Appley Abundance

And still the apples keep on coming... I've been amazed at the sheer quantity of fruit just one tree can produce and when you have a few trees of different types you can have a serious supply for a useful part of the year, and you can store them too. One of the challenges is finding the time to do something with them all, there's barely time to pick up all the windfalls.
We are pressing lots here at the farm as part of the excellent Incredible Edible campaign - Facebook page here:

Stacks and stacks of apples for pressing here at Treflach

First Apple Day nice and sunny...

...second Apple Day rainy but three presses going all the same

Kerry and Janet selling some of the juice in Oswestry

Another nice idea - seeing how much you can grow in a crate

This is Silver posing in front of the old apple tree in our garden...

...still absolutely loaded with apples

This is just a day's windfalls from our tree

Thursday Lightworkers Group - 24th October 2013 - Connecting Earth, Human and Cosmic Energies

All sorts of patterns and possibilities, join in via Facebook here:

The signs of the Zodiac laid over the human body - intriguing...

 Let’s ignore scale, (which I think is an illusion of our 3D view of space anyway), and imagine that the Earth, our individual human bodies and the whole cosmos are each three spheres of energy, all the same size and all occupying exactly the same infinitely small and also infinitely large space. If that’s too much to visualise why not just relax, clear your mind and ask your subconscious to take over the journey for you:-)

...the Zodiac laid over the Earth

I’m particularly interested in just how connected we humans are, one thing this group has shown me is that distance is no object, if we choose to connect with each other in different countries we can. I think we can develop this ability to share information, find design solutions to problems and much more. This is going to be so useful as and when our technological-industrial way of life collapses. This is a conscious evolution into a more peaceful, aware and co-operative state.
Ruth has observed how plants seem to communicate, even in an 8’ by 4’ vegetable bed. Basil and chille plants seem to act as communicators helping other plants to find and absorb nutrients they need. How do they do that? Well let’s explore that this Thursday. The mycellial network is a vital part of forest systems, doing a similar job and also recycling dead plant material back into the soil. I was delighted to see this article: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-fungi-responsible-carbon-sequestration-northern.html which describes how fungi, the fruiting bodies of the mycellial network, are responsible for most of the carbon sequestration in northern forests. This is a bit mind-blowing for me as it suggests that there is at least one system that we can encourage that will help to draw carbon out of the atmosphere and to draw us back from the nightmare cliff edge of runaway climate change.
I feel that there must be other kinds of life scattered throughout the cosmos, some much more developed than our own. Maybe there are other planets where life has been through a similar stage to our own and there are beings who have had to learn to lead a different way of life so as not to destroy their environment – so why don’t we also ask for their advice on how to do that?

Thursday Group 17th October - Earth Energy in Cities - Trees and Us

Our Thursday Lightworkers session was focused on connecting with Earth energies and was really interesting. It feels vital to connect better energetically with the Earth but how best to go about it? I got the feeling that it's important to approach the Earth in a gentle, thoughtful, neutral, listening way. You know how unpleasant it is when you meet somebody who bombards you with their energy - I guess it's the same for trees, Earth spirits. Also I feel we need to be aware of our speed, some Earth energies have a much slower rhythm than us, we're never going to make contact with them at our usual pace.
EARTH ENERGIES IN CITIES
I never felt comfortable in most of the parks down in Brighton, it was if the Earth had been hammered into submission or driven out and I longed for some wilderness. It's wonderful to be living where we are now, surrounded by all different kinds of woodland, some of it hardly visited by people at all - an amazing opportunity to explore all this stuff. I feel every drop of rain and ray of sunshine so much more intensely than I ever did living in town. We're aware of so much life about us, especially the birds. All the same, most people live in cities and I'm sure you can still connect with the Earth there. Apart from anything else, the Earth has the potential to revert to it's natural state where you are, look how plants are making a comeback in Detroit, so it's possible to tune in with potential forest or other states wherever you are. Anyway, all kinds of life have evolved to the state they are in at the moment in a network, as grass eating animals and grasslands evolved together. When we realise that we are part of the network of life and not separate from it then we can start to rebuild true wealth, natural wealth, the diversity of life and local abundance, in our cities and in the countryside.
TREES AND US
We can have a wonderful partnership with trees. Watching everyday life here you see how much trees are part of a network. A cow comes along and eats some of a trees leaves, or scratches itself on its bark knocking off small, low shoots. A branch of a tree is blown off in a gale or breaks off under the weight of fruit it's carrying. Fallen apples are eaten by all sorts of shape and size of creature and by fungi. So when we care for trees and use their products we're doing some of these same things, pruning, eating fruit. I was pruning one of the apple trees and felt it would be a good idea to chop up some of the twigs and leave them around the base of the tree, which would happen naturally. I was so pleased when a while later I saw that there was a frog in amongst the thinnings. I would say that the trees enjoy a partnership with us, it feels as if they are happy to be useful and of course the more useful they are to us the more we will care for them.

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...

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.