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

For Future’s Sake (this Friday someone else wrote about me)

Interview photo For Future's Sake

For Future’s Sake (this Friday someone else wrote about me)

Lou, founder of Boodaville shares some thoughts on the week and a published interview about Boodaville, Permaculture and being an active citizen in a declining world.

This morning I was reflecting on “Nature as our teacher” and made notes to put together a passionate informed post about being guided by nature, both for health and wellbeing AND for wisdom and knowledge. The ideas are complex and growing, so come back next week to see the finished article!

This week I will leave you with Beth Mark’s write up of an interview with me last week. Her online magazine For Future’s Sake shares hopeful stories about active citizens in a declining world. 

I’m feeling full of love for all the people who are engaging in active hope and making the world such a beautiful place, and for all the wonderful connections Boodaville has brought about.

Read the article here

THIS WEEKS CRAZY IDEAS AND NEW STUFF

I went to an office! La Botanica where I met the lovely Clarissa and worked next to baby avocado trees growing in glass jars, with long roots reaching down into the water. Find me there every Tuesday in March!

We are also looking in to abandoning Barcelona to go and live in a camper van in a few years (this may fall into the crazy ideas category). 

We finished the interview process for our new ESC volunteers (starting in April) and we have some wonderful candidates! We will make the selection next week.

We are still looking for young people in Poble Sec who would be interested in financial support for projects, or volunteering opportunities with our local projects. And we are one step closer to collaborating with Vidalia to run a Permaculture training there!

We still need an awesome accountant!!! Let us know if you are the person we need.

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
homepage Rovira Regenerativa

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. 

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

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

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!

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

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

Waves of crises.. (on fridays I write)

Cartoon, waves showing recession, climate change and biodiversity collapse

Waves of crises.. (on fridays I write)

Lou, founder of Boodaville, starts the year with a few huge topics, as well as personal reflections on life in Barcelona in 2021 and links to help us with the question "how can we solve the current crises?"

Happy New Year! Reality means this post starts with some sad news, but the links and ideas are to shed light on where we are and what we can do. The world continues to be amazing in millions of ways.

Waves of Crises

So here we are in 2021, and according to Owen Jones, things in Wuhan are much better than 2020 – which is what we were all hoping for. Sadly in most of the world, and definitely USA and UK, Covid is still out of control, and that is just one of our current crises. 

This cartoon of the waves of crisis was published over 6 months ago, and I’ve seen it in various presentations, and shared it myself before. I wonder if we would need to make the COVID one a bit bigger now…. We could also add a tiny little ripple at the front to represent “politics” and the Capitol Hill incident. On the grand scale of things I wouldn’t class someone who continues to act in the same way they did before as news. It’s attention seeking, again. And hopefully this won’t distract us from the real headline telling us that yesterday, in one day, over 4000 people died of COVID in the US.

Here’s a quote and a link about the climate change wave from this morning : 

“Covid lockdowns around the world may have caused a slight dip in emissions, but the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere is still going up fast. Unless the global economic recovery from the nightmares of 2020 is a green one, the future of many millions of people around the world looks black indeed.”

Climate crisis: 2020 was joint hottest year ever recorded

I’m a big fan of Degrowth, and alternative economics, so the “recession” wave I like to see as an opportunity. The perfect time to introduce a universal basic income for example. Kate Raworth is a great read to go further into that crisis.

The biodiversity collapse wave is part of what I often refer to as “ecological collapse”. I’ve been trying to influence groups in which I work to always say “Climate change and Ecological Collpase” rather than just “Climate change” to help make this one clear. A wonderful book, to grasp that idea deeply is “Climate, A New Story” by Charles Eisenstein.

I wish my view of the world wasn’t considered so “weird”. I look at products on sale, some of which i buy 🙁, and think “Why aren’t you using ethical design in what you do?”
 
Everyone in every sector should be considering these things.
 
Mercadona have reduced the size of their disposable plastic biscuit package, and increased the net weight of the product inside from 300 to 360g. It will sound great when they say “we have reduced our plastic by 30%”. But if that 30% was entirely unnecessary in the first place, is this enough?
 

For a lighter look at all these ideas. I highly recommend the podcast “Jon Richardson and the Futurenauts” It is absolutely brilliant: easy, funny and useful. 

Life in Barcelona

Here in Barcelona we are still finishing the “fiestas”. The Kings came with their gifts for everyone two days ago. (Kira commented, “It’s good to ask the Kings for a much as possible because then we don’t spend our money and get poorer”. The values of the normal world are creeping in to her life even though Mummy always says that if we spend money on good things we get richer and create abundance! I speak truth to my child right? There’s enough content for an essay in here.. what lies do we let our children believe?)

The return to school, officially today, has been delayed until Monday. Unlike the absolute shambles in the UK (again), I think everyone will be going back, and staying there. I hold on to the thought that COVID numbers were going down for a while during last term.

We are currently confined to the district where we live – a sensible move as we wait to see where cases increase after our relative freedom over Christmas (we were allowed up to 10 people together, almost anywhere in Catalunya). We are still on a 10pm curfew, shops and restaurants have limited opening times. But I have to say that I fully understand the rules and apart from not travelling away from home our lives are.. well.. pretty normal. Some real positives to end this post:

  • Kira has learnt to ride her bike and loves it – so being confined in the city involves lots of enjoying Barcelona by bike which is GREAT!
  • I am reading Braiding Sweetgrass. A truly beautiful book to remind us to be present and in love with the amazing nature we have.
  • A friend from the UK messaged yesterday and said she was keeping her fingers crossed that we will all be able to attend a small festival together in August. and thinking about it… why not? Outdoor space, camping, and not that many people. Sounds like the perfect COVID friendly activity.. totally possible!
Cartoon, waves showing recession, climate change and biodiversity collapse

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

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

Friday writing and sustainable living in Barcelona

Gifts from nature - seeds and a story

Friday writing and sustainable living in Barcelona

This week I'm sharing eco-living tips from Barcelona: Fermenting pickled chard / use the amazing Berkey water filter / keep unhealthy marketing out of your home.

Wow. I sat down to do Friday writing an hour ago, and have just actually started typing. We have, as you may have noticed, switched to a new webpage! An amazing feat, which is still ongoing and writing a post isn’t the same as it used to be. I’ll get used to it right?

I haven’t written for three weeks now… and that’s fine. It’s been a weird time here with some trips to Boodaville that seem like a looong time ago, and my daughters birthday. It seems that the time when I could enjoy my child’s birthday are behind me, it is very much about what they want at seven. And very dramatic. I really feel like it’s all easier when there aren’t any presents or games where kids scrabble around and fight over presents from the piñata. Actually I think last year Kira was most happy when she organized the other kids in a neat queue and ave them one chupa-chup each. I’ll bear that in mind next year. 

My world is so busy right now I haven’t been keeping up with the latest craziness from the world. I have signed up to bulletins from “Nature” though in an effort to receive things I want to see. Not like when you hit the search button on Instagram and are blasted with recommended (?) or popular (?) images in a sad burst of seeing how the world really is.

I learnt from Nature that the combined mass of human created stuff, is now bigger than the mass of all living plants, animals, fungi and microbes on the planet. Now there’s a turning point for the anthropocene. It makes the solutions pretty clear though right? Let’s increase the amount of life! and redress the balance. More life, less concrete!

So here are my sustainable steps this month…

Pickled chard

I didn’t think fermenting was for me. Then I tried this, with a ridiculous level of success. I turned the white stalks (my least favouite part) into something delicious. It is remarkably easy – water, some salt and garlic in a jar with chard stalks. You’re supposed to leave it 7 – 10 days, I left it two months.. and it was great! Since we eat a lot of non-processed food, and “rice and vegetables” is a standard dinner, i’m very excited about jazzing it up with jars of tangy deliciousness.

At least say no to the marketing

It upsets me a little that so much food is sold using cartoon animals, bright colours, tricks by huge companies that do incredible amounts of research on how to affect your behaviour and make you buy more of what they want you to buy. So anyway, on the days where we do buy cereal from a normal supermarket, I take the plain white bags out the box, turn the card inside out and add it to the craft drawer. 

Berkey water filter

Yes, this was expensive at 350 euros. I calculated that if we carry on buying mineral water from the mountains 120km away in plastic bottles we would spend over 200 euros in a year. The Berkey is the filter with least plastic and best ethics (for example they don’t sell on Amazon). Most importantly we are extremely happy with it – the flow gets slightly slower as it gets emptier so you notice and don’t forget to fill it up, the tap is really convenient, and best of all we now have filtered water for cooking and hot drinks as well as drinking water. No more faeces particles, or anti-depressants in my tea!

Gifting seeds

I’m full of joy at the prospect of gifting re-used little jars with a few seeds, a Boodaville almond to suck up the humidity while they are in the jar, and a little hand written note about why these plants are useful, a bit about the story of their use over the centuries, and some info on when to plant. In the past I’ve prepared jars like this with soil, an egg carton cup included so you have all the material right there! Thinking about this now, I would love to include longer stories, giving a picture of indigenous cultures. Our modern consumerist culture has so much to learn from other cultures that hold wisdom on sustainable living – these ideas (such simple ideas as gratitude for the natural world) are key to finding our path towards a better future. 

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

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

We got some serious work done at our Permaculture site this weekend!

Chiseling the wall down

We got some serious work done at our Permaculture site this weekend!

This weekend we got some serious work done - see our new dry stone wall and drain, the intervention in the food forest, the results of the olive harvest and the work we have to do to fix our green roof.

This weekend we were working with Nick Park from Cova Fullola to get a dry stone wall built between the two houses. Lou concentrated efforts on finishing the inside wall off the old house with lime mortar between the stones, working with mulch in the food forest, harvesting and sorting the olives and digging up the green roof so the builder can get in and fix it next week. The amazing Jessica was managing site to make sure we had energy, water and a rocket stove warm house to get us all through the weekend. Yes, these were 4 extremely productive days!

See what we did in the gallery!

 

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

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

The Boodaville Yurt – See how we built it

yurt crown by Rob Durand

The Boodaville Yurt – See how we built it

A little bit of Boodaville history about our first collaborative project! In 2010 we built our own yurt with just the help of a 12 page leaflet downloaded from the internet.

10th April 2010

Saturday, our first day building the yurt with the team.

sharpening the chisel – 3 hours

marking out the circle – 3 minutes

at the stinking rubbish dump sawing bits of wood to make floor bearers – 2 hours. key team members: arnau, gary, gary’s right testicle, pau, anna (officially NOT a fascist leader) and a dead cat.

making roof poles round at the end with a fantastically sharp chisel – 1 hour. rob d

drilling holes in the wall posts – 1 hour. phil

trench digging where the bearers will lie on the ground – 1 hour. team members chuk, maskell and smallchuk

lunch. yoopeee. perfect. coffee

levelling bearers and laying and nailing down floorboards on them- hours

tying the wall posts together with the most crucial building material… string – painfully slow and too many blisters

discussing whether to bury the door frame instead of sawing it – yes

discussing whether anna is, in fact, a fascist

wondering whether arnau will get out of the hammock, and whether it was just the morning beer that caused him to drive my van into a wall,

by sundown: floorboards looking flat, wall looking stringy, imminent football match being discussed, arnau’s car battery run down, some not that warm solar showers taken and beer drunk

by 3am .. most people full of wine and on their way to bed

11th April 2010

Sunday. nutella. coffee and tea at the same time. relatively low level of functioning all round.

more floorboards and wedging extra bits of wood under the bendy places,

more and more and more tying wall poles together – second half of wall started

heat. hunger. lunch. river trip option turned down because people are keen to crack on (and they were sitting in the shade at the time)

trying to make the lattice walls have a straight end, running out of string

hole digging so we can bury the doorframe and make a hobbit door.

starting to realise that we are not actually going to get this bastard put together by sundown… but we all had plenty of time to eat pancakes and hot potatoes.

most importantly there are volunteers to come back in a fortnight (24th April) and carry on 

BIG UP THE TEAM !!! 

24th and 25th April 2010

the very first thing i did this weekend was cut a piece of string and then into my finger with a stanley knife.

classy. i think the workers were impressed

me and phil did get some stuff done though.. we finished tying the second part of the wall, layed a few more bits of flooring (when i say layed, i mean put on the ground) and cut the edge of one of the foorboards as neatly as we could with a pruning saw.  a jig saw is, i believe, the name of the tool that would have been suitable for that job.

by sun down we were appreciating beer, practicing going in and out of the hobbit doorway, and realising that hammering down the new flooring may be a rash move. new tasks should aways be thought through twice, preferably discussed with a team who’ve not had three estrellas, and in this case the chance of completely f***ing everything up was high enough to stop us. (that’s something i really need to watch out for when i’m building the real house.)

phil discovered the full horror of packing up in the heat on sunday morning but by the time we got up into the mountains and were actually touching the “three heads” (officially Rocas de Benet) we forgot about that,

“there’s so much rock it kind of blows your mind. there’s so much fucking rock” – Phil. 25/04/10

we walked through pine trees, under eagles, next to cliffs, across a trickling muddy attempt at a stream, up spiky rocks and discovered awesomeness in the true sense of the word when we sent echoes reverberating through valleys away to the edge of the park.

6th June 2010

guapos…  i have a door!!!!

ok so it’s not a hanging door, but i think the door hinging task is made way easier by working with bare earth, if its too big i just dig

for those of you who think “well that looks like shit” can i remind you that i/we built it ourselves with the combined level of skill of maskell’s gcse technology class plus a bit of life experience, there was nothing there before and now there’s a yurt and its beautiful

i will sleep in it soon but my bed in the house is just so cosy and the night still has a bit of a chill, not to mention howling jabalíes

13th June 2010

My first sleep in the yurt!

And it wasn’t too freezing and I had beautiful dreams

i finished the yurt door – its on hinges these days and the walls are properly attached.   it turns out that digging down to make space for the door to open is not a very good idea at all, know why?

You get a puddle, right in the doorway when it rains!

18th August 2010

The floor is finished!

floor recipe : old beams from the tip, bits of ceiling board, old wardrobe and luxury pallets nailed on. and a few carefully chosen rocks wedged under the dodgy bits. 1000 nails = $4.85 euros   25 nails =  1.25 euros   and then i used a shitload more than i thought i would. i’m starting to think that i can do things pretty well myself, it just takes about 5-10 times as long as a pro – but i’m getting pretty nifty with a chisel.

13th September 2010

Fitting a sink, (no thanks to Phil)

something tells me that a piece of chipboard from an old cupboard is not strong enough to support a sink, but when has that ever stopped me before? Marcos told me again that he thinks the whole ger will come down at the first snowfall

so i bought those cheap a-frame things and fixed some extra supporting metal bits, laid the chipboard on top and spent ages making it fit neatly over the screws, then spent a proper ages trying to draw a smaller circle exactly 2.6 cm inside the outline of the sink

finally got round to the fun bit – sawing the hole out – and was rudely brought to a halt by phil breaking saw blade approximately 3 seconds after he started “helping”

so as usual, next weeks job is just a continuation of last weeks. one day i will learn that things take a really long time. (and never think about how fast it could be done if you took it to the wood shop)

good news : la pesquera near beceite is properly lush and swimming under the waterfalls for ten minutes made up for all the DIY sweating,

bad news : erm, ahem, bed bugs – there’s still a few hanging out in the guest suite. damn and DAMN, saw gary naked – to go with the testicle leakage mentioned in a previous post, (maybe that should be good news, sorry gary)

winner of the shooting star contest : phil with 225 points

2nd November 2010

Insulated but creaking

to those of you who don’t believe in the strength of the yurt have to admit that the roof blew off on monday. but only partly and only until me and bernat wrestled with it and forced it back down again with more tent pegs. it creaks quite a lot now

but on the bright side there’s a proper double bed in it now – ha ha! it fitted through the tiny hobbit door!! 

the sides have been pegged down and covered with gravel for the winter and we hung up (fireproofed) curtains/blankets/towels all over the inside for insulation.

the porch wall continues to be an interesting experiment in building with fecal matter. the second section perches relatively precariously on top of the first – this wall will not be very straight – and i’ll be very impressed if our carefully m¡xed render is actually weatherproof; horseshit, flour and water goo, powdered milk, straw, sand, and olive oil.

15th November 2010

diy chimney instalation follwed by fire emergency

Friday : mission – buy a stove and a sheet of aluminium 40cm x 40cm with a chimney sized hole in the middle.

12:00 Encants market – stove €89, hot water bottle €6.95  (how did i ever live without one..)

12:30 asked around – hardware store, then industrial machine type shop and am now waiting outside a tiny backstreet door labeled “metallisteria”. a woman in a tabard  moping the pavement assured me he would be back soon.

12:47 have decided to stick the chimney fitting together with velcro and just bought some

13:07 give up waiting, but then bump into metal man on the street who grumpily talks in terms of “days” to cut the aluminium and he wants exact measurements. apart from anything else this sounds pricey. (i am on a budget of zero- or verrry fecking close to)

13:28 at the organic veg. patch in horta to buy little baby cabbage, cauliflower, chard and leeks from a man in a wheelchair whose daughter speaks english and mandarin.

15:45 at Leroy Merlin (ie B&Q) where they have some aluminium but cut nothing to size

16:00 followed a sign saying aluminium at the industrial estate, they gave me directions to a place that actually sells aluminium who are now giving me extremely convoluted directions to the other industrial estate where i may be able to get what i need.

16:25 chuffed about successfully following directions but can’t remember shop name, randomly pull in here to ask directions. my, is that a pile of metal offcuts next to a huge machine that slices metal? i think it is

the  stubbly man in a boiler suit was smoking while he found a sheet roughly the right size and got to work. the heavy machine pins down the metal then “bummff” slices it. he played around with tubes connected to compressed air and then used a solder to cut the circle. 

between him and the other guy who had his ipod on while trying to resurrect a rusty car chassis i was expecting a horrific accident at any moment. my joy at finding this cheap and cheerful workshop was slightly dampened when it turned out not to be cheap – €10 was double what i expected, but i got it. yoop.

15:48 the windfarm near Caseres looks kind of impressive when there’s an orange sunset.

19:18 building supplies shop Calaceite : after discussing the best positioning for the chimney jigsaw and which types of tape i need for fudging together things that get hot, i was gossiping with the owners of the shop about the english caravan invasion and how the council is trying to ban them. i can understand why when the only light apart from the stars on the Arens road is from a tv inside a luxury motorhome parked permanently in a deserted valley.

21:35 soup and trying to decide if karl pilkington could ever be funny

22:10 hot water bottle, wooly hat, fluffy socks and two duvets

Saturday : mission – put the stove in and go to an “eco-fair” in a nearby town

10:07 building a wall out of a mixture of horseshit and powdered milk which has now gone sour and absolutely stinks

11:00 deciding where to put the stove

11:12 clearing out the insects i found living in the folds of the insulation. this could be a fun weekly task 🙁

11:32 still deciding where to put the stove so there’s maximum gap between the chimney and the wall

15:32 done but not tested and on the way to Ráfales

17:35 beautiful town, shit fair.

i don’t think a stand with imported plastic toys should be allowed to feature in anything eco. there were a couple of people promoting biomass and a talk on farm subsidies by a dull government bod. i was happy to stick it out until he finally reached his point, but Marcos was less patient.

18:35 after dark waterfall exploration – El Salt – AWESOME!!

19:05 stopped for a beer in Valderobres

02:35 after two hours in an almost empty bar playing eurocheese techno Marcos is still insiting this is the last drink befroe he takes me home. why didn’t i drive?????

the streets are rammed with gangs of teenagers  in tiny skirts and thigh high boots. this is their night of the year or something, hundreds of them totttering and shouting.

“no Marcos i don’t want to go to the disco with them….”

04:52 home at last and its cold enough to warrant stove testing

04:58 yurt filled with chemical smelling smoke, water thrown on fire and evacuation to sleep in the house. more experimentation required during daylight hours with company. there was a definite panic right there, is this because i bought the cheap stove? eeeek

Sunday : mission – plant veg, tidy up and go home

20:17 success

29th November 2010

outside it was cold enough to freeze the water in the kitchen sink solid

inside the yurt : 22º

hell yeah

the chemical smoke mostly burnt away by late friday night and my chorizo chick pea soup was cooking on the stove. i would never have eaten that 4 years ago. i’m turning catalan

Winter vs the Yurt – Round 4

Apr 20, 2015

Boodaville is looking great! We made our first visit of the year this weekend with family and friends and the high rainfall has definitely not done any (permanent) harm to the site. 

The yurt and the old house suffered the same fate as last winter with bits of the roof being ripped off, but at least this year we weren’t robbed.

10th April 2016

The yurt has been taken down, to make space for the geodesic dome!

Let’s Connect and Regenerate!

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