Bye Bye Altanure, It’s Been Great!
Hi friends! My two weeks volunteering at Altanure have ended. It’s been interesting and educational, I met some great people and it was wonderful to be in such a beautiful natural setting. So I think I can say this first bit of my volunteer journey was a success!
Changing Impressions
When I first arrived at Altanure I was a bit unsure what to think about it. I guess it’s normal that whenever you go to a new place to do something that you haven’t really done before, you try to imagine what it will be like from the little information you have, and Altanure turned out to be different from what I expected. It was wilder, to me the veggie gardens looked overrun with weeds, the sanitary provisions were a bit more rustic than I expected as well and were quite far from the bedroom and the physical work was intense…
But if my years of traveling have taught me anything it’s that places (and people) are almost always different than what you imagine them to be before getting to know them. Best thing to do is to just breathe and relax and let the place show you it’s beauty instead of focusing on how it’s not what you expected. After all some of the places I hold most dear to my heart these days are places that I originally was a bit unsure about because they were not what I expected.
As the days went on I noticed that my body got stronger and that I could handle the physical work better and I got used to the setup there. I enjoyed working together with my fellow volunteer Rosanna. It was really great to see the progress we made in the garden, pulling weeds, planting new veggie starts, mulching, …
The place is truly quite magical, pollinators everywhere, so many birds (the Hoopoo may have been my favourite! Never seen one like this in real life before!), so many gorgeous smelling aromatic plants, a bright night sky where you can see the thousands of stars clearly, and some really lovely people, …
Turning the Land into a Regenerative Paradise
It’s a big piece of land and they struggle with the hot dry weather and the very hard compacted nutrient depleted soil. And I had my moments that I would think, why don’t they just do this or that? You know, reacting as someone on the sidelines who has only gathered some knowledge from books and youtube videos (it’s always easy to be an armchair critic, right? 😅).
But the reality is that in the past 18 months that Monica and Ze have worked on it and during the time before that when Frederic, the owner, started to shape the gardens, they’ve done a phenomenal job. And it’s wonderful to see how passionate they are about it.
They’ve been trying lots of things, learning as they go how this land reacts to different treatments and it’s clear that progress is being made! In certain areas the soil is getting much better and they say they have less and different weeds than the year before which shows the land is evolving as those first weeds were pioneer plants (plants that grow easily in very depleted soil and add structure and nutrients to the soil , once the soil improves a next range of plants can start growing and very slowly nature will get back into balance). This is a natural process but everything they’re doing at Altanure is helping to speed up the process a little bit.
They’ve also been planting many different fruit trees in the food forest and interplanting them with smaller bushes, flowers and vegetables. Many of the fruit trees already had lots of blossoms or even fruit growing on them. The abundance of fruit will be wonderful at harvest time!
Fruit trees in the food forrest
And they said that the biodiversity is increasing noticeably. There are more pollinators, birds, and other wildlife. I’m actually writing this from my 2nd volunteer place, Quinta Pomar – an organic farm just a few kilometres from Altanure, where they do a more regular type of farming, they don’t use pesticides and such but they do still till the soil here and aren’t trying to follow the patterns of nature as much as they do at Altanure and while it’s lovely here at Quinta Pomar there’s clearly much more biodiversity at Altanure, I’ve hardly heard any bees or other insects buzzing here while at Altanure you hear them from as soon the sun rises above the horizon.
It’s going to be wonderful to see even more progress in the gardens here over the coming years and I hope I can return some day to witness it!
The Vegetable Garden at Casa Terra
Next door to Arka, the Altanure property where I was volunteering was another Altanure property, Casa Terra which has a much more established vegetable garden where they have been using the same principles to build the soil and grow food for a much longer time already. And it’s really lovely to see this magical vegetable garden. It’s a bit smaller than the gardens at Arka and it still looks wild too but it has more abundant crops than the newer gardens at Arka.
This garden is being looked after by Jackson, who just like Monica and Ze started here as a volunteer and then got the opportunity to stay on longterm, though he just works there one or two days per week. Occasionally the volunteers from Arka can go help here as well though I never got the chance to do that since I was only there for 2 weeks.
Some Thoughts on My First Wwoof Experience
Seek Discomfort & Keep Your Mind Open
I mentioned it above, things can be different than you expect and I think in general these type of volunteer experiences go along with some minor levels of discomfort. They’re is not luxury experiences after all, but this can be a good thing! It’s great to experience the simple life for a while and if anything, these little bits of discomfort help you to grow and appreciate the little things in life more…
The Compost Toilet: The Good and the Bad
I mentioned earlier that the sanitary situation was a bit more rustic than I expected. I’d seen on the wwoof website that some hosts have compost toilets but I didn’t know that they would have them at Altanure. The system has a lot of benefits though!
You don’t need any water so it’s ideal in places where there is limited water. And as drinking water is becoming a limited resource in more and more places in the world these days, it is a system that should be implemented more!
It’s basically a dry toilet with saw dust. Every time you go you cover your deposit with a new layer of saw dust which prevents it from smelling badly. I know some people might have flashbacks to stinky self built toilets (HUDO’s as we called them in Belgium) at summer scouts camps but honestly this is a 100 times better and doesn’t really stink at all.
Once the container is full it can be composted in a special ‘humanure’ compost heap with all the toilet deposits and you can add extra food scraps to it. This heap is then hot composted for several months until all traces of our human waste have disappeared and any pathogens are gone and it has turned into a rich fertiliser teaming with beneficial microorganisms. It could then be used to fertilise the land, in theory it can even be used on vegetable beds though at Altanure they will use it to regenerate non-food areas of the land. So instead of our waste going into the sewage system and possibly end up polluting our precious waterways and oceans, it’s returned to the earth in way to nourishes it.
Unfortunately there are some downsides to these compost toilets as well. The system is great but if they are just built as a basic wooden shack outside where you go do your business they can become super impractical especially for women during certain times of the month. I use a menstrual cup during those days because it is one of the more eco-friendly solutions but it’s quite unsanitary to do so in a dusty compost toilet. It’s not that the compost toilet itself is the issue but to be sanitary the ‘outhouse’ needs to have a sink with clean water to wash the cup and our hands, which was not the case at Altanure. I raised the issue and they will try to come up with a solution for this in the future but I have to admit I still had the feeling it was not a big priority for them even while they’re designing a new compost toilet closer to the bedrooms, since it was not a personal issue for them. For me on the other hand, the way it is now, is just not ok. And I would simply never choose to stay somewhere for several days during that time of the month knowing they have a toilet setup like this. There are limits to my seeking discomfort 😅
Bigger is Not Necessarily Better
One of my reasons for volunteering at places like Altanure is to get some real hands on experience and see what it is truly like to live like this, have a big garden to grow my own food, live closer to nature and away from the city. And this first experience already opened my eyes to a few things.
I might have been dreaming of having a really big garden myself one day but seeing how hard it is to manage a property this size (with an ornamental garden with swimming pond, large herb spiral, 2 areas with vegetable gardens, food forest, …) , I would definitely start with something much smaller and more manageable! It’s a lot of hard work and while I enjoy working in the garden I would not want to get completely overwhelmed by it. It was clear that even with two people living there permanently to take care of the garden and with regular volunteers it was hard to get on top of the work at Altanure. Of course the wildness of the place has its beauty but with a property this size and limited hands and resources to work it, it does mean that certain things take a long time to progress.
Finding Creativity Again?
And there have also been a few other thoughts that’s been popping through my head. I’m not sure if it’s simply because I see now how much hard physical work it is to undertake a project like this to create your own regenerative garden/home or if it’s because I’m feeling more balanced spending more time in nature, but for the first time in a long time I’m feeling like I may want to work on some illustrations/designs again.
I worked on a few small graphic design projects for Altanure, some simple layouts and canva templates for Instagram using their own brand guidelines and I enjoyed getting back into it. Maybe it was just a matter of finding the right balance again for me to feel more creative again, more balance with nature, more traveling, less sitting in a boring apartment with four white walls staring at my computer in vain.
I’m considering traveling around a bit and working on some new creative stuff, maybe some illustrations or something completely different, while traveling in the 2 months between Quinta Pomar and my 3rd volunteer place instead of just volunteering non-stop. Though there’s still the option to return to Altanure as well, but the extreme heat here in Tavira during those summer months make me think it might be better to travel a bit to cooler places…
Next Quinta Pomar
I mentioned it briefly but I’m already at my next volunteer location right now. It’s an organic farm called Quinta Pomar. It’s a lovely place close to but very different from Altanure. I’ll give you an update on Quinta Pomar soon, I’m planning to stay for a month so I’ll have plenty of time to do that!
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