CAN CURT - or where I lived when I learnt about PErmaculture
In the autumn of 2011 I took my first PDC with teacher Richard Perkins, organized by Christer Söderberg and the Open World Villages Foundation. I proposed my home for a group project and it was chosen as one of the designs to work on. This gave me a truelly lovely design, and the implication of it would have been my dream. Unfortunately, this property was rented. We did have a Permablitz and had lots of fun planting and making compost, but shortly after, we had the opportunity to go and live in a larger property - Can Servus - which was really a gift at that time. It meant however that we did not see our trees or bush grow, and now we think it has all been ploughed over again...
PDC ESPORLES 2011 GROUP DESIGN
In the PDC Esporles 2011 I expressed my goals to the group I was working with. They were:
- Provide a living space for another person
- Have a food production area
- Enjoy an area that can receive children for workshops and therefore provide an income
- Be protected from the chilly Northern winds in winter
These goals were all beautifully covered by designing vegetable plots, a horseshoe shaped food forest with a little walk through it that served as a educational tool and a windbreak at the same time, a chicken pen with rain catchment, compost areas, a yurt for the colleague with a private dry toilet, and the area inside the horseshoe could take a structure to provide shade so that we could hold workshops or other events there, without having to invade the private spaces of either of the homes on site.
Richard thought it was a great design and that it could well work in real life!
Ooooh if only the property had been ours :-)
PREPPING A PERMABLITZ
At this stage a couple of people from the "tribe" had started the Facebook Page "Permablitz Baleares" and we wanted to start this chain of Permablitzes (Google it if you don't know what it is, but basically it means lots of people go help in any one place, then invite everyone over to theirs) so that we could all work together on different designs, implement Permaculture in different environments, learn from eachothers situations and most importantly; have a great time whilst doing it!
It is however not easy to think up jobs for a whole lot of people! This needs some design! You don't know really how many people are going to come so you need to break the work up into bite size bits, so that smaller groups can work on it, or if not a lot of people turn up, it is still manageable, although of course a system of signing up would be ideal.
I picked a date, put it out into the world, and then got designing on the program for the actual day of the Permablitz. I made a mindmap of the workgroups that I had in mind and stuck this up on a board together with the new "basic" design as well as the Permaculture ethics and some more info, for people to look at so that they have an idea of where their work is actually leading to.
Some of the workgroups were:
- hot compost
- build chicken coop from pallets
- plant fruit trees
- plant windbreak and other hedges
ACTUAL DESIGN
But the property wasn't ours! So we had to think of which items we could actually implement and enjoy them whilst there. We specifically thought of food production and a wind break (both to get costs down - food in summer & heating in the winter) so therefore we came up with a somewhat less pretentious design, which included:
- a chicken coop (a new big supermarket had just opened and we had gotten lots of huge pallets from there)
- a hot compost to improve the soil of our vegetable plot (down the field next door was a little torrent, on the edge of which was a huge resource of caña, the local bamboo, which would give us loads of nitrogen (green stuff to go in the compost); we had also gone and gotten a trailer full of horse manure from a friend and found a sad and abandoned hail bale - huge! - and only mouldy on the very outside. Totally set for 1m³ of hot compost!)
- a windbreak of madroños, giving fruit at the same time as shelter (at this time, my friend Paula had set up this beautiful project of planting trees wherever she could get people together. She received free trees from the Menut Forestry near Lluc, and she passed some on to me for our Permablitz.)
- more fruit trees and a lasagne bed
PERMABLITZING IT
On the 12th of November 2011 27 eager workers turned up at our home, with lots of goodies and snacks, and tonnes of good vibes and energy to work and learn together! We had a great time, got loads of jobs done, enjoyed the company and guidance of our Permaculture mentor Julio Cantos, and then finished it all off with a yummy barbecue (David from the Biogranja La Real even taught us how to grill prickly pear leaves Mexican style!)
1 month later we had the news that we could move into a bigger home. Can Curt was my little haven when I was single. We enjoyed it as a family with young children (the girls were 4 and 5 when I met them), but really, some more living space was a gift! So we sadly packed everything in boxes, lifted the chicken coop onto a trailer as well as the as yet unused compost pile, but left all the other beautiful work carried out on the Permablitz behind. Maybe someone is enjoying those strawberry trees or the rich soil now...