Our next Regenerative Weekend is 13th – 15th March 2026 – More info here
The January weekend was an authentic rural adventure with activites in three different locations, rain, a lot of mud, and truly amazing connections.
On Friday evening we met our guests, including Sawyer and Tamara all the way from New York who were taking a break from the traditional festivities as they travelled from Madrid to Barcelona.
We enjoyed the warmth of the flat on Friday night and started the activities at Boodaville Finca on Saturday morning.
First a tour of the Rovira Regenerativa projects, pruning trees along the way. We found plenty of the Life Terra almonds up in the Almond Grove and demonstrated our water capture and management systems. Nick Park from Cova Fullola explained the theory and practice of pruning, and all the fruit trees (2-5 years old) including the Thyme Terrace Agroforestry zone and the Boodaville Finca were pruned.
After lunch – in the sun! – everyone helped out with the olive harvest to get us to a total of 250kg from the 12 or so trees we harvested. We worked until almost dark, misplaced a chainsaw in the vineyard, tried to have a (very safe) outdoor fire, dealt with charging Ana’s electric car and then the rain started to come down hard. After dinner there were some slidy exits!
Sunday we met in the village before going to El Pinell for the Biochar burn. The humidity meant it was more challenging than previous burns, and it took a while – which gave us more time to have questions answered by Nick, and to enjoy learning from each other about all sorts of things.
(I had my mind blown by Ofer who told me, and then checked on the web, that over 99% of ALL plastic is produced as a by-product of refining oil for petrol. We don’t use it because it was invented; noone ever thought “oh, we need a disposable light material that doesn’t break down in nature for up to 1000 years that we can use for carrying shopping”. It was just a marketing trick to get rid of forever chemical waste created at oil refineries, and during the natural gas production process. I’m particularly stunned by this fact as none of the science teachers at the school I worked ever told me, I never saw it mentioned in the Environmental Systems and Societies text book at Secondary School and 15 years ago on this very blog (well the first version of it) I was asking about why we invented plastic spoons and nobody told me)
Anyway – enjoy the pictures! We’ll be activating the biochar with Spain’s finest horse manure from Windchaser Ranch in February and then you can come and help us spread it in the vineyard in March!
