ardbol

Our main focus is to build a food forest. We already have 120 trees planted, but to truly start working on it, we need to live there. To stay in the village, we need a house. However, building a house requires help from others, and they also need a place to stay. Meanwhile, for us to build the house, we too need somewhere to stay. And so, we find ourselves caught in a cycle. To address this, we first decided to camp out and create some basic facilities: a simple kitchen, a room to stay in, and a dry toilet. We made use of the large house for this. While the house doesn’t have a 100% waterproof roof, most of the rain runs off, with only a little seeping inside. The first room we built was on the second floor of the four-story building. This room stayed dry even during rain. We constructed a new floor and added a door, which proved to be a blessing. While we were camping, some of us came down with a stomach flu, and it was comforting to sleep on a mattress near the toilet. On the first...

Of course there was some media attention this summer. Silvia of the Diario the Burgos came as one of the first, when she heard that Rick, Mirthe and Vos were in Bárcena she wanted to interview them. diariodeburgos Halfway during the 4 weeks unexpectedly the journal of the Castil & Leon came to have an interview and we had a two minute item on the news that day! At the end of the four weeks it was busy: Karlijn form BNR news radio came. She is making podcast about empty rural Spain. bnr The guys from the YouTube chanel Monxileros  came to make a podcast. They came together with Elvira. They made a very nice movie of the village and the Ardbol project. Monxileros   And on the last day the newspaper El Mundo came. It is nice we have the attention as one of our goals is to spread the optimism and the idea of a better world. It sometimes is also funny when there are multiple cars in the village and the journalist start interviewing each other.  Here you can read how d...

Finally we could start planting the trees! Well almost, because first we needed the excavator. the delivery came a few days after we arrived in Bárcena so that was quite in time. The truck driver stopped and asked, how are you going to get the excavator from the truck. And we were like ' what ', you are the delivery man, you tell us. But he didn't have anything to do it with, so we needed a plan B. First we thought, maybe run the truck backwards against a higher part and searched for that. But then Maaike thought: "there's somebody working at the mine, they have a lot of big machines, maybe they can help" So we went there and immediately Diego who was working there came to the rescue in his big tractor. And with some ropes they managed to get the machine off of the truck! First we did some try out holes, before we went on the quest of digging 120 holes. When we started doing that we soon found out that digging the holes 1.5 meters deep, as Carlos said we...