I’m hoping to find out the true answer to this question at the “Introduction to Permaculture Course” we are running on the last weekend of June. Come along!! email me at thegurney@gmail.com with any questions or for more info.
It seems to be about creating a sustainable low maintenence solution to a problem… by using the resources already available. Or as me and Alice from the eco bike tour spent a while discussing … it’s when you do one job which serves many functions, like filling a hole using a pile of rubble you need to get rid of anyway. or moving to a new warehouse and using the left behind shipping container to build a mezzazine floor instead of paying to remove it. … this sounds like the kind of efficiency i like.
Here are some pictures of some of my “permaculture” experiments….. Alfred Decker can set us straight on all this when he gives the course in June!
1) instead of planting a fruit tree i’m caring for an almond tree which has grown from seed of it’s own volition 2) instead of burning the branches i’ve made a pile which will decompose slowly and hopefully stay humid underneath… although there may be pest problems with this.
when i say small town bars i mean the raconet in calaceite, a place where i can sit at the bar and read the mattaraña news and chat idly to the barman. i do not mean the “pub” in calaceite where i spent a hideous 10 minutes on saturday night with the worst kind of dance music, mario brothers painted on the wall and drunk pesado men.
i recently visited the “XXV Olive and oil” fair. there were 4 stalls with oil, a few with chacuterie and more with plastic tat, books and wallets. One of the stalls for oil was eco-mattaranya, who seem like great guys and some of their eco olives are taken from their land just ten minutes walk from my place. The other eco stall i found ecovitres, s.l. have been producing organic wine for 17 years, they must have been some of the first.
at the land i got on with clearing up some more of the mess the digger left, tying the trees to sticks with elastic Bernat conveniently found on the street on the way out of Barcelona. The place is getting slightly more tidier and prepared for the fiesta .. little by little…..
On Saturday I went into town to find a vibrator, the concrete kind, a jacuzzi, and a friend. I found all three What a marvellous place Mora is.
do you like mel’s safety gear? those trousers are made of metal.
starting the chainsaw took us about an hour, you really have to give it some welly. but then we took down two dead trees – an almond and an olive. the first trees i’ve ever chopped down – we did the wedge in one side and everything
apart from getting winter wood, i did very little this weekend. the temperatures are still ridiculously warm for november. there was some wine, some napping, a freaky dream about Mel’s dog having human hands and burying its head in a bucket of pee.
My important job was picking up an official paper certifying that i am now a farmer, and as usual i tidied up and inspected growing things….
mel's greenhouse out of sticks and old bottles - a great idea that i'll be copying
the parsley seeds have sprouted, i planted them where they'll get loads of water off the yurt and it seems to be working
i haven't planted any onions for 6 months, so these fellas are doing well. good luck to them
well it’s only been called boodaville for a few months i suppose, but the seed started growing on the 7th November 2008 when i took the day off work, went over there in a little rental car, signed the papers with Antonio’s ageing parents and a notary to buy a 1.5 hectare plot in rural spain, and cracked open a bottle of cava in the sunshine.
november
2008
7th
The project has evolved since the original idea and just to clear things up – here’s a summary of what’s going on down at the land:
I am working in parallel on building a comfortable home with rooms for rent (read more here) and developing eco-tourism with a focus on educational workshops about sustainable living, called the “positive impact project”. It’s mainly about fun and adventure, but also aims to show people ethical lifestyle alternatives which could be adopted on a long term basis. If we inspire visitors to make permanent changes to the routine can we can claim that by choosing a boodaville holiday your overall effect on people and planet is a positive one? maybe – hence the name project…
the anniversary weekend was all about bonfire
and hulahooping
more highlights coming up.. as i think of catchy headlines
when i’m not actually at the land moving furniture around and slowly progressing in various eco-projects i like to think i’m being useful by networking. this summer i’ve met the wonderful people from the nowhere festival who will hopefully be coming over to Boodaville and use the space to work on art projects in preparation for next years event. They told me about about some exciting sounding local organic farms… more
let’s plant some seeds (article published in bcnmes july 2011 – anna gurney)
I swing wildly between months where it seems the world and everything in it is falling apart, and months like May 2011 where it seems that things are strangely coming together. No, I’m not talking about Argentinian ball control, a multi-million euro field game or even Shakira’s very very tight trousers. I’m talking about the mind-blowing minutes of my life I spent sitting on someone’s shoulders in a sea of pink disco lights and the wild waving arms of 40,000 Pulp fans. Jarvis had just dedicated Common People to the indignats in Plaça Catalunya, Gil Scott-Heron had just left us with his legacy “the revolution will not be televised” and right there it felt like it was all about to happen. My over-excitment is rooted in a far more profound series of events: Starting on the 15th May, peaceful “yes we camp” protesters took over Plaça Catalunya. Their numbers swelled to the point of inspiring thousands to wake up to the idea that we live in a false democracy where governments pander to big business and their own special interests rather than what is best for people and planet. Despite the fact that we all then saw them being battered by the Mossos on Friday morning, it still feels like people are moving in the same direction, community action is the answer to many important political and environmental problems. Here are three more sources for that optimism.
we want to have : bikes that turn a car alternator when you pedal
the question is, how are me and pau (mainly pau) going to make this happen?
thursday
our working lunch thursday turned into a frenzy of table mat diagrams as pau tried to describe the shape/size of the random bits of metal we might need to build stands for the bikes. he had a eureka moment when a group of shopping trolleys rolled past, one of which had a perfectly shaped base. As we left the terrace we realised there was a reason for all the trolleys – a metal junkyard where people bring scrap metal and sell it by the kilo, so this is why you see people searching through bins…
out the back frames/ladders/microwaves were precariously piled metres high with paths in between; possibly one of the most unsafe places i have ever spent a thursday lunchtime. when pau took a metal frame out of the middle of a pile i thought we might bring it down. as we were faffing around discussing what we wanted the guys were shouting and bringing in more and more stuff, when they turned up with several 6m long beams we were trapped behind them all the time it took to unload them against the wall. i wonder where someone “found” those. “eek, sorry pau, i hope you don’t have to be back at work in a hurry”
i’m not a natural at bargaining people down, but today i only had four euros in my pocket which made it much easier. i think his exact words were “you can pay me the other 4 euros next time”. The price he tried to charge me was 60c a kilo, i don’t know how much they pay for the stuff you take in.
With a van full of old metal chairs and random frames i went to Viledecans Industrial Estate to look for alternators, after asking three times and coming across a second hand cement mixer shop, which has been noted, i finally found the desguace. and with more amazing bargaining (i have 60 euros so i can buy 2 at 25 each, or 3 for 60. “me engañas!!!”. it’s fine i can just get 2 for 50. “no, take 3″)
i bought three car alternators
friday
high points : lunch at the beach, deciding to make a thatch roof on the shed i built out of bed bases. i used mud (with linseed oil) and grass and it worked
low points : having a huge headache due to the intense heat – it was over 30º and impossible to do anything except seek shade until about 6pm
saturday
supermarket. heat. cheddar. river swimming. reading about solar water heating systems. lunch.
and later on discovering that the metal frame we picked up is perfect for standing a bike on it almost stays in place by itself – but how will we fix it? duck tape? of course, but only temporarily later those metal rings that you can screw really tight will replace the tape
sunday
hooray for the wind, it’s cool enough to actually get something done today.
like strengthen the bike frame, put an alternator on the ground, make a belt out of an old inner tube and get a light bulb lit. well no, we didn’t light a bulb due to wiring problems but we can get the alternator turning. it’s not perfect (see video) but pau thinks he can fix it all together without welding.
i didn’t do any of that – i dug a hole for the second toilet and continued work on the bed base shed with a staple gun, more mud and plastc sheeting. i am so damn happy with the shed – it cost about 3 euros for the plastic and a euro for the linseed oil i used and nothing more. and in total i think it took about 6 hours and i did it all by myself lets hope we can do the bar as quickly….
oh and we went to the tip to find pallets, crates, chairs, tables, big pieces of wood for the last shed wall, and we found 2 pallets, 6 crates, 1 chair, 3 tables, and 1 piece of wood. it is a very rank place though, not something the tourists want to see.
someone told me that if i made tiny holes in a plastic bucket, put only proper composting material in, and kept it tight shut i would be able to compost on my balcony in barcelona (hopefully without arousing the suspicion of my housemates)
i only put in raw fruit and veg, egg shells, and tea bags. everything went mouldy then blackened and after a couple of months the expected skanky liquid was gathering in the old frying pan under the bucket.
eventually i had to deal with the liquid. the stench when you got close to it would probably have put most people off the whole experiment right there, but i was thinking of it as liquid plant magic.
i collected it every month or so and took it in a plastic bottle to the trees at the land. i didn’t throw stuff in for a while so i could see what was forming…. it was black, mushy and soggy, but very composty, didn’t smell too bad, the white bucket had a few black splodges where bits had stuck to the side
after 7 months and a new housemate who chucked out the kitchen bin and the curtains because they were too dirty i decided to investigate more closely and see if i could get away with continuing the expermient. the black splodges were now completely covering the sides and the inside of the lid and on closer inspection realised they were some kind of living flat non-moving worm type thing.
the sad ending to the tale, about 2 mins after the discovery of the creatures, is that the whole experiment frying pan and all, got wrapped in black bin bags and hurled delicately into a dumpster.
What a marvellous place Mora is.
