never thought I would be a farmer, but the impact of successful regenerative agriculture will be beautiful. And on the journey to get there, after ten years of creating, coordinating and administrating Boodaville, I now have the pleasure of learning, exploring, going out and connecting with other people and projects, and designing.

If you would like to know more about our new direction (including permaculture education, regenerative farming and ecosystem restoration please email me Lou : thegurney@gmail.com and I will send you information)

There is loads of info at Mas les Vinyes on their youtube channel and a great project EDUCA PERMACULTURA

SATURDAY MORNING – WHAT IS RA?

Sergi opens with a little speech about how Syntropic Agriculture won’t work in Spain as it uses loads and loads of water. I’m really interested in Syntropy and will bear this in mind and look forward to learning  more!

What is regenerative? Productive, self-fertilising, healthy with no plagues, resilient (can withstand and recover from shocks)

What is degenerative? Production requires energy, requires nutrients, and leads to dead soil/ desertification

Jem Bendell is mentioned : DEEP ADAPTATION he wrote a paper on this as a way of coping with the collapse of our living systems and all the social craziness this has led to. The 4 R’s are Renounce, Resilience, Restoration, Reconciliation. Part of the process is to accept how bad things really are, to accept that people will be distracted by clickbait, and adverts, and continue as they have been “programmed to function” (words from the Lily Allen song “The Fear”!) Then you can find your way without these things damaging you, and engage with anyone. Ok I’m drifting off topic here…

We can adapt Regenerative Agroforestry (RA) to climate change, using Microclimates, Infiltration, the fact that forests have efficient, Slow transpiration rates – they don’t transpire all the water as soon as the sun shines like cereals (and rocket! Rocket will dry out your soil!!), Biodiversity, Low energy needs.

Characteristics of RA

  • tree layer
  • soil is a living element
  • symbiosis flora / fauna / micro fauna
  • efficient design

Types of RA

  • Food forest
  • Analogue forestry. This is where you imitate the natural forest of the region, but can use homologous varieties – so you might use a slightly more drought resistant variety of a tree, or a slightly different bush that produces fruit that humans eat, and this is agriculture, so you will be planting productive trees in the system.  In permaculture design this would be in zone 3 / 4 much less maintenance than the food forest.

This picture is an analogue forestry design at Mas les Vinyes (MLV), they have replicated the forest behind using ecological surveying, and put the productive trees at the edges of the rows where they can be easily harvested. They have planted many species, indigenous and homologous trees imitating the climax forest behind. They only water the productive trees that are not native. (This project is also being funded by a research program – they are looking at what lives and dies to see how climate change may be affecting what natives live and die now)

They say there is a certification called “Forest (Garden) Product” so for responsible consumers out there you can look that up and buy even better than organic!

(more types of RA)

  • Alley cropping – they do some of this at MLV. Some crops do better in the “alleys” between the trees than they do without trees. This is part of the culture in many places not a “new” idea.

Check out the amazing Paulonia tree – a species that has loads of useful properties in RA systems – but needs a lot of water so no good for Boodaville.

  • River Agroforestry – this is illegal in Catalunya as within a certain distance from the river you aren’t allowed to farm. If you want to use animals in the system make sure they can’t get all the way to to river banks as their behaviour will increase erosion. I see a real potential for this in the bottom of the valley at Boodaville where there is no “river” but there is underground water –  you can already see the bigger trees there making the most of the water available, it would be great to start putting some productive trees and designing a system around there.
  • Perimeter Agroforestry – where the trees follow a pattern on the design (NOT just the edges of fields around monoculture) but maybe following a swale/key line, or designing perimeters into your land to have more forest.
  • Silvopastoreo – animal agroforestry is what they do here at MLV.

Nice graph about mechanisation. Imagine mono culture cereal is 100% mechanisation – you drop down in the following order – alley cropping, 75%, perimeter about 60%, then silvopastoreo 50%, River about 40%, analogue 30% and food forest down the bottom at about 15%.

A tour of MLV

1st stop is the alley cropping, where we see rows of fruit trees with support species such as Eleagnus, Consuela, Buffalo Berry, Caragana. They have a nice Goji next to a Mulberry. Olivo ruso is in the system

2nd stop some “guilds” next to the veg garden. The border, at top of terrace wall is a great mix – rosemary, eleagnus and a pink flower ASK SERGI!!. They have a climber that got out of control, be careful with fast growing climbers. passion flower, nispero,

3rd stop analogue forestry

4th stop in the woods – they had cut down all the spikey, early succession bushes (the ones we get at Boodaville!) to leave space for sheep food and sheep?

Full list of species talked about with Sergi for Boodaville / water scarce poor soils

Cytisus Coronilla

Hippopae Rhamnoides – get male and femail, has yellow spine

Alfalfa Arbolia

Paulowina?

Capers?

Esparago

Pulsatilla (or something that sounds similar)

Cerbuxa (pruny kind of bush, something that sounds similar to this)

Caragana (Anna took seeds from Sergi)

Tanoceto (Anna took seeds from Sergi)

Palomera (?)

SATURDAY AFTERNOON – DESIGN

Process

  • define vision
  • analysis using permanence scale from yeoman. In order of permanent down to less permanent: – climate, topology (get a proper topological survey for new project – Jesus Ruiz can do this), water, roads/access, trees (dominant, abundant, frequent, occasional, rare, non-existent that would be expected), structures, sub-divisions, soil.
  • map of the land
  • sector analysis and preliminary zone map (Fire, Air, Water, Earth for sectors)
  • study of homologous ecosystems and biotic factors
  • define objectives of the system that need to be designed – including, market, economic, social ecosystem
  • have strategies like layers to cover time while trees go (eg growing veg under trees before they get to maturity)
  • define AR system to use
  • choose what to grow

Choosing what to grow :

decide on main cultivations, secondary cultivations, morfología y necesidades, and choose your support species. Support species have the following functions : mineral accumulators, creating organic matter, attracting insects, improving soil, covering soil.

SECOND PART OF DESIGN

  • proyección de especies
  • timeline for action
  • IMPLEMENTATION!!!

We then looked at two projects from members of the group and did an amazing application of all of the above, in about one hour we took two groups through the process and actually had half the design on the board! The best design session I’ve ever done.

Practical stuff that came up : If you are planting anything that competes for water put it more than 1.5m from tree. In general don’t plant permanent stuff closer than 50cm. Avellanas (hazelnuts) need 1000mm a year rainfall. oh. so maybe they won’t grow at Boodaville then.

SUNDAY – MICROBIOLOGY OF SOIL

Living soil has minerals, microorganisms and organic matter.

Aerobic microbiology makes humus. Anaerobic microbiology is what takes the minerals from the Roca Madre. Tractors mix these two, and that is BAD.

Structure : you need clay particles to hold soil together and the elements with a negative charge stick to clay (Ma, Mg, Z) The elements with a positive charge stick to the Roca Madre (mother rock. i’m sure it has a better name in English).

Fertility – Think about now, in the near future and in the long term. (This is where we have been going WRONG)

Fertility now : minerals are in the soil and water transplants them to plants once they are available.

Fertility for the next ten years : The soils needs organic matter. one way to get this is to let animals graze and eat 50% of the top of the plant. This doesn’t kill the plant (good) but also does mean the plant is damaged enough to lose 25% of its roots (good). The roots then become organic matter in the soil. So in RA we want to lose 50% of the plants at the top.

Plants auto regulate themselves, so if they lose leaves, then they will lose some roots. And if they lose roots, they will then lose leaves.

Ants take sugar (seeds, energy) down into the ground where they make fungus. Ants eat fungus. They even make different fungus in different places so they are resilient, and if some doesn’t grow, then the other ones will. Ants know more about different types of fungus than humans.

There are three pages of notes left!

Until I get another chance that is all for now

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