{"id":6611,"date":"2022-05-12T15:49:29","date_gmt":"2022-05-12T13:49:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/labrugueradepubol.com\/?p=6611"},"modified":"2022-05-12T16:53:46","modified_gmt":"2022-05-12T14:53:46","slug":"april-weve-been-busy-bees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/labrugueradepubol.com\/april-weve-been-busy-bees\/","title":{"rendered":"April: We’ve been busy bees!"},"content":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s been a super busy few weeks here at La Bruguera. We have the luxury of having so many bookings for 2022, that we can afford to spend more time than in previous years on developing our agro-ecological projects, expanding our environmental teaching offering, developing our relationships with institutions and teachers, and improving our facilities.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a bit of what we have been up to:<\/span><\/p>\n We are really proud and excited about our composting toilet<\/a>! The average [global north] citizen uses 10,000 litres of perfectly drinkable water a year, simply to move their faeces to somewhere else, where another energy-intensive process then begins to treat the now-undrinkable water. It\u2019s just plain silly.\u00a0 Especially when human waste can very easily be processed safely, in a zero-energy manner, into a rich fertiliser and substrate for use in the garden.\u00a0 It’s called “humanure” – a hybrid word based on “human” and “manure”.\u00a0 THAT is the environmental reason we built a composting toilet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We decided on the adapted wheelie-bin model for our toilet, though we must confess that we bought the kit, rather than going full-permaculture and finding a used wheelie-bin and building it from scratch. We are always looking for ways to avoid buying manufactured products, but like everything in life, there comes a time when a busy schedule means buying something is just that much more practical than spending 5 days monkeying around trying to follow YouTube videos to learn to adapt bits and bobs to perform functions they were not originally designed for… So in the end we bought a Finnish composting toilet kit, from SanesEco<\/a> near Barcelona, and Laura, who runs the company also gave us some plans of a simple toilet cabin<\/a>, which we built using second hand windows, some reclaimed timbers, and some new FSC-certified wood.<\/p>\n Mike worked with our old friend, Chris, who, to be fair, did more than his fair share of the work as Mike was recovering from Covid at the time to build the cabin and install the system.\u00a0 We put it near the area in the northeast corner of the site which we are fitting out for camping, in tents or vans.\u00a0 The idea here is that we then have an area for students who would like to come take advantage of our environmental and permaculture courses, but either prefer outdoor accommodation, or haven’t got the budget to stay in the guest house.<\/p>\n One day in April our Mike got a call from Mike at Dos Kiwis Brewing<\/a> around the corner, who had an interesting problem.\u00a0 A swarm of bees had decided to inhabit an empty wine barrel that was serving as a bar table at the brewery, right in the guest seating area next to the main door – not an ideal location (for the bees, or DK’s customers).\u00a0 But Judit and Mike of DK are not the type of people who would exterminate the poor little pollinators simply for choosing their real estate poorly, and they therefore called us, to see if we wanted to adopt some bees.\u00a0 Oddly, that very morning, our Mike had been thinking about getting some bee boxes to simply leave in the forest and see if bees chose to live in them. A few hours later, other Mike is phoning him, offering him bees… ask and the universe will provide.<\/p>\nComposting Toilet<\/span><\/h5>\n
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Busy [real] Bees! \ud83d\udc1d<\/h5>\n