Permaculture center in Spain

Hi everyone,
we have decided to make a complete change in or lifestyle and start a family friendly permaculture center in Malaga, Spain. We have just purchased 6,5 Ha of land and are starting our journey. Hopefully we can move there this year and open our doors early next year.
I'll post updates on our youtube channel Permaculture Malaga

This is my first video:


I would love to hear any feedback from you!

We moved on site a few weeks ago - Marcus made this video last week while he was in Denmark, and I wrote a blog post about living on site too.
http://soloenespana.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/permaculture-malaga-7-sector-analysis-1/
http://soloenespana.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/permaculture-malaga-moving-onsite/

We haven't updated our thread for 6 months!

Reason being is that living permaculture is hard work - I sure do hope it gets better along the way.

We have made a few updates to our blog:
Permaculture Malaga 8 - updates and mulch
Permaculture Malaga 9
Permaculture Malaga - 6 months on site

We have taken the day off today... For the first time I think in 6 months: Except for those days where we have had guests or gone out to meet friends - not one single day, just relaxing at home. We are tired, right now we have no water and very little money (we have money comming, just not at the pace we would like it to). The past month has been especially hard - but yesterday I asked my husband "do you think sometimes that we are just not cut out for this?" and he said "The thought have struck me once in a while, but then I ask myself - would I rather be living in a terraced house in the pueblo now? And the answer is no" I feel the same way. It is like life with kids - it is at times so hard and you are exhausted - but then there are these moments - and a lot of them - that makes it all worth it.

New blog post:
http://soloenespana.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/and-we-have-water/

Haybox cooker: http://soloenespana.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/haybox-cooking/

I'm trying to collect all the things we are doing and learning in one place - so I might cross-link in this thread to all the threads where I've asked questions etc. I just realised this week just how much we have learned in the past two years!

New blog-post up:
http://soloenespana.wordpress.com/2014/10/21/getting-things-done/

Dear Dawn and Marcus,

Thank you so much for tolerating our gate crashing last week! It was a delight to experience your company and your stunning site. Seeing your lovely kids fully express their kidness without them being frustrated by "adults" was really heart touching. There isn't much that makes me happier (and I'm pretty sure that goes for them as well).
I have the impression you've made tangible what's possible for my friends and it sure as hell is inspiring to me.
It was a privilege to see the early stages of what's to come. Something beautiful is hatching in Andalucia.

You are very welcome! It was lovely having you here!

Planting Apples from Seed

I've posted these 3 posts to our website the past couple of weeks:

Dec. 12 2016
Last week Málaga saw some of the worst rain it has seen since 1989, and large parts of the city was flooded, damages on houses roads etc have not yet been estimated, a woman died and several animals have drowned.

It is a tragedy that is increasing in occurance here in Europe and whether it is climate change or poor watershed management, the solution is more or less the same: Plant more trees, make sure water can seep into the ground, slow the water down. Unfortunately the people in charge at government level seem dead set on not slowing the water down, but quite the contrary getting it away as fast as possible: It  isn’t legal to build gabions or check dams on your land, rainwater collection is illegal, you cannot make terraces where none were etc. etc. In addition the public building projects all add far more hard surfaces, and the water drainage lead the water via concrete drainage canals and drainpipes as fast as possible to the rivers and streams. It is a catastrofe waiting to happen… and last weekend it did.

(There are no pictures in this post since the water had entered a cable connection, and I was writing from a 3G connection)

Read more:
After The Rain

Dec. 16 2016
Last week when I posted about the rain I promised that once the internet was up and running again I would post the pictures. And then the internet worked again, and my computer broke… and since all the pictures were on it I wasn’t really able to just make do with the tablet as I did last week. Well now it is working again (though it might be temporarily – it is old… but I will get and external screen set up in my office and work there). I’m posting the pictures here instead of in the post from last week – that way I make sure that people who have already read the post will see it.

The first video is right after the first rain: The water had blocked the big tube under the road, but then it had washed away the block from an old tube – much much smaller, which we hadn’t been able to see on the neighbors side of the road so we had actually started building a wall in front of it. That wall is washed away now.


Read more:After The Rain 2

Dec. 27. 2016
Merry Christmas! I hope everybody has a lovely time and spend time with loved ones, get some time to rewind and relax.

We are celebrating at a very very low pace and it is becoming us well – Christmas eve we were just the 4 of us here, eating good food and opening a few presents, finishing the evening playing a board game with the kids. Christmas day we were with friends, celebrating an English christmas, crackers included.



Read more:Merry Christmas and After the Rain 3

The Rabbit Cage

Not the Cage Aux Folles, but it very well could be

About year ago i bought two rabbit does, more or less on a whim – I have a tendency to do things like that… sometimes it moves things forward, sometimes it becomes yet another project I never finished. This one seemed for a long time to end in the latter category – but fortunately my husband had helped me out this time and we are now almost finished with a colony setting for the rabbits. They are cute though (but now way too big to fit in one cage).

Read more: https://soloenespana.wordpress.com/2017/01/22/the-rabbit-cage/

I actually also posted this a couple of weeks ago, which might be interesting to some people:

Dec. 31. 2016
Happy New Year – as I have promised for a while now I will post my article on composting – that way I end the year by meeting one of my personal goals.

One of the cornerstones in Permaculture is recycling as much as possible, an cornerstone in recycling is composting.

When we bought the property we were exited to get a compost started – both of us grew up with and “ordinary” compost in our parents gardens in Europe, so we more or less assumed that we could more or less do the same – so we collected our organic trash, and we piled it in something like a keyhole garden and we covered each layer with brown material. After a few weeks we found the first rat in the compost… We got two cats… We later had to move the pile because we needed the space for building materials when we started renovating the house… hardly anything was composted – most of the material had just dried out.




Read more: Composting in Dryland Areas

Often this journey into permaculture is more about personal development, or at least as much about that, as it is about land development. This weekend my husband and I celebrate the 10th anniversary of our marriage. It has in many ways been a journey into permaculture away from the main stream.



10 Years of Marriage – How Things Change

This Friday Marcus and I celebrated our 10 years anniversary. The picture above is our wedding picture.  Looking at it feels like staring into another world… how we have changed! How our values have changed!

Our wedding was a huge deal with all the trimmings, morning suit, silk dress (tailor made), star chef, party in an old manor house an hours drive from Copenhagen. Back then I was working in the medical industry as a statistical programmer/project manager, Lucas was in day-care – way earlier than is the norm in Denmark, because … reasons, don’t really remember them. Marcus had his own business trying to develop some kind of remote control for your home entertainment system (Chrome cast much and a touchpad kind of thing). It never really did fly – and seeing which players he would have competed against, he might not have made it regardless. We were living in a big apartment in Copenhagen, a few weeks after the wedding we bought a big car. Loads of debt, loads of spending. Loads of surface.

Read more here

So I wrote another blog-post!

This time I am posting pictures of some of the changes we have experienced here as a result of implementing some of the permaculture techniques on our land.

This is Marcus planting and mulching 3 winters ago:


And this is the same terrace today:


Just a little side comment: I quit Facebook a few weeks ago - and since then I have 1) Gotten a lot more work done here on our land 2) Posted more blogposts than ever before 3) Spent more time at permies. All three things are good things in my book because it is focusing on our future business instead burning time... But I did expect that my blog would take a hit from not being posted on Facebook. But but but now half way through February I have almost as many unique visitors as  I did in the entire month of January and 75% of what I had in December. This is entirely due to me posting on Permies! Now that says something about the reach of Permies (even if my numbers are still not huge) - that I am reaching a far more targeted audience, which is far more relevant to what I am writing. This is really awesome

Almost forgot to link to my post:
Pictures of Progress

We have had a rough week here on our homestead because we all came down with a tummy bug. I really wanted to plant a whole lot of stuff before we leave for Denmark tomorrow - but I only managed to get out Wednesday for a short while and planted my beloved elderflower bush. I am hoping that it will grow and thrive in th comming years and provide me with flowers and fruit for cordial and soups.


https://soloenespana.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/what-a-week/

Oh my! Today is a BIG day for us We are now solar powered! Yay - after 3 years on generator power (why oh why did it take us so long?) we are finally running solar and one step closer to self-sufficiency Here is a sneak peak at the beauties:



From the blog:
"We are having solar panels installed today! Right now our solar guy is in my room hooking up the entire system to the house – and once he is done, we have power. Well actually that just happened! Which is super crazy – the truck was here yesterday, and now we have electricity without the noise from the generator, for the first time in over 3 years! No more generator – unless it is cloudy for more than 3 days in a row. I don’t know how many of those streaks we’ve had of those in these last 3 years… We’ve had one cloudy week this winter (we’ve had plenty of cloudy days, but seldom more than a couple in a row) – but I think that is the only time I remember… Maybe that is a little optimistic – but if that stat holds we will need the generator once every 3 years. Nah – I don’t think that will hold, but let’s see. This is a big milestone – a really really big milestone."

Solo En España

Lovely to find this. We are currently travelling around Spain and Portugal looking for a new land base to pursue our permaculture dreams, so this is really inspiring. We'll be following your posts :-)

Hello

Do you also run PDc courses?

Peace, Ange

Metok Vlasblom wrote:Hello

Do you also run PDc courses?

Peace, Ange

We don't sorry - but we have some friends in Coín who do