Toni Cardona shows his collection of utensils made with reeds to highlight the importance of this material in everyday life. He places them next to the porch of Can Pujolet, the same house in which he was born and which he estimates to be more than 200 years old. He has tools for the fields, musical instruments, toys, all kinds of baskets, fishing gear, pieces closing wine barrels, hunting claims or all kinds of essential items for a self-sufficient life in rural Ibiza prior to the arrival of the tourism. All of them made with his own hands or those of fellow member of the Associació de Majors de Sant Josep.
But, in addition to this ethnographic collection that he has just improvised, at Can Pujolet various examples of how the reeds are still used today, beyond the vestiges of the past. He still uses them to protect the young fig trees, which he surrounds with casats, a covering made of stalks joined together to form a cylinder.
“It has two functions. It protects them from animals, because goats really like to peel the trunk, but it also ensures the seedling grows upright and, when the top of the tree shows, it starts to put out leaves.” The casats are only made with natural elements, without wires . It can stay on the tree trunk without problem, because it is biodegradable. Then it rots and mixes with the earth, highlights Toni Pujolet .
In his orchard he has also erected some bardissa, barriers with intertwined and interwoven reeds, with hardly any gaps between them. These protect the crops that were most exposed to the wind. Now he is satisfied with some tomato plants and padrón peppers that are growing strongly, well protected by the bardissa, but at the same time staked to direct their growth vertically.
Fig Season
While he attends, Pujolet offers some figaflors (figs) of the season, which he still collects with llecadores. These are poles to reach the highest branches of the fig tree, with a small basket with a string to make the fruit fall to then collect. There are two types, one for prickly pears or the more delicate varieties, such as orioles or blanques, and another with a larger basket at the end, which can hold four or five figs.
“We are not looking to make a documentary to explain which gadgets are older or about the scientific side of the reeds, but about their practical use, because the peasants used them for practically everything,” he stresses. Pujolet is the president of the Associació de Majors de Sant Josep and, together with his fellow board members, this is the third year that they have embarked on a project to the program ‘Units pel nostre parlar’, promoted by the Sant Josep City Council and coordinated by the linguist and Meritxell Rius.
Image of the board of the Associació de Majors de Sant Josep | SURUMBAM
With the sponsorship of this municipal program, the elders of Sant Josep filmed a documentary together last year with Surumbam Producciones, ‘Un tastet de paraules’, dedicated to compiling obsolete lexicon. “I already had in mind to carry out a project to rescue the meaning that the cane of the waterways came to have in Ibiza, but last year it was not possible during the state of alarm, because it requires a lot of work to compile”, recalls Pujolet .
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.