I just started my volunteering in Bozevce with GAIA, since maybe one month, when I participated to the training for coordinators in natural building. I didn’t know what to expect to it, except to meet new people and to learn technics of natural building. Actually, I only had a dim idea of what non formal education was, and I thought that it could be relevant to have more knowledges about natural building before to plan to teach it.
Still today, I don’t think to be able to explain, with words, what is non formal education, but I can tell what this collective experience, which was very different of all the learning ways I had known when I was student, looked like.
Earlier this month I was fortunate enough to take part in a PDC (Permaculture Design Course) at Gaia Kosovo. Permaculture is an ethical system for living in harmony and balance with the earth and with each other. The ethics of permaculture are Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share. There is also a set of principles that demonstrate how to carry out these ethics. For example, using biological resources instead of man-made ones both cares for the earth and helps us to share resources fairly, as it leads to less consumption.
Before I attended the course, I had heard a lot about permaculture and even worked in several gardens that claimed to be based on permaculture principles, but I still didn’t know exactly what permaculture was. The PDC showed me that permaculture is a lot more than a set of gardening guidelines or ideas; instead, it’s a system that we can apply to every area of our lives.
There is a growing awareness about the field of Social Permaculture, which includes valuable principles such as integrating rather than segregating, as establishing healthy relationships strengthens systems. We can also apply the concept of zones to social permaculture. Zone 0 represents you, zone 1 is your family (birth or chosen), and so on until we get to zone 5, which represents the world.
The PDC also contained a lot of practical, hands-on activities. My favorite activity was learning how to measure contour lines using a simple A-frame. Water always flows at a 90-degree angle to contour lines, so knowing where they are on your land can show you where to build swales, which catch and retain water. We also built a hot compost pile and got to try out some different natural building techniques.
Gaia Kosovo was an ideal place to hold the course. The residents there have a lot of experience with natural building and it was the perfect place to see concepts like thermal mass and passive heating put into practice. The residents and volunteers at Gaia Kosovo also cooked us a bounty of delicious food, and mealtimes were a highlight of everyone’s day.
There are several permaculture concepts that are easily applicable both in the garden and across our lives. One of these concepts is the idea of zones. In permaculture, zones are used to delineate different areas of a property. Zone 0 is the area that is closest to you (i.e. your house), zone 1 is an area that you visit multiple times per day and is a good place for intensive gardening. Zone 2 is an area that you visit maybe once or twice a day and is a good place to keep animals or grow vegetables. Finally, we reach zone 5, which is a wild zone that we never visit.
Our facilitators on the course were Mihail Kossev and Annelies Buggenhout. Having good teachers can make or break a course, and having Misho and Annelies as our trainers was the main reason that the course was so interesting and meaningful. Not only were they both very knowledgeable, but they used a variety of interactive and alternative teaching techniques that really helped to demonstrate the different concepts. They also helped us to bond as a group and kept us laughing!
At the end of the course, we worked in small groups to create a permaculture design for different plots of land at Gaia Kosovo. This was an invaluable experience as we got to actively experience the different steps of the process, from the initial observation period and client interview, to mapping out the different zones, sectors and flows and integrating the different elements and concepts that we learned about throughout the course. Of course, we stopped short of actually implementing our designs, although not everyone wanted to!
I’m very grateful that I got to participate in the course. I think that taking a PDC is a meaningful experience for everyone, regardless of whether or not you have land or feel ready to start gardening. You can apply the principles and concepts of permacultures everywhere; after all, you’re only limited by your imagination.
Claire Stephens 30 Nov 2021
Pictures taken by Kim-Lien Nguyen, Anca Bilciurescu and Ayşe Özgü Ötünç.
Permaculture as a Path to Peace 2.0 is Erasmus+ supported project coordinated by GAIA Kosovo. It includes several activities, such as PDC Training course and Permaculture Teachers Training. The next PDC will take place in May and the Teachers Training is planned for June 2022. Stay tuned for the news.
Since I arrived for volunteering in Kosovo in September, everybody is joking about winter coming and how, for us foreigner, it’s going to be hard to survive the cold and how challenge it will be for the daily routine.
You enjoy the last tomato of the garden; you chop the wood for heating and one day you wake up and there is twenty centimetres of snow quietly laying all around the property as far as the eyes can see.
When arriving for the first time in Bozevce, I remember people telling me the only place where I could have mobile data and internet was at the walnut tree. So I looked around and very fast, I could locate the well-known tree that overhangs the property. Whatever the season, the majestic tree is cut into the sky and offers a marvelous picture to walkers in search of network . . . and network there was indeed!
This winter, in Bozevce, we took care of our wild birds, by building some feeders and some houses for them.
Why do we feed them?
Most of the littles birds usually eat insects, or in winter, some seeds. The problem in this period is that because of the snow, the seeds and all the food they usually eat is hard to access. And in this period they need to eat a lot to fight against the cold.
How to feed them?
To feed them we used wheat seeds, because that is what we had now, but sunflowers seeds, different kinds of nuts, and animal fat can also be used, and be good for them.
Our feeders offer a surface large enough for the birds to land and to eat on it, and they are covered, to keep the seeds dry. We hung them on different places (roofs, trees and in our orchard), high enough to be hard for the cats to reach them, and in some places where there are not too many people passing by, so we do not scare them.
Why do we make bird houses?
Winter is the time for birds to find a new place for a nest. Indeed, they have to prepare spring, and the love season. With the growing of artificialised spaces in both urban and rural areas, and the disappearance of old trees, birds have less and less appropriate places for nesting.
How to make bird houses?
Bird houses can be a simple box, to offer a good shelter for the birds. But be careful, if you want your house to be used, you have to respect some dimensions. Depending on the species of the birds, their needs differ. For example a tit (Parus spp.), the entrance needs to be a hole of 32mm of diameter, and it’s 90mm for a hoopoe (Upupa epops). Also depending on the needs of the species, the place and the height where you put the house will change.
During the snowy days through our windows, we could see birds around the feeders by dozens! Thanks to that, we manage to identify some of our land mates, like:
Great tit (Parus major), blue tit (Parus caeruleus), marsh tit (Parus palustris), great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major), middle spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos medius), yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella), cirl bunting (Emberiza cirlus) and and Eurasian bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula).
We are going to continue to feed them until the end of March, when most of them become insectivorous again, to avoid them being dependent on us. Like this they will be fed until they are able to find food by themselves in nature.
A new action week took place from 19th to 26th of October, when GAIA’s Bozevce program hosted a workshop on plastering with natural materials. The workshop was designed to introduce young women with little or no prior experience to work with earth and natural materials.
The idea was to show that natural materials are easy to work with, but also to promote their benefits. Conventional building in general has a very high carbon footprint, and using natural and locally available materials contributes to keeping the carbon rather than releasing it to the atmosphere. Responsibly acquired natural materials are not damaging for the environment, and are available to all. Working with construction material such as earth and straw can be very meditative and is always fun, especially when many hands are involved in the process. By taking care of our choices, such as building materials (as the conventional ones are often polluting), we also take care of our planet, and thus of ourselves and our communities.
A different aspect of the workshop was the fact that it was intended for women. It is unusual, especially in the Balkans, to see women involved in building activities, so we wanted to use the opportunity to challenge some common stereotypes of such as building being reserved only for men. Gender roles are very present in our society, so it is always good to give different examples that could contribute to positive changes in our communities. An example of young people from different backgrounds (e.g. Albanian, Serbian, Croatian and international, different age, coming from rural and urban areas, different religions) working together, women involved in building, sharing the work but also caring for each other, these are all the little examples that are able to inspire others to make positive changes.
To contribute to the developing of environmentally and socially healthier society, it is necessary not just lower our carbon footprint, but also to treat each other with respect and equity. We are all different, and we don’t come from the same starting point. Women are often not encouraged to take part in building activities, mostly due to tradition, but with artistic natural building aesthetics and the clear environmental, economic and social benefits, women are taking almost 50% in the natural building world. It is a new chapter for a fair future, where people of all gender, younger and older generations, everybody, can work side by side.
Ruzica, an IT expert from Belgrade, who has already been involved in different projects on natural building with Earth&Crafts in Mosorin (Serbia), was teaching and showing the practice of plastering to us. She has several years of experience in building with earth, and earth plastering became her passion. So, this week around 10 young women came to Bozevce and learned how to prepare, test and plaster with clay, sand and straw mix. Most of us were plastering for the first time, and the results are great.
Our task was to put a finishing, outside layer of earth plaster on a house which is used as organizations work and educational space, where we have a workshop, space for seminars and gatherings. The goal is to make Bozevce program an eco-village and educational centre, where people from Kosovo, region and broader could come to learn about permaculture, and also experience it in practice, by living together and with nature.
As we started to work, our plaster mix consisted of 1 bucket of soil, 2,5 buckets of sand and 1,5 buckets of cut straw(1:2,5:1,5). The recipe changes very much depending on the soil type you have. That’s why before starting we made few soil tests, to see approximately how much clay our soil has (e.g. making different shapes with it and checking how it cracks). So we got to know the materials we will work with and filtered them, prepared the plastering mix and then we started to plaster. After the first few movements with earth plaster in our hands, we got more relaxed and continued our work even better. We also painted the walls with earth-water mix, which is another technique to make the natural plaster look more even.
In addition to work, we prepared and shared meals, talked and enjoyed our time together, went for walks, watched some short movies on natural building and a longer one about soil, we crocheted and tried to make dorodango (Japanese polished mud balls). It was a dynamic week in Bozevce, and it was nice to host people from all around Kosovo and share muddy work with them.
Maja
Bozevce, October 2020
P.S.
This workshop was part of my ESC volunteering project Building Resilience. Spending a year in Bozevce and experimenting living with nature and in a community, building with natural materials and producing organic food offers a lot of inspiration and knowledge. It is a chance to challenge ourselves and to grow, but more importantly to experiment in our context, where we are trying a different way of living, that is not harming to nature nor people.
Time to spring, time to spring! It is finally here, after a few months of cold weather, some snow and calmness, now the whole nature is setting its pace on maximum. Every day, trees crowns are bigger, meadows are greener, flowers blossom, bushes grow… Our whole surroundings is changing so fast and so beautifully.
Currently we are eight people in Bozevce, where we are living and working with seasons, and respecting the course of natural cycles. There are many things to learn and to try out in practice, and together we experiment.
The crisis that hit us now is only showing up to be an opportunity to learn more and plan better for future. Even though the covid-19 is having a big impact on mobility in Kosovo, our lifestyle in Bozevce stayed similar to what it was before. This actually inspired us to buy more locally, which is something we already practiced, but now we try even harder to support our neighbours. We have decided to put our focus to learn and grow together, rather than getting slowed down by the pandemic. It gave us space to reflect on the current situation, and how it could be an opportunity for the society to change its habits and transit to a more fair way of being, both for people and Nature. As one of the outcomes, volunteers from all GAIA programmes started a project ‘Shifting Perspectives’, where small but important messages relevant to our way of life, are being questioned.
With the crisis appearing we adjusted our plan for the year.
Until now, we have built a chicken nursery, plastered the inside of the red house (which is now more brown than red), and are building a material storage and outside workshop. Later in the year we will start with the building of an additional facility, on the place where there used to be an old hayloft. The plan was to focus primarily on building a facility that would serve as a kitchen and a storage place. But due to the pandemic measures, we are not able to organize all the activities with volunteers and professionals, in order to build it.
This is why our focus this year, in addition to natural building, is food production. We have extended our garden, made new planting beds in the orchard and close to the bees’ area. We built another greenhouse from hazel branches, so now we have two. Since beginning of March, we have started to sow seeds in the garden and in pots for seedlings, but only since the middle of April all of the small plants started to grow rapidly. Every day, it is noticeable that they are growing bigger and stronger, and this is something that makes all of us very happy! So, we have put some more efforts into planting, composting and taking care of soil. The soil we have is mostly clay, but the garden beds that are being worked with some of regenerative practices (no-till, aerating with broad fork and adding compost) are having a much better soil which is ready for planting a variety of vegetables. In the garden we are planting annual plants, while in the orchard we plant perennial plants, those which will stay under the trees for a longer period (a couple of years or more). We also decided to use more space around the property to grow more attractive plants for bees, medicinal plants and herbs for cooking.
As spring is showing us its nurturing side and it is providing a large amount of edible and medicinal herbs, our team has started to make daily plant or creature (sometimes it’s mushroom, a bird or an insect, etc.) presentations. As we learn about them, we are also collecting herbs for teas, fresh and cooked meals and ‘jar’ food, such as pickles and pesto made of wild plants. Experimenting in kitchen is a way to direct the creativity spring brings out in us. Our days have become more full and joyful, working outside, taking care of the animals – dogs, cats, chicken, bees, taking care of plants, preparing and building new things, meeting with neighbours and exchanging ideas, a variety of tasks and moments that are happening every week. A special moment happened with the coming of longer days – one evening as the sun was setting, a beautiful wolf ran across the field in front of our house. It was the good spirit of the Wild showing herself to us. Spring has also brought the birds that are singing and flying all around, many small creatures jumping, crawling and flying, the meadows became colourful with flowers which are essential for our bees and many other insects… It is beautiful to see the Nature starting her life all over again. Let her inspire you and bring out your curiosity for life.
When I was a child, I dreamed of a white Christmas
and as I am in Boževce, I realized how much the melted snow could be mud.
Winter in Boževce: How we live…
First, we cut wood in order to warm the two houses – the kitchen, the living room, the 1st floor of the ‘red house’ (still in construction) and the volunteer’s rooms. We bought the wood from neighbours and when the weather is good, we can hear the chainsaw, and the sound of cutting, in all the valley.
Sometimes, there are electricity cuts in our village, so we bring our candles and we continue our tasks. The water pump works with electricity, so if we need it during cuts, we take a bucket with a rope and we go to the well. When you are pulling up the full bucket, you can understand how life in the past was and conclude you are in a good situation, as you might not have a well in the property, or you have to do it all the time. And when electricity comes back, you appreciate it more.
design of our food forest
For the purpose of planning the food forest…
What is a food forest?
A food forest is a living system in which you plant multiple levels of plants that are all edible.
We planted trees (plums, cherries, apples, even apricots!) and now we are preparing for planting bushes (raspberries, hazelnuts, gooseberries…), and later we will plant strawberries and comfrey, to cover the ground, some herbs (sage, lavender, rosemary and others), some beans to produce nitrogen, some vegetables also.
It’s just the beginning, we’re still searching what is best for us!
And of course, in order to be as self-sufficient as possible, we are building a new greenhouse for this summer.
Beginning – filling the holes with cob
As you know, in Boževce, we do natural construction!
Besides adding ‘mass’ on the Rocket Mass Heater,
we plastered the living room.
We took out all the carpets, table, couch, we filled in the holes with cob – a mix of clay, sand and straw, and we put the plaster. Plaster is made with filtered clay, filtered sand, filtered straw (1.2 of clay – 3 of sand -1 of straw). We started by the ceiling, and we continued with the walls. Now we have a beautiful living room, and we’re waiting for it to get completely dry, to fill it back in!
Finished plastered living room
In my point of view, winter is a getting fat season.
There are not so many vegetables in the garden, and those sold on the local market consist of potatoes, onions, cabbage, leek, garlic and if we’re lucky, dried paprika, pickles, ajvar and spinach.
So we buy eggs, cheese and milk from the neighbours and we try to diversify meals with the same ingredients.
Thanks to the supermarket, we can also buy pasta, rice, lentils and oats. Interesting, isn’t it?
Fortunately, we have winter food in jars, full of “hunters” salad, ajvar and others pickles, from last summer.
Besides that, we have sour cabbage!
The sour cabbage, it’s one month fermented cabbage. People from Alsace can say it’s choucroute, or sauekraut, but here we say holy sour cabbage.
We ordered 100kg of this beautiful vegetable. We cut it in fine pieces,
then we put one layer in a big CLEAN barrel
and we put coarse salt on it,
we put a new layer of cabbage,
new layer of salt,
sometimes some bay leaf and pepper,
etc…
You also can put full cabbage inside. You have just to make a little hole on the bottom of the cabbage head and fill it with coarse salt. At the end, we add water until the top and we let it ferment at least 1 month.
The sour cabbage is very healthy, rich in vitamin C, the sailor used to take it on the ship to avoid the scurvy (you see this disease who get lost your tooth). It’s also rich in fibre and it’s antioxidant.
What to do with all this sour cabbage ?
Apart from simmering it with dried paprika and red onions, the most famous usage of cabbage is SARMA.
cooking of Sarma
To begin, you have to take a full leaf of sour cabbage (the big one) and you fill it with the stuffing you prepared; traditionally it’s rice and meat, but we did it with rice, lentils and vegetables. You roll this leaf and you put in a big pot. Between each layer, put some cabbage. In the end, cover with water and some tomato sauce and let it bake for 2-3 hours. At the end, you can cover it with some fried garlic and paprika.
We did it for New Year’s Eve, that was delicious.
As I said, sometimes we bought milk and cheese from the neighbours. We visit them in the morning – before they milk the cow/the goat – and we have a coffee (and rakija) together. We speak about weather (imate zima?) and people in Boževce. It’s nice to meet other people than European volunteers. And in winter we don’t hang out so much.
learning Serbian
To speak with local people, we need to learn Serbian. So in winter we have more time to study and to go more often to our classes, in Rajanovce, the village closeby.
To conclude, winter is mainly a season to take rest just as nature does. The sun goes down around 4 PM, so the outdoor activities also finish earlier.
We stay inside, our roots grow, we plan the future sitting on the warm Rocket Mass Heater, we eat good food and drink the good beverages.
A new year is coming,
What we want to do,
what we have to do,
where will we do it,
how…
Winter is a good time to speak and explore the possibilities. We planned the constructions for 2020 (to finish the red house upper floor and down floor, to build a new food production house), planned a garden (to build the new greenhouse, to see which seeds we want to plant), to develop some personal project (Nema Struja Boževce Band).
Nema struja B.B.
But now spring is coming and all the houses in the village have a lot to do!
Our research about the so called “swales” started with a problem: Due to the very dry summer, we had problems with getting water; It did not rain as much as expected and we could not use our wells in the way we were used to. Taking in account that we had to provide a garden made us thinking about ways to collect water in a more efficient way. Besides, on the area between greenhouse and walnut tree, there was a field which we did not use for anything. This field appeared as a slope which was very exposed to sunlight and the soil under the surface of dried grass was full of clay. This means, that water could run down very easily instead of being soaked by the ground. A field, not used, not capable of collecting water and showing nothing more than compacted ground?
At this moment the swales came into play.
A swale is made of the trench – the part which is dug into the earth – and the berm – the part which occurs as a bump made of ground. Usually, swales look like lines non-parallel to a slope in order to collect rainwater, which would run down if not stopped as in our case. If there are swales, the water fills the trench first and after sokes the ground of the downhill sided berm. Since the earth of the berm is not compacted, it can be used as a place for growing trees or other plants and their roots will be provided with water from the trenches.
With this method of collecting water passively, we hoped to firstly make use of rainwater, secondly loosen the compacted ground and finally find some new purpose for the field. On a longer term we planned to introduce a Forest Garden, using the water from the swales.
A very important thing to consider if you want to build swales is the following: At a slope, water will always run down at the steepest point. That means, that water will go where the land is at it´s lowest height. On a naturally field it is not said that the slope is always the same, but it varies, being more or less steep on different spots. If water shall be collected efficiently it is important, that the swales always follow the contour lines of a slope. Contour lines are the lines which follow the spots on the slope, that are all on the same height. Why is this important for swales? If there would be a slope inside of the trench running down to the left or right side of the field, water will not be distributed over the whole swale, but centralized on one spot: the lowest.
This leads to the first step of building swales: finding the contour lines.
An easy way to do this is to use a very simple tool, called the A-Frame (see picture below). This tool consists of three long pieces of wood, which are connected in the shape of an A. On the top of the A a rope is fixed, which is pulled down by a stone. The two feet of the A can be put on the field now. If they are on the same level, the rope will hang down exactly at the middle of the horizontal slat. Then we move the A around, finding the next point. Following this, we can make a mark at every point, that is on the same height. Connected, they show us the contour line. On this line (remember) water will stay and not flow down.
We marked the spots with some wooden sticks and connected them with rope. What was very interesting to see was, that the lines neither always were straight nor did they lead parallel to each other. This showed us, that the slope of our field varied on different spots.
Our swales should follow the contour lines. To make swales out of this lines we had to make some more measurements to define the place of the trench and the berm. We marked two more lines next to every contour line. One 80 cm uphill which would mark the edge of the trench, and one 120 cm downhill, defining the berm. Between the swales should be at least 2 m space to make it possible to grow trees and offer them enough place. So we had to make some arrangements, moving some lines up or down the hill. Finally, all our contour lines were set and the markings for trenches and berms were fixed. Let the digging begin.
But it was not just about making a ditch into the ground and putting the earth on a hill beside it. We had to follow some measurements in order to catch as much water as possible. The shape of the swale is shown in the graphic below.
Following this we had to dig the trench to a deep of 20 cm and to shape it a bit like a quadrant of a circle. The berm had to be 10 cm high.
Using pickaxes, spades and shovels we started to dig out the ground and shape the berm. A method we used was to take off the layer of grass first and put it upside down at the place, where the berm should be. Like this, we ensured a stable base for the berm and avoided to have some grass growing, which would be in competition to our crop plants later.
At the left and right end of every swale we led the berm around the swale to close it and to prevent water from running out. While digging we noticed that the colour of the ground changed. This can be a sign for a higher quantity of clay at some spots and can influence our decision later, which plants we want to grow where (see picture).
I mentioned, that it is very important that the bottom of the trench is always on the same level. So we had to use the A-Frame again and to dig at the places, where the bottom of the trench was too high. During this process we noticed two things: First we figured out, that the A-Frame had some limits, because it could only show us, if two points were at the same level. To bring the whole line on one height, we later used a level. Secondly we had to take care not to dig to much down at some spots, because this forced us to dig the whole bottom of the trench to this level. So we had to be careful and dig slowly. After this, the digging part was finished.
A thing we missed was to build a spillway, which could be useful when heavy rains appear. To prevent the water from over-floating, a so called sill can be dug into the berm to let the water out. This path can be blocked with a sand sack, leading parallel to the slope and which can be opened in case. This security can be imagined like a plug in a bath tub.
After finishing the swales it is important to observe them in a heavy rain to see how they work. In our case, we had some water gathering at several spots. This could mean that this spots were a bit lower or that the soil was more compressed or included more clay than on other spots. To solve this problem, the process of levelling can be repeated. Another observation we did was that the trenches are keeping snow longer then the flat ground around. This can be a sign, that the swales are stopping the airflow above the field and the cold air remains in the trenches.
The last step was to fill the trenches. This did not mean putting soil back from the berm into the trench, but there are several other possibilities. If you want a path following the trench, the trench´s bottom can be covered with fabric and filled up with gravel until the top. In our example, we wanted to use the trenches to put plants. For this, the trenches can be filled with woodchips or with straw and rotten branches. We put first one layer of straw, then one layer of branches and on the top again some straw. Like this, the material will decompose during the next year, providing a good soil for planting and in the same time absorbing water better than the pure ground.
Now the trenches are ready for planting or using them for another purpose.
In Bozevce, like everywhere in Europe, the autumn is coming.
The colors are changing and the tasks too!
Everyday on the daily meeting there are the daily tasks that are more or less the same during the year, such as:
– cooking – washing the dishes – watering the green house – fill the barrels with water for the garden– taking care of animals – turning compost – going to buy food and dairy products to us neighbors – taking the daily picture – reporting the weather on data book and taking time for collecting herbs and fruits.
And there are the autumn tasks, which for a lot of them is a lot about preparing for winter. :
Harvesting, Cooking :
The trees give us the mood of autumn and the fruits too.
We collected walnuts from our 6 walnuts trees which give us good nuts for cooking and baking, and lot of leaves that we have to deal with .
We are not the only one to eat those good walnuts, the dogs help us. When you stop by for a little break you can observe the techniques that they have developed to break the shell and eat the nut ! They don’t have hands but they are close to!
As the dogs, we try to eat as much as possible what
the nature gives us. We are still waiting for the mushrooms but we have a lot of tomatoes that remain in the garden, so we took the time to collect all of them before the first frosts, even the green ones. We are making jars of chutney with green tomatoes and also pickles of green tomatoes aromatized with the dill collected and dried from the garden as well!!
The autumn in the garden :
The garden has to be prepared for winter ; like us, it needs a good blanket and food. First of all to prevent erosion and to give it nutriments that it will need for the next spring ! The soil will slowly take the good food from the layers of mulch that we put on the bed. We mulched by altering cow manure and straw, like 5 or 6 layers, as a lasagna ! The garden is ready now, we put a bit of water to give humidity on the mulch that is important if we want that the decomposition to work well. The winter hibernation can start …
We also take care of our piles of composts, we
want to keep them warm, and even hot for the beginning in order to start the decomposition and « burn» the seeds that may be inside. So we made big piles, keep the humidity and turn it sometimes !
And in the middles of those bed you can see some little winter vegetables that begin to grow : beetroots, chard, cabbages, winter salads, carrots, celery, turnips.. !
Building :
The red House :
The special task of this autumn is PLASTERING. There is the « Red House » that has to be finished for winter. With the most energetic team of volunteers, we managed to plaster the outside of the house and the first layer inside ! The first layer inside is a plaster made of 1 measurement of clay, 1.5 sand and lots of straw , called COB.
And some other projects :
The workshop begin to looks like a true one. After building a new structure to support the 3 T of the new Rocket Mass Heater (link article), a table was designed and shaped to fit in between. For structure we RE-USE the power-pole that were replaced by new ones in the forest next to the property. And for the « old-school » look we paint the table with a strong coffee;) ! We try as much as possible to use what is available around us !
To keep us warm during the winter, we will start to distillate some liters of our homemade rakija. The distillation machine is close to be finish, after one evening of good introduction about the science behind it, we are all looking forward to it…
The last step was to fill the trenches. This did not mean putting soil back from the berm into the trench, but there are several other possibilities. If you want a path following the trench, the trench´s bottom can be covered with fabric and filled up with gravel until the top. In our example, we wanted to use the trenches to put plants. For this, the trenches can be filled with woodchips or with straw and rotten branches. We put first one layer of straw, then one layer of branches and on the top again some straw. Like this, the material will decompose during the next year, providing a good soil for planting and in the same time absorbing water better than the pure ground.
Permaculture as a Path to Peace 