175 We finally used our compost in our garden YouTube

Six years ago we bought this abandoned piece of land in Portugal to try to find another way of living and so far we've been building up our base camp, regenerating the land and documenting what we do so we can all learn from it. And in this video we're going to go to a fire training and we're also going to take care of the gardens at Project Camp using the compost we produce in the land. So welcome to a new Project Camp update. So one of the main topics around sustainability is how nutrients circulate in food systems. In modern agriculture it works in a linear way with all the problems we know it brings whereas in nature nothing goes to waste. Things cycle through the systems creating more fertility and abundance like this cork oak. Actually we like quite a bit this approach and we've been composting our waste since we started almost and Cameron has been looking into this so he's very eager to tell you more about it. So let's start by taking a look inside the kitchen. Here in the kitchen we have a lovely team of cooks who cook a lot of organic vegetables which are sourced locally from our farmers and it's a very difficult job because cooking for so many people in camp means that there are always some leftovers that don't make it into our bellies. That stuff though is okay for us because we have two different systems for recycling these food scraps. One of these systems is our lovely biodigester and you may have seen this already from several previous updates and through its own complicated process this allows us to get two very valuable things from inside. One of those things is gas which we are prototyping for cooking our own food or heating up water. Also around the back we create some lovely fresh fertilizer. Although this stuff doesn't smell the best it is very very rich in nutrients for all our lovely plants on the land and creating gas is our priority to try and replace with our food scraps but everything that will not go into the biodigester we have our lovely compost bins for. This is the second system where we can place our things and you may have seen us recently I just rustled this around yesterday so these mushrooms have grown in the last 24 hours. That's the good stuff. Beautiful. So it's nice that we can make these products with just our leftover food scraps and nice that we can return it to the land but even whenever we do eat the food and it stays within us it goes out the other end and we don't want that to go to waste either. Here in the poop palace we have many different pallet bins for turning our poop into compost and even with those many bins we were running out of space. Now we're taking the approach of spreading it out over several more bins and this means that it is time to reduce dine over the weeks before adding our new additions and we can see that that's working at the moment because we can say for sure is that the compost from previous seasons has been very very fertile and it's very very good for growing things. So as you can see we have created lots of systems over the years which work for managing our waste streams but none of these are sewage and we actually need to develop a sewage system for dealing with our wastewater. We've got the sinks, showers, even the washing machine and it is all biodegradable products because it just goes straight underground nice and simple and comes out into our land. It's not harmful but it's not ideal and thankfully the landscape team is looking into how to go about making a better system. Yeah so what is happening in the moment is that we try to get an idea of how much water actually runs into the land. We know how much water we use but we don't know how much water runs back. So the landscape team has set up some buckets so then we know how big to scale the sewage system and for that we also created a research module that you can find online and if you have any ideas about sewage systems and you want to contribute to that go check it out and maybe we can upscale it for the community center at some point. And in the meantime we're gonna get our hands dirty get back into the land. Okay we have a few different areas to work on that we've been planting and caring for through the years like our herb garden, the rain garden, Biscamp Lake and the Swales patch. Here we have some fruit trees we planted a couple years ago and it changes a lot throughout the year where in the dry summer they need a little bit of watering so we will start over there. And one of the things about the patch over here is that there's lots of beautiful flowers in between the trees and if we're gonna be brush cutting around the trees and watering them with the hose a lot we're gonna need some access paths. Now that we have access we can go give some love and care to those fruit trees. And to finish up we put the grass back down as a mulch and we can repeat this process for all the rest of our trees. So now that that work is done we have a nice system in place for caring for our trees. We've got the humanure compost which we're going to keep producing. Also the mimosas which we chop throughout the year. It's nice to use that plant matter which they've generated and to be able to return that and feed the soils of the trees that we do want to grow here. Now we can leave the Swales patch behind and move on to our base camp lake which is located behind the kitchen container at the back of our base camp. At the end of last season we had the very fun job of being able to plant a lot of native trees in the area and we did that also with a nest method. A bit different from the fruit trees nest that we've just made. We planted them directly into the nest which we had dug into the ground. So it's already quite fresh there's still a lot of compost. The only thing we think that needs done here is to maybe add some digested from our biodigester that we saw earlier. Before we do that though let's take a look at the area. There's been a lot of growth especially in and around the water. The new leaves are coming and they seem very happy and green. Also some bigger chestnuts which seem to be loving the water from the lake right here. All of our cuttings of the elder and the willow seem to be growing really well. We have the oak leaves coming through even our little laurel tree and the tiny pines up here. And one cutting which we thought didn't do very well was the fig cutting. As it looks fairly dead we're actually noticing lots of little buds. So this is the anaerobically digested contents of our biodigester which produces the gas and this comes as a by-product and we can use it as a fertilizer. Let's rinse and repeat. So we also have big piles of mimosas on the land and some of them we wood chip but also some of them we have fires with and the leftovers from that gives us a lot of good charcoal and a lot of good wood ash. So we are screening it out and the charcoal can go back to the fires. This ash can be used to regenerate our forests and put some good stuff back in the soil. None of it goes to waste. And this kind of wood ash it's actually very mineral rich. It simulates the kind of conditions that a forest would have after a big forest fire but thankfully without us having to actually burn anything. And obviously it's not pure wood ash it's mixed in with some of the soil that we already had around the fire. So we can return this just to the forest as a whole into the grind and it's a very young forest so it gives it a lot of boost for growing up tall again. We will likely use more and more ash in the future as sometimes we have to burn the tops of the mimosas we don't wood chip. Fire is also a driver for the nutrients flow in nature and by spreading the ashes we kind of mimic what a forest fire will do. But of course we don't want forest fires. So we're going to take a step out of our gardening at camp to participate in a fire training in a neighboring valley. This area burned a couple of times in the last years as you can see. Many black trees all around. The training is organized by Bravo Mundo, a network of land owners in these valleys. Most of them are foreigners and they've been working to improve their response in case of fire. We are here in the training ground. It's actually somebody's land and we got firefighters here and civil services and the municipality and we have some people from Bravo Mundo and we just came to see the training see what we can learn and help them also document this. So it's very exciting today the bomberos just arrived all you can see with the cars from three different fire stations and they're just checking the ground now the moisture level to see where we start because we have the grassland and the brushland which will both burn and then we'll see how it goes. Okay so first of all we can explain how much as we can we can show videos and pictures but nothing is compared to the the possibility of being near the fire and feeling the intensity that's generated by this kind of forest fuels. We started with some key remarks and a little showcase of tools that can be used to stop fire After the intro we will start training at the grass patch. Important to mention this training is not to fight big fires but to try to control it when it's less than the height of the person. Beyond that it's advice to leave it to the firefighters. We have to make sure we can scrape this to the mineral soil okay so the fire can't pass. Anyway still worth it combined with a good land management and some water systems to keep critical areas moist. At the time of training the field was still wet so fire didn't really catch. Still good enough to practice a bit with the hand tools. Even as a warm-up you can feel the heat and the smoke which makes it harder to do physical work. Now we're going for another patch with taller bushes. Seems like the wind is going to make it more difficult. We are not used to flames bigger than a campfire. This is actually intense but the firefighters seem quite chill. I guess this is nothing compared to a big one. Firefighters told us that in the past people would help them with this kind of labors but nowadays this is a bit problematic. First these areas are quite abandoned and population is aging whereas in the past there were many fit young people used to work in the countryside. Also due to rural abandonment vegetation is not managed so there is a lot of fuel available. On top of that eucalyptus and mimosas are widespread. And last climate change is creating worse climate conditions with hotter and drier summers but also very intense rainfall during winter that boosts vegetation. This will become fuel during the summer if not managed properly. So landowners want to protect their lands but realistically it's limited what can be done. Any help can be valuable but safety must be always prioritized. So after this reality check the commander ordered to put down the fire so we could get into the last part of the training. Cold trailing is making the trail of the fire, filling the soil to detect the hot spots. You put your hand near the perimeter and you feel the heat. You can feel, don't touch it because you can get burned. Yeah it's hot there isn't it? That's a cold trailing. Use your hand tools in the white ash areas to mix the soil and make a strip. This is actually quite important as it frees the firefighters from this sort of task so they can be more helpful at the front line. Anyway it can be risky if not done properly. Be careful not to drag burning material you know. You can't, it's not really that important to get where it's burning as long as you do a strip in the green area, the unburned area okay. Lastly we saw how to use water mixed with soil. They call this the porridge technique and it's used to tackle underground burning. And meanwhile the firefighters made sure everything was safe before leaving. Okay so that was the training day. It was a lot of information. It was also a bit messy. Lots of people, things burning, lots of firefighters but I think it was quite useful and we got quite some interesting tricks. This training gave us an idea what a forest fire could mean and we are not prepared for it. Still we can keep working on making our land more fire resilient. Back to base camp we still have a couple of gardens to take care of like this rain garden we created last year. It's quite overgrown at the moment so let's go and check in with Cameron. So before we take a look around at what the rain garden is like these days we're gonna do a little time lapse and get rid of these brambles and mimosas. It appears we are attracting some wildlife in the rain garden. Just casually yanking mimosa branches. I saw a rabbit run out of here and run up the hill and I thought it was hiding in the grass but actually there's a big rabbit burrow here. Maybe that's why there's not so many mimosa sprites. So one thing that's also noticeable with all the overgrowth is that it's not quite clear where the road is and where the rain garden is. So even though there's some beautiful flowers I'm just gonna brush cut the edges slightly and then we can put some logs up along the border and make it clear what's what. Now we've got the borders done we can move on to some other fruit trees. So we bought a range of different plants last year and some have lived, some did not. Some white lavender, some pink stuff, chocolate mint which has been doing really well. Also lots of ground cherry or physalis plants. Plus we have some berrykins growing up, elephant ears or some buddleja saplings which were planted. Afro-Australian daisies, pineapple mint and some lovely raspberry plants which are starting to pop up. Some plantings were not however so successful such as this little cane which we're not sure what it is or this raspberry cane which was planted here. It has gotten pretty dead and dry unfortunately. But what we see successful we are now going to go to the store and buy more of and use that knowledge that we've learned from last year to plant more successfully this year. Chamomile tea. We have the plant person he he's not able to distinguish parsley from coriander. Supposed to be very knowledgeable I don't know where he's got the education from. Which one is which? This is parsley this is coriander you can see by the leaves. No yeah I'm serious. We know that these daisies do very well in our garden so we'll get a couple more colors of these. The gooseberry like plant is doing really well in the rain garden compared to the grape so maybe we replace it with something like this. The verbena also do very well in our so and I think we try one new one. What did we get? Very satisfied, very rushed but we have everything we need for our rain garden for our herb garden. And a discount too huh? 30 euros for all of this. 30 euros from 50 to 30 euros. 10 more to go. Now our rain garden is ready for the summer and there's just one last area for us to go and take care of. Right beside our kitchen here we have Rita's herb garden from season one which has lots of herbs growing and lots of other things so it needs a little bit more care and I think I know just the person for that. What do you think want to give our herb garden some love? I sure do. There's a lot of grass growing in the herb garden and a bunch of other weeds that we don't really want so first order of business we got to clear up some of these paths. Here on this small grass patch we're going to replant it almost completely. So after clearing a lot of space in here for the plants that we want to grow we noticed there are already some very cool things in here like this rose very small but also some geraniums this big bunch of lavender in the back and we have these physalis or the grind cherries and they're the remnants of an old frame here that we are going to build up so that they have a structure to climb because they're getting a little bit a little bit floppy. That's some roots there's like actually a lot of plants in them which you saw with the root systems so we've split them up in smaller pieces like quarters or halves or maybe even less so we get more plants out of each. With this side almost done we still have a lot more to do so we got many campers to join in and set off on a collective weeding action. Good weeding session yeah okay okay And all of these grasses that we take out of the herb garden we can reuse here again as straw for pupalis and it just goes back into the system again nothing goes to waste huh. One last thing to do and that is mulching. We used a couple different types of mulch such as oak leaves or cardboard and even straw. We also wanted to try some wool as mulch and our neighbor kindly left it abandoned on our land so it's worth giving a try. And with this last bit we are done all of our gardens are ready for the season. Okay that was it for this update hope you enjoy it it is a bit different from the usual thing we do chopping mimosas and building stuff so let us know in the comments if you like it and if you want to see more of this kind of stuff. And as always lastly you can go and subscribe on patreon if you want to support us and see the videos 4k with no ads and two weeks ahead otherwise we will see you back here next week same channel same time same place thanks for watching or else subscribe