European Permaculture Convergence in Bulgaria

 As promised here comes my report from the European Permaculture Convergence, which took place from the 25th to the 30th of July on the shores of Lake Batak in the Rhodopi Mountains of Bulgaria.  Apologies for the delay in reporting back, we traveled for another 3 weeks after the event.

The setting was an eco-camping site in an area of great natural beauty.  280 participants from over 25 countries showed up.  It became some sort of hybrid between a conference and a festival.  Days started with a morning circle, usually led by maverick Mr. Bulgarian Permaculture, Misho.

The first task was to organise the workshops in an open space format. 

That meant anyone was invited to stand up and propose a workshop, announce it, find a time and a space for it.  So you wrote your proposal on a piece of paper...

 and announced it.  There could be joint proposals.

The person proposing the workshop did not have to be an expert in the field, but perhaps simply wanting to know more about the subject, but they were responsible for the running of the workshop they proposed.  Some 200 workshops were thus soon on the board.

Then the serious business began of running and/or attending those workshops.  Of course I ran a foraging walk together with 'Extreme Salad Man' and perennial vegetable expert Stephen Barstow.  We complemented each other well.  The biodiversity in the Rhodopi Mountains is so great that during a 2 hour foraging walk we only managed to move about 200m away from the camp.

Other workshops explored subjects like 'Money - do we need it? How do we get it?'

The next big step for permaculture into the mainstream:

 How to make rich earth seedling pots with practical demonstrations:

How to use music in permaculture teaching run by Peter Cow and attended by the inimitable Charlie McGee and his ukulele of the Formidable Vegetable Sound System. More of both of them in the video at the end.

Other workshops got quite heated as we discussed sociocracy and the state of politics in Bulgaria as the government had just resigned days before the convergence (a sign?)

Other workshops explored permaculture games, talked about biodynamic growing, education, etc., new networks were formed, especially across the Balkans and so it went on. 

In the end each workshop presented their results on some paper and hung it up in the gallery for all to see.

For our bodily needs an excellent team of cooks provided us with 3 excellent and varied vegan meals each day.  I thought I'd get bored with vegan after 5 days, but these guys did well.

Finally, after an intense 5 days, it was time for the closing circle.  What had we learned?  What were we going to do next?  Everyone felt inspired and newly motivated, especially many of the Balkan participants who had, for lack of a network, felt rather isolated before this event.

 As for my next plans?  Yes I did get up and announce them. On the last night I had a drunken conversation with a fellow wine lover and we bemoaned the fact that wine generally came from monocultures.  And that there is precious little information out there on applying permaculture principles to viticulture.  Milcho, that was his name, then revealed to me that he wants to restore an old vineyard belonging to his grandparents.  And so a new project was born.  I'm intending to fill the knowledge gap and research the permaculture vineyard and plan to write a book on it.  As soon as I announced it I had a couple of people approach me immediately with some useful contacts.  So watch this space.

Now finally I hear you say, didn't he mention something about festival as well?  Abso-bloody-lutely.  I present to you 'EUPC -The Full Movie'.  Ok it's 35 minutes long, but it's got a lot of good music and celebration on it:

Visiting Other Projects

While traveling around Europe recently we took the opportunity to visit a couple of other projects for new inspiration and connect with friends.  On our way to Bulgaria we took the scenic route via Hungary and visited my friend Kristina in the village of Nagyszékely (don't ask me how to pronounce it, the Hungarian language remains a closed book for me) some 70km south of Lake Balaton.

I know Kristina from my Permaculture Design Course in Italy and she shares her time between Budapest and this village, where she participates in the activities of a small community.  It is a very rural area in a gently hilly country and 10 families within the village have got together to form a small community bound by their common interest in permaculture.  It's not so much an eco-village, but a naturally grown community.  It now attracts visitors from all over Europe and other parts of Europe willing to experience their way of life.

Kristina works a great garden with a great bio-diversity, using techniques such as companion planting and mulching.  She also has a few beautifully creative elements such as this 'willow tent'.  From the outside it looks like an ordinary shrub...

...but if you creep in through the gap, you are in a wonderfully secluded shelter:

We also visited a few other members of the community.  My favourite one was a tour of a food forest by one of Kristina's neighbours (her name escapes me just now).

Around every corner, something new and productive turned up, a mixture of annuals and perennials, vegetables, fruit, herbs, grains.  Her enthusiasm was infectious and the forest truly inspiring.  I leave you with another few images:

This week we visited another project in Greece in the seaside town of Pefkohori in the Chalkidiki of Northern Greece by my blogger friend Mary.  She has followed my blog for some years, but unfortunately her English garden blog has been inactive for some time.  Nevertheless, we have stayed in contact and exchanged seeds.

The garden she works together with her parents has some big challenges.  For a start they don't have much money to spare.  The soil is very poor and near the sea (500m).  The summers are very dry.  Although they've had the property for 35 years, running water has only been installed 2 years ago and they still don't have electricity and for shelter they have a small self-built house.  So she has been experimenting a lot with drought resistant heirloom vegetables and they collect the little rainwater off their roof in a large storage tank.  Keeping ground-covering plants plants to improve the soil is difficult for them for two reasons: giving shelter to venomous snakes and fire hazard.  A wild fire last year only stopped 500 metres from the property, narrowly averting disaster.

Mary's elderly parents still very much enjoy working the land, the father usually busy with some project or other around the house, the mother watering the plants:

I love the way Mary experiments with different types of seeds.  Here she has sown sesame for seed production, which I never realised what a beautiful plant this is:

This is a really interesting long Chinese bean variety:

Also this year they started keeping rabbits for food production and chickens are planned for next year.  Mary made the cage herself from recycled materials:

After enjoying a few days of Greek hospitality and a few dips in the sea we returned to Bulgaria, more of which soon.  Thank you Kristina and Mary for your hospitality... :)

S for Survey, P for Plants...

I

To help with the design process for a permaculture garden I was taught a number of acronyms to remember what to do when.  The first one is SADIMET, which stands for Survey, Analysis, Design, Maintenance, Implementation, Evaluation, Tweaking.  So having done a base map of the garden in Rozovets, we are still way not ready to start any designing, let alone starting to do any altering work on the property. 

If you are intending to design a place, first take a step or two back, slow down, hold your horses!  The survey is the most important and time intensive part of your work, so it was good for us to spend some time on the plot for a while.  One of the first things you observe also follows an acronym: PASTE, which stands for Plants, Animals, Structures, Tools, Events.  So let's start with the survey of Vasko's plot in Rozovets with the P for Plants.  Another acronym is used to indicate how frequent the plants occur: DAFOR, which stands for Dominant, Abundant, Frequent, Occasional, Rare.  So I will put one of these letters after each plant name.  Here comes the list in no particular order, with some of their uses:

Broad-leafed dock (D in places) - edible and nutrient accumulator

Dandelion (F) - edible, nutrient accumulator,medicinal, ground cover
Mugwort (O) - edible, medicinal, nutrient accumulator
Stinging nettles (O) - edible, medicinal, attracts beneficial insects
Various grasses (D in places) - ground cover
Mallow (A) - edible
Wild raspberries (F) - edible

Rue (O) - medicinal, insect repellent.  This herb is actually native to the Balkans!


Vetch (D in places) - limited edible use, nitrogen fixing






Wild roses (F) - edible, bee attractant
Red clover (A) - edible, nitrogen fixing, bee attractant
Hemlock (O) - useful for knocking off you mother-in-law...

Something from the mint family that looks like lemon balm, but smells more pungent (O)
Bindweed (R)
Hollyhock (O) - edible
Tulips (F)
Periwinkle (O) - medicinal
Wood sorrel (F)- edible, nutrient accumulator
Burdock (O) - edible, medicinal, nutrient accumulator
Various walnut, cherry and wild plum seedlings (F)
Goosegrass (O) - edible
Sweet violets (O) - edible, medicinal
Wild lettuce (R) - medicinal, halucinogenic
Yarrow (O) - medicinal, edible, nutrient accumulator
Bugloss (O) - edible, bee attractant 

Bladder campion (O) - edible
Some white flowering brassica (R) - edible
Shepherd's purse (O) - Edible
Cornflower (R) - edible, attracs beneficial insects.

So much for the plant survey. What we cold start doing without the need of designing or planning was chop down some of the plants for mulch and adding nutrient to the soil.  Here is Susan in action with some great hoe-like implement we found at a local hardware shop.

We didn't get everything cleared during our time there, but about abthird is looking a lot more accessible for now.

 

Also many of the trees are diseased and we got going cutting out much of the dead wood:

 

Finally, I discovered that the local grocery shop in the village sells seeds.  We will now leave Bulgaria for a little while to come back in a month to finish the job, but we thought it would be nice to be able to harvest something when we do come back.  So I prepared a little bed near the fron on the lowest part of the land and sowed some beans and raddishes. 

I wouldn't normally sow in such straight lines, but the hope is that the beans will climb up the fence.  It's really more in hope that any serious expectations.  If it stays as dry as it has been during the month we've been here, it's not likely to yield much at all.  This is the variety bean I sowed:

We have managed to get our first harvest of cherries off the land before we left though and... The starlings nesting in an old street lamp above the land started flying just before our own departure.  A good omen?

Close to the Edge

 "A seasoned witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace,
And rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace,
And achieve it all with music that came quickly from afar,
Then taste the fruit of man recorded losing all against the hour.
And assessing points to nowhere, leading ev'ry single one.
A dewdrop can exalt us like the music of the sun,
And take away the plain in which we move,
And choose the course you're running."

Todays post starts a little unusually with some 1970's prog rock, I picked a short version of Close to the Edge by Yes, I'll explain the relevance in a minute...

I'm talking about permaculture again and wild food foraging.  What's that got to do with THE EDGE I hear you ask.  Having traveled a little to other parts of Italy recently in the name of permaculture, a friend coined the new term 'permaculturing around', I realised that I am in a very privileged position in living in an area with an enormous variety of edible plants.  I find some 150 different species of edible and/or medicinal wild plants during the course of a year within an hour's walk from my home.  I had always put that down to the favourable climate of Italy in general compared to the more northern climes where I grew up, but it turns out that we live on a special place within Italy and I started wondering why.

One of the main objectives of permaculture is that we observe nature, see how ecology works and then apply those principles to our designs, because nature does not need any outside intervention and is therefore self-sustaining.  Wild food foraging is a great exercise in observation.  You start to look around you much more and seeing things you normally miss.  Soon you start realising that certain plants prefer certain conditions such as micro-climates, soil conditions, the way they often associate with other plants and how those plants can in fact be an indicator of existing conditions.  One of the main observation you start making is that you find the greatest biodiversity on 'edges'.

It makes perfect sense of course once you start thinking about it:

If you go into the middle of a forest there is only little light available so you won't find many ground covering plants, whilst in the middle of an open field you will find that certain herbs and grasses will quickly dominate the scene.  However if you look at where the two meet you will find the greatest biodiversity, not only of plants, but also of animals.  There is more light available then in the woods, also the forest acts as a windbreak, catching seeds and organic material on the edge and animals normally at home in either of the two environments will occasionally come to the edge where they can feast on the greater diversity of the plants.  In addition a number of species evolve that specialise in colonising the edges of different biotopes, meaning that on the edge there is a greater variety of life than the combined sum of the two.  This is known as the 'edge effect'.

There are many more examples for the edge effect.  Where water meets land, land animals come to drink, fish catch flies, predators eat both and frogs are happy inbetween.  There are aquatic, semi-aquatic and land plants meeting at the same place and all the animals that go with them.  This happens next to lakes:

...rivers

...and of course by the sea.  Then we have have mountains meeting valleys:

or the edge of a path.  Water runs off the path giving an opportunity for many plants to flourish on the side of the path.  Sometimes the seeds hitch a ride with whoever goes along the path:

Or you may even have several edges meeting at the same time, such as wood, land and water.

Any birdwatcher worth their salt knows that the greatest variety of birds are found in river estuaries, where the river meets the sea.  There are seasonal 'edges': spring and autumn edge around the poorer seasons of summer and winter.  In short edges is where things tend to happen in nature.

Now coming back to where I live.  Within a radius of about 25km as the fly crows... the cry fl...flow cries... around here we have two major mountain ranges of up to 2,000m altitude, the Appenines and the Apuan Alps, we have the Ligurian Sea and the sheltered Gulf of La Spezia, 2 river valleys meeting just below us, the Vara and the Magra, which combine to exit into the Mediterranean and we have extensive woodlands all around us.

If you imagine flying towards us, as you come in from the sea, which is in a general southerly direction of us, you follow up the wide river delta and the hill we live on is the first one you encounter, rising up to 300m.  Should you fly further upriver along either river, you will find the valleys narrowing directly afterwards, giving rise to a much more continental climate within only a few kilometres.  Uphill from us, you'd be flying above a complete cover of chestnut and oak woods.

So we get all the species of all those different biotopes as well as the edge species, cormorants and eagles, saltwater fish and freshwater fish, woodland edge species and plants that like growing in the open, migrating birds such as bee-eaters and passing flamingos and all that goes with it.  And of course aforementioned wild plants.

And that's the reason I live at such a privilegded place.  Also the farmers around us are mostly small-scalle subsistence farmers growing crops mostly for own consumption.  That means few chemicals are used, there are many edges between relatively small plots of land, vegetables are interplanted within vineyards and olive groves, little machinery is used and a lot of natural ground cover plants are allowed to flourish amongst the cultivated fields.  Sometimes cultivated crops are allowed to go to seed and sow themselves out, becoming part of the general flora.  Examples are alfalfa, which is sown as nitrogen fixing cover crop like this one on the edge of a wall:

this Jerusalem artichoke, which has long seized to be a cultivated crop in Italy since the introduction of the potato in Italy:

or this sow thistle just on the edge of a pavement in downtown Milan, surviving on the little dirt which accumulates by the side in a little crack away from the pounding feet of pedestrians:

"Down at the edge, round by the corner,
Not right away, not right away.
Close to the edge, down by a river,
Not right away, not right away."

 If, incidentally you are wondering what that Yes song is all about, apparently it was inspired by Herman Hesse's novel Siddharta, a story telling the life of a young Brahmin in India during the time of the Buddha.  He spends his whole life trying to find himself and the meaning of life until he finally settles down as a ferryman by the edge of a river, where he finds peace and wisdom by observing the ever-flowing, ever-changing yet un-changing river.

 "Crossed the line around the changes of the summer,
Reaching out to call the color of the sky.
Passed around a moment clothed in mornings faster than we see.
Getting over all the time I had to worry,
Leaving all the changes far from far behind.
We relieve the tension only to find out the master's name."

It's all a bit cryptic, but good song anyway...


So how can we utilise the EDGE effect for ourselves.  First of all when going out foraging look for edges, that's where you are most likely to find a great variety of plants.  Keep your eyes peeled next time you are out on a walk.  Secondly when designing a garden create edges.  I designed my pond with as much edge as possible, not just one simple round or oval, but with a wiggly outline, narrow bits and wider bits.  The more edge, the more biodiversity.  Instead of planting your veg in straight lines, try wavy lines.  That way you can also fit more plants into the same area.  Plan vertical as well as horizontal to maximise the space and create edges.  Hedges aren't called that for nothing, they make excellent edges which encourages wildlife and biodiversity which will benefit your garden.


The edge effect also works within human society.  On the edges between different social groups, various sciences, age groups mingling etc is where we can learn most.  Look over the edge of your own horizon to open it up.  Where philosophers meet physists new knowledge arises, when the young listen to the old and vice versa we learn from each other.  And aren't those people who live on the edge of society, those who don't follow every trend like sheep, the ones who will ulitimately change the way we behave, think and live?  I certainly hope so.  


On that philosphical note, let's all move away from the comfortable centre and become 'cutting edge' and there's hope for the human race yet.