Syntropic experiment 1, and wishing you a Happy 2023 (On Fridays I write)

I’m back! and catching up after the long Spanish holiday. With King’s Day on the 6th January, the first day back in the office (read : kids back at school) was 9th January! Alex has moved in to Boodaville Caseres, the cats have mostly moved out, and the place is looking tidier than ever after some intense days clearing out the yearly build up of random stuff. 

The children are healthy, energies are restored and I’m even feeling in many ways “back to normal” and my motivation is similar to the good old days. On Monday we are meeting to put projects and objectives into a plan for the year. Any input / ideas are welcome over the weekend. 

pooless

Before I say any more about the syntropic agriculture experiment, first I have to make the kind of comment i don’t usually make.

“Never mind what I’m doing with that stick, look at my hair! Doesn’t it look amazing!!” 

That was my first thought when I saw the above photo and now I can share with the world that I haven’t washed my hair with shampoo since June 2021. Inspired to action by Paul Wheaton and Shaun Klassen-Koop’s book “Building a better world in your backyard” and the fact I was pregnant and not going to be going out very much, I stopped washing. It took 15 months, but now I never need shampoo again. I use a comb to clean my hair, a nailbrush to clean the comb, and it really does look and feel great. Hooray for reducing the number of chemicals in my house, reducing costs, going the natural way. Not to mention savings by avoiding packaging, transport and prodcution embedded energy, water, fossil fuels and quite probably buying from a huge multi-national company participating in a degenerative economic and financial system. But mainly – it’s easy and it works!

syntropic seeding experiment 1

“Plants grow in community, just like the human beings in villages, and the ground seeks to protect itself from the sun, just like a person at noon wants the shadow of a tree.” – Emilio

We seeded a forest! The theory is that nature decides, based on incredible wisdom and ecosystem knowledge, when the seeds will germinate.

The different species are ready to fill roles in the natural succesion, soil restoration and ecosystem of plants growing together. We are creating conditions for life and more life. The more science based element of the experiment is to see what two adjacent fields will look like in ten years – one with all species planted from seed (although we did put some tree cuttings in there) and the other with the “normal” method of planting trees from a nursery.

The theory is that growing from seed, in company, gives the bushes and trees such an advantage that they will “overtake” the bigger trees next door within ten years. I love learning about theories that are so deeply based in designing as nature with a holistic approach to ecosystems of soil, plants and all living beings. Not only is it beautiful, and regenerative, but we hope to demonstrate how effective these ideas are in practice. 

We have a googledoc with exact details of what we introduced. See the titles of the photos and the map below that show what we did.

This was a joint project with seeds and cuttings donated from Sam Miller, Jessica, and Anna Louise at Boodaville. As always we are infinitely grateful to Sam for his brilliantness and generostiy. We did most of the work on 29th December 2022, and will continue to add seeds to the area as they are in season, and whenever we can. On the 4th January we added more seed balls with various species of edible plants thanks to Jack and Jacqueline.

ants

We’ll keep you updated on whether ants take the seeds or not! so far not.. but you don’t see so many of them around on these dark days of winter.