Hardic Perma

Hardic Farm

Contact person:

Ciubotaru Dan Paul

Languages spoken on the farm:

Romanian, English, some French and a bit of Spanish too.

Description of the area:

The higher foothills of Oriental Carpathian Mountains, 480 m altitude, the land of Bucovina, near the Ukrainian border. Mainly forested area including spruce, fir, pine, hornbeam, beech, alder. Drinking water springs, predominant streams and lakes. About 1 km away you have a Habitat Conservation area where you can spot the brown bear, wolf, wild boar and deer families. The nearest village is 5 km away via a forestry road.

What do you grow on the farm:

This is the first year when we planted a garden, therefore the main crops like corn, potatoes, beetroot, different type of beans, onions etc. We also planted a fruit tree garden with apple, pear, plum, cherries, almond, walnut, hazelnut, also shrubs like a diversity of raspberry, blueberry, blackberry, cranberry, blackcurrant, goji. More trees to be planted this autumn. The farm entails a lake, we grow trout fish along some species of grass carp. The future plan is to get goats and ducks to begin with.

Farm size:

A bit less that 1 Hectare.

Months when they accept voulteers:

August & September & maybe first part of October

Volunteer activities:

Activities such as helping to build a hey barn/storage room, cutting timber logs for fire, cutting the grass, helping to maintain the vegetable & fruit garden, building a forest garden from the scratch, feeding the fish, cooking.

Accommodation:

Accommodation is on a caravan home (2 separate beds suits 4 people) or if you like with your/our own tent, hence the main house is not yet finished. Once in a while, for hot showers I can provide you with my appartment located 17 km way from the farm, in Radauti town.

Diet:

We cook & eat mainly vegetarian. Other considerations can be discussed and arranged upon arrival.

A few words about the family:

Dan is the lone wolf living in the forest where the farm is located. After living 18 years abroad, he decided to return to his homeland of Bucovina to create part of his dream: a permaculture farm.

Pets:

Allowed.

Other comments:

We are a Permaculture Farm Project that is in construction. Here you can learn good skills about building your own house, growing your own food, making your lake productive and many other. We started this project in 2015 and it is still going on. Since then we have been constructed an organic fish pond, swales, and terraced gardens, rehabilitating a river bed and we’ve brought an old haybarn piece by piece like a puzzle at the construction site to be later used for the main house as part of the wooden structure of the attics and roof. We are clearing an old (out of use) forest to make a forest garden, and many other cool stuff like designing and starting to build a superadobe house made from earthbags and a wooden shingle roof, rocket stoves, planting fruit trees and shrubs, mulching, building a terrace and a compost toilet and so on... We are very active people and we welcome volunteers who want to do some action and learn really useful permaculture knowledge. We are constructing with earth bermed structures earthbags as per SuperAdobe technic (developed by architect Nader Khalili) and we often use excavators for the systematic earthworks that we do here... We teach and design farms or how to reshape the land for building aquaculture strategies and organic gardening, therefore there is indeed much to learn about this topics. We also give advice and some homework to future study adapted on your specific requirements, or plans for a future homestead. We are mostly vegetarians, sometime we use eggs, dairy or fish. Accommodation is in a caravan home (2 separate beds) or if you like with your/our tent, hence the main house is not yet finished. We kindly ask helpers to stay AT LEAST TWO WEEKS since there is a lot to learn and to do and it is simply not possible to understand all the complexity of this systems in less time than this and also being able to help around the farm. This way you have the chance to learn both theoretical and practical skills. Come and join us !