EARTH & US: Planting and tending
Regeneration: planting water, planting trees
On his first day back from over two weeks in the US, Joe confessed to having felt pangs of longing to reconnect with the land. At the Bioparque, he showed me how to scrape out sediment from a swale so that water could continue to flow and infiltrate. He also admired a couple of new diversion drains that Don Jesus had put in. Best of all, the area we had cleared of invasive grass was beginning to fill in with a few hardy native plants, especially under trees…perhaps from seeds birds drop, perhaps spread by the wind.
Joe’s wife Jessica and I went to the Vivero (plant nursery in the Bioparque) and watered everything well, carrying buckets from a nearby pond. Almost everything had survived our absence. She also planted seeds from tomatoes and a poblano pepper. We filled new little black plastic bags with compost in preparation for more planting. Joe reported that another family is now bringing food scraps to help build compost!
Up at Origen del Agua, the damaged land recently purchased with the help of Barichara Regeneration Fund, Jessica planted an orchid. We spotted two beautiful varieties blooming, despite the arid and eroded land conditions. We put fresh bananas in the bird feeders, and Jessica pointed out how birds had been eating previous offerings of papaya and banana, and pooping out some seeds below. The point of the bird feeders is to attract these spreaders of native plant seeds. I made a little retaining wall of rocks around the base of a very small guava tree and mulched it with a few twigs and rocks. Joe commented that vanilla, a species of orchid which grows in the little scrap of forest in Origen del Agua, only flowers one day a year, and a specialized bee must pollinate it; the plant also relies on mycorrhizal fungi at its roots to grow to maturity.
A friend recently gifted Joe with about twenty small guanabana fruit trees, although they had no soil around their roots and looked dry. On the advice of a friend, Joe soaked some lentils in water and then immersed the roots in this mixture for about three days to rehabilitate the roots before planting. The soil in the nascent “food forest” is still very hard-packed clay, so digging deep enough holes was tough work and Joe had to do most of it. We hauled over some composted manure mixed with other compost for each little tree, as well as crumbling up the clay soil. We left space for water to collect, then mulched the base of each tree. I invited Elise to bless each one with a song as we gave them rainwater from the cisterns, and I added a few words of my own for the growth and well-being of these new lives. In two days, had planted ten of the biggest trees; the next day, we put all the smaller ones (that wouldn’t survive if planted in the ground now) into bags of compost to grow in the vivero. We also put two “tree spinach” trees from the vivero into the ground. Heading into the dry season, it’s not the ideal time for tree planting, but these were a gift. Joe appreciates the way local people gifting plants gives them a sense of ownership and connection to the Bioparque.
Spending time in the Bioparque, I am coming to see it as the crowning glory of Barichara, with its beautifully labeled trees and shrubs, flowering plumeria trees, small ponds, swales directing water to soak in instead of run off, comfortable benches and earthen structures, and sweeping views of the canyon, just above the town.
Funding community projects
Joe creatively leverages his fundraising to promote community involvement, in an area where it’s hard to get local volunteers. Eight projects were chosen by the Advisory Council of local people to receive small grants, about $300 each. This can really extend the reach of regenerative work! Joe’s brief descriptions:
- Helping elementary students create their own YouTube channel to document their ecological restoration efforts in a poor, rural area comprised of campesino families. (When children lead, their families often follow.)
- Setting up a permaculture school and demonstration food forest in the community reforestation project known as Bioparque Móncora.
- Inviting a local ecologist to teach the community about native bees and their pollinator relationships with local plants.
- Setting up a research project to heal and maintain a wellspring to show others in the community how they can protect their groundwater supplies.
- Enabling a local organization to host women’s healing circles around cultural trauma and domestic violence — as it relates to cooperation among neighbors and management of water.
- Helping Felipe and Alejandra organize a water-walk for children to create ceremonies at the “acupuncture points” of water on the land. (see https://water-walk.org)
- Organizing a minga (community workday) to establish a community garden for 15 rural families in a low-income neighborhood, with drip irrigation systems to conserve water.
- Assisting a restaurant owner to start a composting program for food scraps, encourage other restaurants to do the same, and bring compost to the Bioparque.
Learning Journey: Living into the Design Pathway for Earth Regeneration
Joe’s latest learning journey of eight weeks has just ended. We explored questions such as: What is dying and what’s being born? How can we step away from extractive economies and co-create bioregional, regenerative economies? What does it mean to live regeneratively? How do we create support structures for one another and our children? What can we learn from the indigenous worldview, and how can we become “the future indigenous”? How can we awaken from the dream of mindless consumerism and consciously dream the world we want into being?
The next learning journey will begin September 25, and will look at what “Prosocial” means: creating effective and harmonious groups engaging in regeneration. All are welcome; a voluntary donation of $30 is asked, for which participants will receive a copy of Joe’s new book, hot off the press, and the rest of the donation will go to the Barichara Regeneration Fund. Interested? https://earth-regenerators.mn.co/posts/learning-journey-in-prosocial-groups
Cascada Juan Curi
All the guidebooks tell of this marvelous, powerful 600-foot waterfall about 90 minutes’ drive from Barichara, so of course I wanted to go there. Margarita needed a trip to San Gil (on the way to the falls) anyway to get her bicycle fixed, so I packed us a picnic lunch and just the two of us went this time. There is now an “eco-park” surrounding the trail to the falls, with restrooms, trash receptacles and well-built rock steps, as well as several strong ropes for climbing on sometimes slippery rocks. Margarita reminisced about how, years ago before this privately owned park, there was no entrance fee and people could camp there. I was happy for the infrastructure, and wasted no time getting into the deep pool at the base of the falls, as well as enjoying the natural massage of the water. Flowing from steep, well-forested mountains, the cascade was pure and cold, and generated its own gusts of wind. So delightful! On the 30-minute hike there, we spotted a blue morpho butterfly.
We returned to San Gil to pick up Margarita’s bike, and bought some delicious ice cream (maracuya for me, of course!) Then Margarita turned me loose in a large supermercado, the likes of which doesn’t exist in Barichara. It was somewhat dazzling. I got treats like plain Greek yogurt, coconut milk, oat milk, oatmeal-flax cookies, chamomile-ginger tea, pumpkin seeds.
Yoga class
Shona decided to lead a weekly yoga class at Margarita’s, just for Margarita, Rafa, and me. She is very skillful, and puts on meditative background music. We’ve had two classes so far, in Spanish. Of course I can cheat a little by just observing her movements, even if I’m not quite sure what body part she is talking about! It’s deeply relaxing, so much so that the dog and cat chill out completely too. An afternoon planting trees at the Bioparque followed by a warm, soothing solar shower, and then yoga at 6pm…delightful!
Biogas Digesters: www.sistema.bio “converting waste into value”
Ever since my evening talks with iAnku, I’ve been researching biogas digesters. Recently I found a link to three compelling short Spanish videos about them. The company, Sistema bio, is headquartered in Mexico City; in business for 10 years, they are now working with small farmers on five continents, including Latin America, Africa and India. They have a branch in Colombia. They manufacture biogas digesters in varying sizes depending on the numbers of animals on the farm, and sell multi-burner stoves as well. The cost for their smallest digester is about $1300 US, including installation, training and two follow-up visits. There’s a 10-year warranty and the equipment can last up to 20 years. The organization appears to have a great track record and has won several awards, including the Ashden Award (2019), the Buckminster Fuller Institute and CleanTech Challenge. The Bioneers has featured their work. Their goal is to serve 400 million small to medium farmers worldwide. Partnerships include Ashoka Foundation, USAID, NegaWatt, Bienestar, Biogas Nicaragua, and many more.
I immediately sent a link to Joe, and within hours he had sent it on to a couple on his Advisory Council, who started and run a “huerta” or community garden, including goats and chickens, near Guane (not far from Barichara). They expressed interest! My first thought: raise some money while I’m in the US so I can help subsidize one of these locally, then the idea will spread naturally, and hopefully many small farmers will be attracted to the advantages. Converting manures that once contaminated water sources into cooking gas, saving trees from cutting for firewood, avoiding fossil fuel and chemical fertilizers, while obtaining a superior liquid fertilizer rich in beneficial microbes, are among the benefits. So many problems solved at once! By eliminating the need for fossil fuel or chemical fertilizer on most small farms, greenhouse gases are greatly reduced. (Chemical nitrogen fertilizers, promoted by the “green revolution,” are a significant source of greenhouse gases, as nitrous oxides form which are much more potent than methane; they also kill soil and pollute waterways.)
I had not heard of this group before; mostly I was aware of DIY or small kits, though I had also heard of East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland, CA using sewage from Alameda County to generate a substantial amount of electricity.
The hardest part
Despite taking a few Spanish lessons with Emerson, a lively, sociable little man with impressive dreadlocks who teaches both English and Spanish, I find myself still struggling to follow most conversations unless they are 1:1. That means I miss a great deal of what’s going on (like all the jokes!) and continue to feel like an outsider, despite the warmth and welcoming of so many people. Having arrived with big hopes like being able to start a project of helping people install water cisterns, I’m faced with the reality that my Spanish skills are not up to speed. Jessica told me that it took her nearly a year to get relatively fluent. Seeds of doubt begin to sprout… Am I kidding myself about being able to make a real difference here? Plus, just walking 90 minutes mostly uphill in the hot sun to Origen del Agua wipes me out for the rest of the day.
It is so tempting to think about staying here in Barichara, maybe even on Joep and Julia’s nearby idyllic land, helping them build a tiny house I could inhabit…dreaming of helping iAnku promote and build biogas digesters…seeing the town with more cisterns and water retention…imagining being able to assist Joe with more of his inspiring projects. And, I have less than a month left until my flight October 1. Will I just go back to my comfortable Western North Carolina lifestyle, with nothing but magical memories of Barichara?
I had an interesting dream: to support a birth, I was weaving together strands of fiber the color of red clay. And the other day while sitting on a bench in the Bioparque, I experienced an unusual feeling, as if two giant hands were holding me gently but firmly in place here.