Categories
Rovira Regenerativa Uncategorized

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”

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

SIGN UP FOR OUR LATEST NEWS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Copyright 2024 © All rights Reserved. Boodaville
Categories
permaculture

2018 Wicking Bed

whatsapp-image-2018-04-23-at-17-41-32

2018 Wicking Bed

A wicking bed is a drought resistant garden, watered directly under the soil, so nothing is lost to evaporation and the soil is always moist.

25th April 2018

We finished the wicking bed. Here are the designs and photos of the process!!

Read more about wicking beds here : https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/diy-instructions/wicking-bed-construction/

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

SIGN UP FOR OUR LATEST NEWS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Copyright 2024 © All rights Reserved. Boodaville
Categories
Uncategorized

Nature as our teacher (On Friday’s I write)

Temperate rainforest

Nature as our teacher (On Friday’s I write)

This week Lou shares beautiful stories, quotes, ideas and resources exploring the idea of Nature as our Teacher.

In a meeting last week with Fraser, a member of the Rovira Regenerativa team I was explaining the “why” behind my passion to build a permaculture designed residential education centre completely immersed in nature in the Vall Rovira.

This weeks writing is a gathering of stories, resources, quotes and ideas on the subject of Nature as our Teacher to share this passion and the beauty behind these ideas. I invite you to follow the links and enjoy and engage with what is being shared. 

complexity and awe

As a parent who feels very connected with nature I am deeply touched when I see my daughter caught up and fascinated by leaves, snail shells and insects. I don’t know anyone else who ever found lizard eggs on Montjuic. I sometimes wonder if she has enough “toys” of the typical kind, and if she should be more interested in building with lego or making worlds for her teddy bears, but it makes so much sense to me that she finds them boring compared to a snail shell. A snail is part of complex ecosystems that have been evolving on our planet for 4 billion years, what interest does a plastic cuboid brick really hold? Anything which is alive, growing, processing, made of complex patterns of cells and microbiology, and connected in hundreds of different ways to the elements of the systems around it is infinitely interesting. The questions to ask and explore about elements of living systems are many and often still unanswered. 

This is a wonderful 10 minute story – perfect for children as well. From a Jon Young course book published in 2001

Nature and health

It seems incredible to me that our world has almost got to the point where we are expected to use science to explain the health benefits of nature. Knowing ourselves and being in touch with our own bodies and our needs will show us that connection to nature feels good, and feeding on natural food is healthy.

Connecting natural ecosystems and biological health by looking at diet and medicine is obviously an enormous topic that affects all humans on a daily basis – and not one to dip into here. I am interested, however, to reflect on nature and wellbeing, and mental health. 

Joanna Macy has developed the “Work that Reconnects” about connection with nature (remembering that humans are nature!), self-care and people care. The meditative, relaxing, peaceful, and mindful effects of immersing yourself in nature are the most wonderful gift we have to help ourselves be ok. Disconnection from nature, our true reality, is often associated with mental health issues. To learn and grow we need to have self-care as a base, and, as is so beautifully expressed in the work of Looby McNamara self-care is the key to collaborating with others and working well with others is what will ultimately allow us to address and explore the questions that we want to answer. 

George Monbiot (2012) makes another incredibly important point about connection with nature, especially relevant for young city dwellers,

“There is no substitute for what takes place outdoors; not least because the greatest joys of nature are unscripted. The thought that most of our children will never swim among phosphorescent plankton at night, will never be startled by a salmon leaping, a dolphin breaching, the stoop of a peregrine, or the rustle of a grass snake is almost as sad as the thought that their children might not have the opportunity.

The remarkable collapse of children’s engagement with nature – which is even faster than the collapse of the natural world – is recorded in Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, and in a report published recently by the National Trust. Since the 1970s the area in which children may roam without supervision has decreased by almost 90%. In one generation the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places in the UK has fallen from more than half to fewer than one in 10. ….  Eleven- to 15-year-olds in Britain now spend, on average, half their waking day in front of a screen.” 

The rise of obesity, rickets and asthma and the decline in cardio-respiratory fitness are well documented. Louv also links the indoor life to an increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other mental ill health. Research conducted at the University of Illinois suggests that playing among trees and grass is associated with a marked reduction in indications of ADHD, while playing indoors or on tarmac appears to increase them. The disorder, Louv suggests, “may be a set of symptoms aggravated by lack of exposure to nature”. Perhaps it’s the environment, not the child, that has gone wrong.

In her famous essay the Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, Edith Cobb proposed that contact with nature stimulates creativity. Reviewing the biographies of 300 “geniuses”, she exposed a common theme: intense experiences of the natural world in the middle age of childhood (between five and 12). Animals and plants, she contended, are among “the figures of speech in the rhetoric of play … which the genius in particular of later life seems to recall”.

“And here we meet the other great loss. Most of those I know who fight for nature are people who spent their childhoods immersed in it. Without a feel for the texture and function of the natural world, without an intensity of engagement almost impossible in the absence of early experience, people will not devote their lives to its protection.”

In summary – If we don’t have the chance to fall in love with natural ecosystems, will we passionately stand-up and speak out for their protection?

NAture as our teacher

Beyond the positives for health and wellbeing, I want to explore how nature can affect learning and how natural ecosystems can teach us. 

Wisdom – One of my most used quotes from Daniel Wahl’s book “Designing regenerative cultures” – 

“Making time for solitude in wild nature helps us to have the largest conversation we are capable of having with the world. Communion with wild nature helps us embody our ultimate place and act wisely in recognition of our kinship with all life”

Increased creativity and cognitive function – from Rob Hopkins book “From What is to What if?” p.58

“three researchers set out to understand the cognitive impact a four-day hike with no electronic devices would have on a group of people who had never backpacked before. They found that the backpackers were 50 percent more creative following their four-day immersion than before they set off.”

“At Stanford University, researchers divided a group of sixty participants, sending thirty on a walk through the woods, and the other thirty for a walk along a four-lane road.” “those who walked in the woods were less anxious, had better memory and felt more positive.”

“At a primary school in Liverpool, researchers found that the soundscape of  birdsong helped children concentrate”

Systems thinking approach – 

Systems thinking is a powerful approach for understanding why situations are the way they are, and how to go about improving results. Let me begin by quickly defining the opposite of systems thinking, which I will in this case call linear thinking. Using linear thinking we would conclude that because the anarchists were the ones wrecking places, the problem is in the anarchists.

Observation of natural systems and the study of Ecology is the basis of the systems thinking approach, which is now being applied to design and problem solving across all areas of life.

From Wahl’s book : The many surprising properties of water could never be explained or expected by only looking at oxygen and hydrogen on their own. “There is a tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution”. 

The study of natural ecosystems brings us to the type of holistic thinking we need to understand the world, and to design and solve problems. The interconnections and relationships we can study in nature are what we have failed to pay attention to in the past.

Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants – Many indigenous cultures that the modern world tended to class as “primitive” are actually bursting with exactly the kind of knowledge and natural solutions we desperately need right now. And they learnt it all from nature. Maybe in some cases we don’t need nature as our teacher, but rather cultures that have already learnt from nature can show us. The stunning book “Braiding Sweetgrass” has a wonderful chapter “Sitting in a Circle” about learning from nature. I cried when I read it. It touches everything I feel as a secondary school teacher and permaculturist. 

It’s a 40 minute read, which I highly recommend (in fact I encourage you to get the book!!). I will give some of my highlights..

Robin takes her teenage botany students on a field trip to camp out near a wetland ecosystem. To get what they need for the trip, rather than go to WalMart, they go to “Wal-marsh” and spend a day foraging in nature to meet their needs including rope, bedding, insulation, light, food, heat, shelter, rain gear and more. The cattail plants provide many of their needs.

Natalie says,It’s almost as if the plants made these things for us.”

The parallels between the adaptations evolved by the plants and the needs of the people are indeed striking. In some Native languages the term for plants translates to “those who take care of us”. The people were attentive students and borrowed solutions from the plants.

I used to teach just the way I was taught, but now I let someone else do all the work for me. If plants are our oldest teachers, why not let them teach?

The story ends with the beautiful conversations of the students when they realise that all the offerings from Wal-Marsh were a gift, and they discuss what they can do to give back. They use their knowledge of relationships and interconnectedness to come up with ideas like “a payment to support wetland protection” or “refusing to put fertilizer on the lawn to stop runoff” and many more beautiful, knowledgeable ideas. 

This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world

Read the chapter here: P.266 Sitting in a Circle, Braiding Sweetgrass (40 min read)

Biomimicry

Daniel Wahl’s book Designing Regenerative Cultures also brings together a great selection of examples of nature based design. I’ll leave this one with you as a question. 

Which of these products has not been designed by emulation of the models, systems, and elements of nature:

a) Aeroplane wings

b) Velcro

c) Cooling system in a Zimbabwean office building

d) Western toilets

e) The Gherkin building in London

(The answer is d) apart from the incredible waste of water and creation of sewage the natural way to poo is squatting!)

These are the ideas I share today – I’m sure there are many more ways we learn from nature! Feel free to share and add them in the comments. 

This weeks crazy ideas and new stuff

Well this weeks post was a long one! I’m sitting here on the sofa surrounded by books. Including the as yet unread “Cultural Emergence” by Looby McNamara. 

Since last week I’ve decided to go ahead with a Lush funding application for Rovira Regenerativa – we seem like a good fit and the prize can be spent pretty freely.

I’ve signed up to give a workshop at my daughters school…. involving trays of soil and watering cans. I think we found an accountant, still waiting for the email though…. 

We are looking for young people in the Poble Sec neighbourhood who might like to get active and get funded in Permaculture projects, and today had an inspiring meeting with Cooperasec and found out that, among other things,  they are running environmental education activities around the neighbourhood, and starting a project with my daughter’s school to create a sustainable map of the neighbourhood. 

An active and productive week! See you next Friday.

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

SIGN UP FOR OUR LATEST NEWS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Copyright 2024 © All rights Reserved. Boodaville
Categories
Uncategorized

Fermenting

Fermenting Kombucha

Fermenting

Jessica posts about life at Boodaville and what makes her heart sing, including fermenting; kombucha, sourdough and lactobacteria.

Let’s talk about things that make my heart sing at Boodaville. For example fermenting. I love fermenting stuff.

A volunteer from Cyprus, Olivia, came in May this year to Boodaville and introduced us to sourdough. She taught us how to create our own “sourdough baby” as we call it (during the season our baby literally grew up and we called it “masa madre”) and make the most delicious pita bread. Olivia moved on to pursue her sourdough career and we bake sourdough pita’s regularly. Sourdough is incredibly simple and tasty. Every day we feed our masa madre and “harvest” some already fermented sourdough to kick start today’s bread. If we want to pause it for a few days we put our sourdough baby in the fridge, if we want to pause it for a few weeks we put her in the freezer. As simple as that.

Kombucha is fermented tea, also introduced by Olivia. We have one big jar of kombucha and since that one is going really well and tastes great we split it up in several smaller jars and have experiments. All volunteers on site have at least one little jar to do weird experiments with. At the moment we have kombucha in an airtight container, apple-kombucha and tea-free kombucha. We taste and compare. Fail and try again. It’s fun. It’s also interesting to see how kombucha responds to outdoor temperatures. In summertime it fermented super fast. Winter has arrived and the kombucha is very very slooooowww…

Least favourite under the Boodavillians but the most fascinating to me are the lactobacteria. Lactobacteria are airborne, present everywhere and all they need is a nice home (which I created in a jar with starchy water and no lid) and it grows in a beautiful sour smelling substance. It is very effective to speed up the composting process, for example if our -usually odourless- compost toilet goes smelly. It produces a lot of gas during that process and when we once added lactobacteria to closed buckets of humanure permaculture teacher, Marc, almost freaked out. The pressure in the buckets could build up and the lid would explode off-sending our poo flying. That’s called learning from experience, isn’t it?

During a permaculture conference I learned how to multiply microorganisms for the compost toilet so that one is definitely on my to do list. And I’m still looking for a neighbour with some goats so I can start making cheese… hmmm… I love fermenting stuff.

Fermenting Kombucha

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

SIGN UP FOR OUR LATEST NEWS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Copyright 2024 © All rights Reserved. Boodaville
Categories
Uncategorized

In Barcelona (On Friday’s I write)

Big sky in Spain

In Barcelona (On Friday’s I write)

A difficult, cold, week in Barcelona with a story about my weird, yet ultimately successful experience finally getting my post-Brexit residency card.

This week was a return to the rhythm of getting a 7 year old dressed, full of breakfast and at the school gate at 9am. Add to that the temperatures of around 4º and the fact that we only heat a couple of rooms in our house. This was a difficult week. We will know things are getting easier and warmer when the olive oil in the kitchen becomes fully liquid again. Walks in the park and yoga, are helping me find my way back to organised and productive days. It turns out that running an association is just a constant never ending cycle of administrative tasks, and increasingly I am now managing other people – which like any work with people is complex, sometimes flowing beautifully and other times incredibly draining. I must find some balance – teaching, or having fun, or actually producing somthing. The new website is the only thing I’m producing right now and it’s going rather slowly.

Every day police violence

I did some important Brexit related admin this week in Barcelona, and finally went to pick up my Spanish ID card. The process, one which I will never have to repeat, was an incredible experience of the reality of immigration issues and my privilege as a UK passport holder. To get this legal identity card from other places in the world the queue is three hours, standing in various different queues while doubting if you are in the right one. The UK people go into a separate office with few people and wait on chairs. I know this because I went in the wrong queue back in October. 

Yesterday I witnessed even more of the frustrations and weirdness surrounding this process. To pick up the card once it has been made you have to go WITH AN APPOINTMENT to the Barcelona “Policia Nacional” office. The website said “no appointments available” every single time I logged in. The rules said that I must pick up my card within 40 days, but I was also in a situation where I could’t get an appointment. 

So I went to the office. An aggressive young officer outside told me that yes I had to queue up in order to ask him a question. When another officer barked at us to stand closer to the wall in the queue I decided my strategy was to obey immediately showing them that they had total power over me and barking was a brilliant idea. 

15 mins later when I got to the front of the queue I had smartened myself up a bit (took off my silly pink hat and fingerless gloves i’ve had since I was a teenager), I had prepared what I was going to say, and was ready to be absolutely 100% calm and polite, and not expect anything. This actually worked. After asking what to do to get the card I somehow found myself moved to the side of the queue with one other woman. Here I was, standing in front of 20 posters saying “You must have an appointment” about to get in without an appointment. Magic. 

From this spot I watched the officers say no to everyone else without an appointment, except one other woman. We were the lucky three. 

Anyone who expressed their frustration at the insanity of the system (these people have spent hours and hours logging in to the system at different times of day hoping it says something other than “no appointments available”) received an incredibly aggressive response from the police. I saw a man with his child yelled at in the face “get out of here”, then taken by the arm and told to “go”. I then saw two males, one after the other,  yelled at and pushed hard in the back. These people were asking for the same information I was, just letting their stress and frustration show. 

As witness to this, and one of the lucky ones, I felt incredibly weird and uncomfortable. Here they were yelling “noone gets in without an appointment” and here we were three people for who that wasn’t true. Was this the moment to try and take some sort of stand and call out the violence and hypocrisy? No. For me it was the moment to breathe, maintain a silent calm and wait patiently, committing the story to memory to be able to share it as a learning experience for others; the absolute truth in the benefits of inner calm, and the uselessness of stress. As well as the horror of the way society works for people who are frustrated and desperate.

We were given no indication of how long our chosen group of three (all female) would wait for our non-appointment, but we all knew that standing here in the sun, with the end of this process in our grasp today was a whole lot better than more frustration and doubt trying the website, or phone calls that are never answered. The woman before me had been waiting 90 minutes. I was there a mere 20!

When we got inside one of the officers was there, kind of joking with us saying “I don’t get paid enough for this” and “Every single day we have to do this”. She then listened to one man who actually got in the door and asked reasonably polite question before telling him “noone gets in without a previous appointment”, then shouted “outside” to another woman who tried the same move to get inside. 

After a few more minutes I got in to the office. There were two people working, and more than two empty desks. Really?

I was out in two more minutes with my permanent ID card, complete with fingerprint data, photo and a little window with a picture of me. I hadn’t really expected to get all the way to this point today, and as she put my scraggy green paper on a pile of documents to be disposed of I looked at there with an emotional moment of nostalgia. That folded, torn, sellotaped piece of paper had been with me for 14 years since 2006 when I moved to Barcelona. I lost it for over a year in 2010 before finding it folded in the special lift pass pocket of my old ski jacket. I had a sudden urge to take a selfie with it! but it was too late, and I can’t imagine how the police would react to photos in the office, there was absolutely nothing going on with me except nervous best behaviour. Just the way they wanted everyone.

This weeks crazy ideas and new stuff

That was a long story about just two hours of this week. So I’ll share a few more things that are going on. Firstly I have a dream to start a podcast. I have a vague idea of format, but not sure about the technical side. Secondly I’m considering offering a regular zoom session, I have three ideas for this: One hour to just be available for questions, one hour to do connection activities, based on Joanna Macy the work that reconnects and Jon Young Exploring Natural Mystery. And one hour which is content based, sharing ideas and principles and examples of ecosocial and regenerative design. That’s 3 hours. Should I do that, or should I go and spend time online networking? Or maybe I could try and get a job teaching ecosoical design, that way someone else could do all the coordinating?

Also this week I was extremely happy to take up a position as a Director for “Greenhearted” the new NGO being created by the wonderful Kate Curtis in South Africa. 

And this morning I loved this little piece of direct action by the neighbours who are sick of dog poo everywhere. 

I try to write every Friday – read more here

 

Poble Sec dog poo action

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

SIGN UP FOR OUR LATEST NEWS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Copyright 2024 © All rights Reserved. Boodaville