Joan Carulla (Juneda, 1923) is the pioneer of green terraces. The creation of gardens and orchards on the roofs of buildings is an international trend since New York popularized urban agriculture on roofs. However, Carulla is his great precursor and source of inspiration for this practice.
More than 50 years ago, he converted the terrace of the building where he lives into a 150 m2 orchard, where he collects all kinds of fruit and vegetable crops. The limit of his plot is the railing of a fifth floor that overlooks the nothing pacified Navas de Tolosa street, in El Clot in Barcelona.
“From here I took a potato that weighed 950 grams; and from there I took a 1.7-kilo bunch of grapes ”, he points out to us on his terrace where he walks freely despite the fact that this Friday (the 26th) he turns 100 years old.
In his garden, he plants all kinds of vegetables: potatoes, tomatoes, celery, onions, leeks... Here he shows us some splendid broad bean plants; further extols eggplants; He is especially proud of the vine, which has produced 100 kilos of grapes in one year; and on the tour he shows his pain "because climate change has killed eight fruit trees."
Carulla is capable of giving an agriculture lesson in every corner of this agricultural space to illustrate the best way to bury a sarmiento so that it takes root, advise the ideal dates to sow garlic or clarify (with a synoptic table included) what is the ideal dimension of a terrace for each type of crop to prosper (tomatoes, mint, cherry trees, olive trees, aloe, vines, ficus or medlar...).
His is a story of those elderly people who lived through the war and who had to overcome years of hardship and poverty until they were welcomed in Barcelona. “I had to leave Juneda because we were starving; I couldn't buy the wedding dress, and I wanted to get married after 12 years of courtship, ”she explains.
He has been a merchant all his life (he was president of the Food Guild), but he has never lost sight of his rural roots, his great source of knowledge, as he demonstrates in the emotional book My green century (Icària) in which the writer and journalist Carlos Fresneda has transformed these "shavings of his memory" into 100 wise life lessons of an urban farmer. He is a centennial witness of how agriculture has evolved.
"Before, with one hectare of cereal, a farmer could get by, but now with 20 hectares we would not live." For this reason, he regrets that “field products are being paid at the price of 40 years ago; and we don't know if the intermediaries are in Chicago or on a 80-meter yacht”, since they act “as if they were slavers” in their dealings with the peasants.
He has always been an ecological farmer, like his father and grandfather, "who could not buy chemical fertilizers," he says, convinced that "so many herbicides and insecticides poison the land" and that monocultures are sources of pests.
Carulla has built a water drain on his terrace that prevents it from stagnating, blackening and rotting the roots of the plant. To do this, he placed a layer of tiles upside down so that the water could flow under tens of tons of earth, and all of this completed with a double layer of asphalt and a substrate that fertilizes everything: hundreds of wet cardboard boxes, wooden fruit boxes light, wood or furniture based on conglomerates with glue, old blinds, organic composting remains, leaves, paper and even bills. He has seen the roots enter the wood and the plant grow without soil.
Under all this human artifice hides an intricate and powerful skein of horizontal roots that makes it possible to grow potato plants over one meter or bean plants that are taller than a person.
Carulla made an emotional presentation of the book by Carlos Fresneda (and his) a few days ago at the Biocultura room, where he dedicated his memoirs "to the million deaths" caused by the war and to the other half million deaths from terror after the war, as that of his mother, at 53 years old.
A pacifist since the Civil War, he became a naturist at the age of 10. It was the result of having accompanied his aunt to the doctor in Barcelona, where he came into contact with the naturist Tomás Capo, pioneer of a diet to prevent diseases caused by a poor diet, and whose teachings in the magazine Pentalfa made him an ecologist without know.
He remembers how as a child he ate frugally, "in such a primitive way that it looked like natural food." And for this reason, he recommends eating whole food (cereals, legumes and lots of fruit).
"The cheapest diet is sometimes worth half the money and allows you to eat the best there is for health," he highlights. "You have to try to be a vegetarian and avoid contamination of food through stabled and wild animals," she says.
He is convinced that many Barcelonans could use part of their terrace to create a vegetable garden; and, in fact, he receives students from the neighborhood schools since people like Jordi Miralles (Fundación Terra) or Josep Puig Boix publicized his work.
"This terrace is like an agricultural school," he says. A year ago she received the award that bears his own name, created by the Replantem association.
And what is the secret to reaching 100 years?, they ask. He answers that throughout his life he has had "inner peace", that "plants are our sisters", that since he was a child he wanted to be a "generator of love" and that he has followed Hippocrates: "may food be your medicine and may your medicine be be your food."
