Stewardship and biodynamics

April 8 and still mild and sunny! Plants are growing, lavender greening up a month or more early, tulips almost grown, forsythia about to burst open. Even some of last year's Brussels sprouts seem to be growing again, turning green! Edward's bees are looking healthy, buzzing around, making new brood, bringing back pollen already from who knows where. I am keeping my fingers crossed that there will not be some freak snowstorm, like the blizzard I remember in Halifax on May 9, 1982, where buses stopped running or were hard to find and I had to flag down and share a taxi to get partway home from work. Let's just hope this El Nino, if that's what it is, is consistent in bringing us a long, warm season. 

I started seeds indoors last weekend for tomatoes, broccoli (already up), eggplant, peppers, three kinds of basil, some other herbs and some flowers. Unfortunately I didn't obtain my Stella Natura Biodynamic calendar until this week so did not know that the stars were not entirely in my favour, except for the herbs....it was a "leaf" day when I planted. However now that I have it I am all set to plant flower seeds this Saturday for my cut flower garden, as it will be a "flower" day!

I do not totally understand or even know that much about biodynamic farming, a concept or philosophy promoted originally by Rudolf Steiner (creator of Waldorf Schools) and augmented by the work of Maria Thun. It recommends making the farm a closed loop of production, a self-contained system and also incorporates the movements of the moon and the positions of the constellations.

Ideally a biodynamic farm would have a variety, even a small one, of animals, so there would be ruminants to eat weeds and grass, create manure for fertilizer, and other animals who would graze the land in succession, like cows first eating grass, chickens eating other things left behind, and pigs coming in to turn up the sod and eat what the others didn't. The land gets naturally tilled and fertilized, waste gets composted and crops get rotated so that no outside sources of fertilizer is required. And there seems to be a certain amount of magic attached, or rather, a sense of the Divine really, based in the idea of the energy of the land and the beings on it being inter-connected.

"Preparations" are also used, for example, a cow's horn full of the manure of the cow could be buried in the garden for winter and then the composted contents spread in spring to infuse the whole area with its energy. When planting seeds, a farmer could put each seed in her mouth before planting (a little hard with tiny ones like for herbs and carrots!) to infuse it with the energetic connection that will make that food the healthiest for her to consume. A cross of manure or compost placed in a certain location on the farm where there are energy lines could impart its nutrients miraculously throughout the property rather than having to be spread on every bed of plants.

It is a system, if it can even be called that, that involves respect for the natural earth energies as well as the natural inter-conenctedness of all beings and life cycles. It respects and honours the local ecosystems. Edward and I had the pleasure and honour of being able to join a group to visit and tour the farm of Charles Hubbard in Colchester County, Nova Scotia, a couple of years ago, where biodynamics is practiced at a high level, with all those factors mentioned above, along with things like building pyramid-shaped greenhouses and even open pyramids of copper tubing to conduct energy to the plants beneath. Apparently everything grows amazingly well on this land. It is a sacred space.

Last year we planted by the calendar and moon phases whenever possible and certainly seeds sprouted really really quicky and grew well! If only we hadn't had a June and July full of rain and fog and cloud we might have had a stellar crop of tomatoes along with the other things that did grow well...actually most things grew well, just didn't have enough sun time to ripen as they should have. This was our advisory to build a bigger greenhouse this year, just in case, and to extend our season.
So rumour has it we're in for hot and dry this summer. Certainly it is still dry, relatively speaking, which while good for lavender, may not be good for the well if we have to water everything else.

And while we don't have livestock other than the chickens, we will use what we can on the land to self-fertilize. We have the chicken poop pile, along with our own kitchen scrap compost, augmented by the buckets of coffee grounds we've been bringing home all winter from the Wildwood Cafe in Bridgewater. We plan to harvest some seaweed and make seaweed tea and integrate some into the beds. (I guess technically that would not be biodynamic unless we actually lived at the seashore...)

We have had our property doused for energy lines, not specifically for where to put a cross of manure to send its energies outward across the property, but we have incorporated some gardens using sacred geometry, some spirals (more or less based on the Golden Mean), an octagonal garden containing a pentagram (star) and we built a medicine wheel garden, honouring the four directions, which has a cross of paths running north south and east west, near to an energy vortex. So we will see what all that brings to our land this year! We built those gardens last year to reclaim an area we had called "the Wasteland", a former logging yard that was hard-scrabble, compacted land.

If you wish to learn more about biodynamics, other than Googling it, you can order the Stella Natura calendar by contacting info@stellanatura.com or looking at   the Stella Natura website. Or if you are in the Bridgewater area you might be able to still buy one at Helping Nature Heal.
For information on the work of biodynamic farmer Charles Hubbard and to obtain his book, check out http://www.sacredstewardship.net

Tending the land is, as Charles' web site name suggests, sacred stewardship. Edward and I certainly regard our role here on this property as a stewardship role. When I bemoan the abuse that this piece of land had formerly suffered the message comes through that that is precisely why we are here now, not to inherit something already perfect, but to steward this place back to natural health and vibrancy and a sense of sacredness. We do what we can and we honour and enjoy this creative opportunity to regenerate both the land and ourselves in the process.