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 its great precursor and source of inspiration for this practice. More than 50 years ago, he converted the terrace of the property where he lives into a 150 m2 vegetable garden, where he collects all kinds of fruit and vegetable crops. The boundary of the plot is the railing of a fifth floor on the not at all pacified Carrer Navas de Tolosa, in the Clot de Barcelona.
"From here I took a potato that weighed 950 grams, and from there I took a grape of 1.7 kilos", he points out to us on his terrace, where he walks easily, despite the fact that this Friday (26) 100 years
In his garden, he grows all kinds of vegetables: potatoes, tomatoes, celery, onions, leeks... He shows us some splendid mats of broad beans, further afield he praises the aubergines; he is particularly proud of the vine, which has come to produce 100 kilos of grapes in a year, and during the tour he shows his pain "because climate change has killed eight of my fruit trees".
Carulla is able to give a lesson in agriculture in every corner of this agricultural space to illustrate the best way to bury a branch so that it takes root, advise the ideal dates to sow garlic or clarify (with a synoptic table included) what is the ideal size of a terrace for each type of crop to thrive (tomatoes, mint, cherry trees, olive trees, aloe, vines, ficus or medlar...).
His is a story of the elderly who lived through the war and who overcame years of hardship and poverty until they were welcomed in Barcelona. “I had to leave Juneda because we were starving; I couldn't buy my wedding dress and I wanted to get married after 12 years of courtship," he 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 Mi siglo verde ( Icaria ) in which the writer and journalist Carlos Fresneda has transformed these "shavings from his memory" into 100 wise life lessons of an urban farmer.
He is a century-old witness to how agriculture has evolved. "Before, with one hectare of cereal, a farmer could get ahead, but now with 20 hectares we wouldn't live". That's why he regrets that "field products are being paid at the price of 40 years ago, and we don't know if the middlemen are in Chicago or on an 80-meter yacht", because they act "as if they were blackmailers" with the farmers. 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 drainage system on the terrace that prevents the plant roots from becoming clogged, blackened and rotting. For this, he placed a layer of tiles upside down so that the water flows under tens of tons of soil, all this completed with a double layer of asphalt and a substrate that fertilizes everything: hundreds of soft cardboard boxes, fruit boxes from light woods, conglomerate wood and furniture, old shutters, organic composting remains, leaves, papers and even bills. He has seen the roots go into the wood and the plant grow without soil.
Beneath all this human artifice is hidden an intricate and powerful trocha of horizontal roots that makes it possible for potato plants to grow more than a meter tall or bean plants that exceed a person in height.
Carulla made an emotional presentation of Carlos Fresneda's book (and his) a few days ago at the Biocultura salon, where he dedicated the memoirs "to the million deaths" caused by the war and to the other half million deaths from fear after the war, like his mother's, at the age of 53.
A pacifist since the Civil War, he became a naturist at the age of ten. It was the result of having accompanied her aunt to the doctor in Barcelona, where she came into contact with the naturist Tomás Capo, precursor of a diet to prevent diseases caused by poor nutrition, and whose teachings in the magazine Pentalfa was made an environmentalist without knowing it.
He remembers that as a child he ate frugally, "so primitive that it looked like naturist food". And that's why he recommends whole foods (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 emphasizes. "You must try to be vegetarian and avoid food contamination through farmed and wild animals", he says.
He is convinced that many Barcelona residents could use part of their terrace to create a vegetable garden; in fact, it receives students from neighborhood schools since people like Jordi Miralles (Terra Foundation) and Josep Puig Boix publicized their work. "This terrace is like an agricultural school", he points out. A year ago he received the award that bears his own name, created by the Replantem association.
And what is the secret to reaching 100 years? He answers that throughout his life he has had "inner peace", that "plants are our sisters", that since childhood he wanted to be a "generator of love" and that he has followed Hippocrates: "Let food be your medicine and let your medicine be your food”.
