The leaps of 2023 have been the increase in the number of people performing the Vital Orchard project and the more efficient dissemination of the contents they generate. To present these novelties, 30 people who are part of the project have gathered in Hernani: the mayor of Hernani, Xabier Lertxundi, and the Environmental Councilor, Mattin Aldaia, have first known the project "Hernani buruburua", to later share experiences and reflections on the Vital Orchard. Do you want to know the news of this project that was born in 2014?

You will have noticed that the ARGIA Bizi Baratze section has been three pages since the end of March: we have deployed the network of collaborators who write there for everyone to make known a particular sector. The 14 collaborators currently writing in this department and the topics they address are: Jakoba Errekondo with plants, Garazi Zabaleta with experiences of food sovereignty, Garbiñe Larrea with medicinal plants, Mattin Jauregi and Inaxio Arin with beekeeping, Josebe Blanco with grazing, Aintzira Oñederra and Goiuri Alberdi with seeds of Marta Barba, Iñigo Marta Barba, Amanda Dias, Junkal Arruti, Leticia Urretabizkaia and Mirene Begiristain.

To disseminate the content on land and food written by these authors and journalists of ARGIA, this year we have developed the following tools:

New website bizibaratzea.eus

The website bizibaratzea.eus that has been in operation since 2016 has been revamped, with the aim of improving the two main functions: on the one hand, finding practical information about plants easily and on the other, getting to know news about environmental issues.

Practical information is provided on the right side of the website. Depending on the time, the moon info, the bases of the orchard, the eight steps to start in the orchard, what to sow or plant every month and what to collect...

On the left side of the website we will see articles, news and videos about land and environmental issues. Anyone who wants to follow the news has a beautiful source here.

It is also a window for the Basque Country initiatives: It feeds a unique agenda of the whole of Euskal Herria, agents have the opportunity to present their news and the experience of Euskal Herria that Garazi Zabaleta exposes every week in his article is also available on the web.

Newsletter with 9,900 recipients

The Huerto Bizi has also renewed the newsletter that has been underway since 2016 (see latest). Every Monday comes at 8:00 in the morning and is free. Anyone wishing to receive it only has to enter the website bizitzaratzea.eus and write their email address in the box above.

Already 9,900 receive this newsletter every Monday. It contains the information that has been posted throughout the week on the web: works, news, videos, agenda events...

Egonarria Web Television Programme

In April we launched the first episode of Egonarria web telebista. We decided to start this session to learn about sub-sectors related to land, delve into each of these issues and give voice to those who work. Over twelve weeks, the young Eli Pagola and Mattin Jauregi will address twelve main themes and interview twelve concrete experiences.

Telegram’s Bizi Baratze channel: a special job every day

The Bizi Baratze project feeds social networks a lot, especially Facebook and Instagram. But in their presentation at Hernani they highlighted the Telegram Bizi Baratzea channel, which started in the spring of 2023.

Every day at 5:00 in the morning, time to awaken many farmers, the followers of this channel receive a dose. A single dose a day, which briefly explains a special work of this time, with a beautiful photograph. It recommends at the end of the message a content treated: An article from the Baratze Bizi section of the ARGIA weekly, or the latest Egonarria video, or the Baratze Bizi website where all the works of the time are shown.

These are the novelties of this year presented in Hernani, but their genesis and evolution were also analyzed:

Surprise book on earth worked

The Baratze Bizi project comes as a surprise when we publish the book of the same name Jakoba Errekondo and ARGIA. But to germinate this seed from the Vital Garden the land was cultivated much earlier: Jakoba Errekondo publishes a weekly article in ARGIA for 28 years. Since 1995, this week Errekondo has written Article 1,280. ARGIA, moreover, has always followed the news related to land and the environment. Pello Zubiria, Jenofa Berhokoirigoin, Urko Apaolaza, Iñaki Sanz Azkue...

In spring 2014, social curiosity about the garden, the desire to learn in the garden among young people, concern about the environment and food... and ARGIA made a simple request to Errekondo to write a 20-page leaflet. And on summer holidays he returned to ARGIA with the famous bookseller Errekondo.

The book Bizi Baratze opened a whole line: ARGIA and Errekondo started meeting with all the actors in the sector to present the book and expand their sponsorship proposal. On the other hand, this book reached people who know Euskera but do not usually read in Euskera by the subject, by design, by language... Their sale reached numbers that are an exception in Basque books. The book taught us the importance of this issue in Basque society, and in 2016 we got to it.

From a book to a full line in 2016

In 2016 we launched the Bizi Baratzea working group within ARGIA, consisting of five ARGIA workers and Jakoba Errekondo. In this presentation all the initiatives of the Huerta Vital have been taken:

In 2016 we launched Garazi Zabaleta's page in the weekly and called Bizi Baratze the department that composed two articles of Errekondo and Zabaleta. Zabaleta shows us weekly a project or initiative being carried out in Euskal Herria around food sovereignty. Every week we are amazed by what interesting initiatives we get to know, many very curious, different… and the fact that we have written over 300 articles in seven years demonstrates the number of projects underway in the Basque Country.

The Luna and Planta agenda emerges as a response to the needs detected by Errekondo and ARGIA in their meetings with the different agents of the sector: it explains the work that must be done at the time according to the moon in four areas: vegetable garden, fruit orchard, forest and floral orchard. For this first agenda that was published in 2016, we chose Antton Olariaga as an illustrator, and since then this agenda has been the result of the union of Jakoba and Antton. Each year the agenda focuses on one theme, for example the 2024 theme will be “Collaborating Animals II”, completing the information that has worked this year’s agenda.

Since 2016, ARGIA’s Bizi Baratze line also participates in the working group for the creation of the Lunar Calendar that the Alkartasuna cooperative of Usurbil and Biolur take out.

We have also tried to generate material and useful knowledge in schools: With the Eat Think project we publish a brochure to work during the course. On the other hand, Errekondo teaches many lectures in schools with orchard and within the Inguru Gela project he teaches three annual sessions aimed at teachers to later promote school orchards.

From 2016 to the present, ARGIA has edited with Errekondo the following publications (here you can see the entire catalog): The Vital Garden, the comic book Altza Porru, in which 8 comiceros carried out their work with the vegetable garden as a theme, the annual agenda of Luna y Planes, book 111 that includes the selected articles of Errekondo ARGIA and the book Etxeko Landariak.

This last book resulted in the following leap: Collaboration of ARGIA graphic resources from the beginning with the writer. That is, Dani Blanco took photographs for the book and was designed by Maitane Gartziandia. This form of work has been repeated in the books below.

We work in Pandemic and collect medicinal plants

In the anguish caused by the pandemic, the Vital Garden took two steps forward in 2020:

Public institutions announced the ban on local fairs and banned the vegetable garden. Errekondo wrote the article denouncing it and had a great impact. There were solidarity actions in favour of fairs and farmers and ARGIA contacted the agroecological movement to bring solidarity to them. Thus, together with the agents of the agroecological movement, ARGIA pulled the Lurra Herriari Deia T-shirts. With this message, we wanted to bring the Earth's defense to the forefront. On the other hand, small farmers expressed the need to publicize the word agroecology in society, and in this regard, ARGIA produced several reports and videos Lur Herriari Deia. Since then, the collaboration of ARGIA with the agroecological movement and the Biolur association has been strengthened.

On the other hand, the pandemic brought the issue of health to the front line and it occurred to him to publish the book of medicinal plants to the team of Baratze Bizi. Considering his wealth of knowledge on the subject and his dissemination trajectory, we address Garbiñe Larrea. This book, entitled What medicinal plants know, published in 2021, has also become an exception in Basque publications. The book was photographed by Dani Blanco and designed by Maitane Gartziandia.

A year later, in 2022, Baratze Bizi published his second publication on medicinal plants with Garbiñe Larrea, which, as its name suggests, invites us to cultivate the medicinal garden, if you will, in a circle, so that part of it stays in the flower throughout the year.

As the network of collaborators of the Bizi Baratze project continues to work with the primary sector, new expectations for the coming years will be created. Let Huerta Bizi continue to offer tools to work desirable lives!