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Erasmus + projects and soil workshops (On Friday’s I write)

Plant Workshops Barcelona

Erasmus + projects and soil workshops (On Friday’s I write)

Read this post about our upcoming Erasmus+ projects and find out how you can join us on a Permaculture training! This week Lou also shares the Urban Permaculture projects happening in Barcelona.

It’s one of those days where I feel like I have taken on too much. A day to make sure I find the time for some nourishment and empowerment as well as a lot of movement and doing. I am surrounded by house and parenting work (Kira has to pack for Colonias this weekend) and also in the middle of funding applications, managing volunteers and leading workshops. But I have been juggling tasks long enough to have learnt that finding calm, quiet reflection and time to write really does give you space and help you find the joy in what you are doing. And as my yogi tea told me yesterday “Joy is the essence of success”. 

So this weeks post is a gathering and organising of ideas, current projects, opportunities and needs. 

erasmus + projects
1) living the questions, sanillés 21 – 29 june 2021

I am facilitating this youth worker training on “Regenerative Cultures” with the amazing Aline at a stunning location in the Pyrenees. Frank manages the place and will be hosting us and providing food and we are starting a new collaboration with Sam Miller. Me and Sam had a wonderful meeting yesterday talking about the soil food web, JADAM methods for growing effective microorganisms and we have planned the practical sessions to make and spray these “magical” potions. 

We are looking for two volunteers to join us for the week! In return for all food and lodging and attending as much of the course as you can, these two volunteers will help us manage the participants in their reflections groups, indivdual taks, housekeeping roles and timekeeping – and be classroom assistants for Anna Louise and Aline. Please contact us if you are interested! thegurney@gmail.com  INFO HERE

2) “BETTER THAN NEW” – YOUTH EXCHANGE AT PIPIRIMOSCA SEPTEMBER 2021

Jessica and Pere are taking the lead on organising this exchange near Valls in Catalunya. A week of exploring permaculture, circular economy and getting hands on experiences to develop skills at fixing and upcycling anything from technology, to building and clothes, to waste food! We are looking for 6 participants from Spain, all expenses paid, INFO HERE

3)ecosocial design everywhere, Youth Worker Training November 2021

Boodaville is very excited to start a new collaboration with Vidalia Intentional Community, and to reunite with Alfred 8 years after teaching our first course together (with the beautiful name “Think Like a Forest”). This project is still a half-finished application at the moment – deadline in 3 days!!!

4) youth exchange with vidalia

In a very last minute move, and mainly because Carlos had the capacity, we have also jumped in to put together a youth exchange with groups of young people coming to Vidalia to co-create the future living spaces, learn and share the important ideas and designs behind living as a community. (Also in the project writing phase)

urban permaculture workshops

I am also preparing for two workshops over the weekend.. thinking about plants, wooden posts, which screws we need, which photos I want to take and share, whether the “good soil” I collected from the Boodaville food forest is still alive after being in a cupboard downstairs for a month! (I hope so!)

Due to COVID limitations, both workshops are already full. We will do more!

Plant Workshops Barcelona

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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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permaculture

2018 Wicking Bed

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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/

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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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