Sunday 29 September 2013

Ducks and Dogs

We had a couple of duck chicks earlier this year, both fully grown now. The ducks are really good fun to have around, waddling about and eating anything they can lay their beaks on, including slugs which seem to be a duck delicacy. I'd recommend ducks rather than hens for any eco project with a bit of space. They lay lots of eggs and it's great farm entertainment watching them do their duck stuff. Then just when you're starting to take yourself a bit seriously their's a hoot of duck derision from the distance...
Duck chicks at a few weeks old
Since Ruth put out a water bath for them the ducks come down onto our patch much more. That's the duck love machine, Barry White, in the background.
Nellie and Silver, the two farm dogs. We have been teaching Nellie to grin but Silver manages to look crazy all on her own.

Woody Adventures

A lot of my work here on the farm revolves around woody stuff, whether it's looking after trees or making things and fixing things...
One of two king size trestles, already very useful, it receives several alien radio stations too ha ha
A typical farm job for me, fixing the floor in the grain store...
...ready for the excellent crop of barley...
...and there it is, safely stored away to help feed the pigs and other animals
It's been fascinating to watch the whole ploughing, sowing, harvesting etc process here for the barley. It was a good crop but then the field's been either fallow or just had pigs on it for several years and ploughing breaks down the natural structures in the soil that keep it healthy, so it's unlikely that the yield would be so good if we did that again next year. To me this is the kind of farming that we need move away from, into something less energy intensive. But what exactly? I'm hoping we find the time to explore perennial cereals and other perennial crops, maybe in strips with different seedings through the year...

Thursday 26 September 2013

Fruity Times

So much fruit everywhere on the farm at the moment...
Apples galore
The weight of apples snapped one of the branches off this tree yielding half a barrow of fruit...
We've had maybe eight barrow loads of windfall apples from the orchard so far which have helped to feed the pigs, who love them
We're developing these large pig feeding beds with two apple trees each so the pigs can feed themselves at least some of the time
The beds will be mini forest gardens, here we're starting ground cover of mustard and facelia which worked really well in the pig field
Damsons everywhere too - love that velvety, dusty finish on them - sadly three-quarters of them are out of reach...
...still plenty to make wine with though - I hear that damson wine is one of the best too, sort of like a really good port

Therapy and Ecology - Bringing it All Together

Therapy and ecology aren't often grouped together but there's so much the two worlds can learn from each other. Therapists generally focus on treating their patients, they might include their patients' relationships with other people in sessions, but how can healing not include a patient's relationship with the environment, the Earth and all life? And permaculture, sustainable living and other eco-projects most often seem to fail because of personality clashes, where people don't understand the dynamics of their behaviour and interactions with other people in their patterns and roles, where some deep therapy could really help. So that's what this blog is all about, bringing the worlds of therapy and ecology together.
I've been exploring what people are doing on eco projects in the UK and Portugal for some years, writing about it all on Ian's Eco Blog. I was developing a separate site for my therapy and healing work then realised I was keeping the two worlds apart myself... So here's everything in one place. Ruth's got me interested in Biodynamics which you could say is about working with the energy of plants and their relationship with ourselves and the cosmos, a good example of bringing it all together.