Salmon Leaping - photo by Phillip Colla |
Sunday, 19 February 2017
CLEARING
Sunday, 5 February 2017
BIODYNAMICS WORKS
garlic doing well - planted back in december |
chillies and tomatoes sprouting away - it's cool having the propagator in the cottage so we can watch plant power in action |
We planted the garlic in the photo on a good garlic-planting day and, sure enough, up it came beautifully. I was interested to notice, by the way, that Stewart and Helen's saved-from-last-season garlic came up much more strongly than some bought in this year, even though it was top quality. Similarly, the chillies and tomatoes we planted have come up well though it's also interesting to notice that the chillies were planted on the ideal day and have come up better than the tomatoes which we planted the day after. So give it a go, Ruth works with Maria Thun's Biodynamic Calendar, easy to get hold of and just a few £'s. At the end of the day it's simply about working gently and cleverly with Mother Nature rather than trying to bend her to your will with brute force and dumb chemicals - so what's stopping you?
Monday, 16 January 2017
MASANOBU FUKUOKA - "THE ONE-STRAW REVOLUTION"
"Drifting Clouds and the Illusion of Science" |
But I think the even more important revolution that the book describes, in his charming style, is Fukuoka's internal journey. Moments of insight, the alienation from the modern industrial consumerist approach to life, the gradual deeper understanding of natural processes, all leading to a simple life looking after fields and orchards, growing and eating simple natural food.
It's poignant that this book has been around since the 1970's - all my working life. Fukuoka's insights have been influential, widely read and talked about yet here's humankind still entangled in the terrible web of supermarket consumerism, cars and fossil fuel addiction and the shallow information of mass media, internet and TV; the harder we dig ourselves into the industrial way of life the harder it is to escape, the situation now so bad that we are endangering all life on the planet. I've understood all that for years, I helped friends on an organic small-holding way back in 1976, and have been actively looking about and living on ecological projects for ten years. Yet in all that time I've never found people living as naturally as Fukuoka and Ruth and I still use a car and get the bulk of our food from supermarkets...
Here's some of Fukuoka's last words, "There is nowhere better than this world. Years ago I realized that we human beings are good just as we are and I set about to enjoy my life. I took a carefree road back to nature, free from human knowledge and effort."
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