Sick Veg 100

Twenty years ago at my blog WOEBOT, in December 2005, I made a list of 100 records.

 

For a couple of years I've been planning a 100 for the Sick Veg blog, but this time of non-fiction books. I first thought I would do it for Christmas - but I've had a little time free - so think of it as an early Christmas present. You're welcome.

 

This moment has arrived because I'm clearing my decks. Last week I finally got to the bottom of my pile of non-fiction books. I can date the start of this reading process with accuracy to 15th April 2017 when I ordered a copy of Theodore Roszak's "The Making of a Counterculture" and begun the research on "Retreat". Since that date, eight and a half years ago, I must have read close to two thousand books. One book lead to another - in most cases because it referred to another book that I ended up investigating - until the process felt complete...

 

The books themselves were not expensive, and it'd be inaccurate to think of this as an exercise in bibliophilia, with me showing off my valuable possessions. I was almost entirely concerned with their content. The real cost was the hours I spent reading when I might have been doing other things.

 

The books here are all ones which made a big impression on me, usually because the ideas they convey are luminous. I've broken down the one hundred I've chosen into the following categories: History, Psychoanalysis, Eastern Philosophy, Tibet, Philosophy, Beat, Theodore Roszak, Self-sufficiency, Acid, Anti-Psychiatry, Communes, Agriculture, Permaculture, Anthropology, and Self-help.

 

Strictly non-fiction, the list obviously doesn't include books of poetry (William Blake, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg) or fiction (Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Herman Hesse, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Phillip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon). But also not writing on music (Simon Reynolds, Lester Bangs, David Toop), on artists (William Blake, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Van Gogh, Edward Bawden, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Crumb, Moebius, Basquiat, Keith Haring, Brian Bolland, Yayoi Kusama), or practical growing (Eliot Coleman, Charles Dowding, John Jeavons).

 

Collected together I see these one hundred non-fiction books as the ultimate progressive "Behaviour Change" curriculum.

 

Eliot Coleman: "The Self-Fed Farm"

 

 

Great interview with Eliot Coleman at The Real Organic Project for his new book, "The Self-Fed Farm."

 

Coleman argues that vegetable growers can effectively generate their soil fertility with Green Manures.

 

To the layman, the city-dweller, this sounds like obscure, agricultural jargon. Eyes roll. Why should anyone care about this?

 

Because it's so totally critical, let me break it down for you:

 

1) Everyone survives by eating food.

 

2) While it is perfectly possible to survive by just eating plants, of course, the meat that is eaten is first fed on plants we grow.

 

3) Growing vegetable and grains is extractive. So if we want to keep eating food, and, er, living... we have to engineer properly sustainable ways of making a contribution back to that fertility. This is what Sir Albert Howard called "The Law of Return."

 

4) Industrial agricultural systems cheat the replacement of macro-nutrients (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium) by importing them to the growing site at great expense to the farmer and the environment. As for micro-nutrients - they usually don't even bother providing them for the soil, which leads to a reduction in their presence in the food we eat that these Industrial systems produce.

 

5) Other agricultural systems also import fertility to the farm. This includes Organic as well as Regenerative (for which there is no legal framework and is basically a free-for-all). With Organic this can be animal manures or other organic matter which feeds the soil microbiology.

 

6) Eliot Coleman and a few other innovative Organic farmers argue that, rather than importing this Organic matter to the farm, it is possible to grow plants called Green Manures. These can be legumes like clover, vetch, alfalfa, and peas, or non-legumes such as mustard, rye, buckwheat, and phacelia. If these plants are grown in a farmer's rotation, and then chopped down into the top four inches of topsoil (not deep digging which would damage the soil), they can provide all the fertility that the soil requires. Furthermore, as the Green Manures break down on the surface they produce carbonic acid which etches valuable minerals out of stone in the top and subsoil.

 

It's a system as elegant as it is brilliant. Not a new idea, but one which needs all the publicity it can get. It has been elbowed to one side by not just Industrial agriculture, but also Regenerative agriculture. The latter, with its emphasis on No Till, to the delight of herbicide manufacturers who can keep on selling Glyphosate to farmers, has vetoed even the minimal tillage that the system Coleman describes requires.

Finding Lights in a Dark Age.

 I've absolutely loved Chris Smaje's previous two books.

Smaje has been locked in life-or-death tussle with the journalist George Monbiot - bravely articulating what many of us think about Monbiot's celebration of lab food. Monbiot here is reduced to a very brief cameo - somewhat like a pantomime baddy; mercifully diminished.

"Finding Lights in a Dark Age" is, instead, a much more personal book. Smaje draws on his experience of the realities of managing land and market gardening. I laughed when he said he has been described locally as "not really a farmer" because it highlights the sclerotic attitudes of conventional farming and the countryside's too-common snobbery.

Bang up-to-date with the latest academic and sociological perspectives, the book nevertheless falls into the grand tradition of radical self-sufficiency. One could be reading Scott and Helen Nearing or John Seymour.

J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World" gets a very welcome mention and a highlight for me was the epic chapter twelve in which Smaje renders a genuinely excellent "Soi-Fi" projection of life in the South of England in the coming Dark Age he has conceptualised throughout the proceeding book. I'd read a whole book of that.

John Seymour: The Self-Sufficient Gardener

 

 

Just when I thought I had read all the books by John Seymour that were pertinent to me I came across another. "The Self-Sufficient Gardener", which I should have discovered sooner, was referred to in Paul A.Lee's "There is a Garden in the Mind" - his memoir of Alan Chadwick and the Organic Movement in California.

 

Published in 1978, two years after "The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency" (1976), this is a sequel to that classic. My hunch, no more than that, is that this will have been commissioned by the publisher Dorling Kindersley. John Seymour was an expert in growing vegetables, but from reading his other books I suspect that (a) he preferred the larger canvas of the farm, (b) his wife Sally, a remarkable lady who has recently passed away, was the true authority when it came to the art.

 

This is still an excellent book. I was very pleased to discover many references to Alan Chadwick within it. Seymour, like his friend Fritz "Small is Beautiful" Schumacher held Chadwick and his ideas in the highest esteem. He refers to Chadwick's "raised beds" as "deep beds"; and "double-digging" as the creation of "bastard trenches". This might be Seymour's translation of the original terms from French Intensive market-gardening from whence these concepts originated. I was especially delighted to read Seymour referring to Chadwick's disciple John Jeavons who I interviewed for "The Garden."

 

 

 

Worth the price of entry alone are the exquisite colour illustrations of fruit and vegetables the illustrator of which, sadly, is not credited.

 

 

When I interviewed Seymour's daughter Anne in 2023 she mentioned Tao Wimbush and the nearby Lammas Commune and I included this in the book. My curiosity piqued, this summer I visited Lammas in South West Wales on one of their rare open days and swapped books with Tao himself. His story of the commune's foundation, the pioneering example of Wales' stringent "One Planet Development", is a rollicking good read.

 

 

Subsequent to our meeting Tao made a video which doffs its hat to Seymour and the era which I chronicled in "The Garden". Check out some of their other videos too. Tao is a true rebel. 

 

Nature is One and Indivisible.

 

 

You'd have to have a hard heart not to chuckle at F.C. King's name. And this IS Sick Veg after all.

 

I was delighted to find a cheap copy of this slender classic from 1951. I have restored it with a replica printed dust jacket. It was written in his capacity as the head gardener at Levens Hall in Kendall in Cumbria. King met Sir Albert when Howard was evacuated from his home in Blackheath, London in wartime 1940 to Heversham, just a mile away. As a result the text is topped and tailed by Howard.

John Harrison of "The Allotment Garden" says,

"Levens Hall’s ten acres of gardens date back to 1690s including the world’s oldest topiary gardens. Even though the days of estate gardens were fading following the First World War, being Head Gardener of something like Levens Hall was a very prestigious position."

I'd heard of King before but first came across the book when it was mentioned approvingly in Joseph A Cocannouer's "Weeds: Guardians of the Soil" (another classic). This is because King took an astonishingly progressive view of weeds,

"Everything in Nature has a definite place and it is our duty, as gardeners, to find a much better use for weeds in future than we have done in the past. Frequently I am amused at the amount of sympathy I receive from visitors when they see my weed crops. It is difficult to convince them that I deliberately encourage such growth on any piece of ground not immediately requiring food production..."

And he explains a number of advantages to their cultivation.

King, a compost evangelist, while not entirely a proponent of No Dig, says of compost that he did "not advocate digging it deeply into the ground. The best results I have obtained by its use have been on plots where it was kept reasonably near the surface."

Most bracing is his belief in the need to return organic matter from the city back to the countryside,

"For too many years townsmen and countrymen have tried to exist in a state of complete divorce the one from the other. Such a condition is wrong from every point of view. A campaign to educate the town-dwellers in their duty towards the land which is their heritage and from which they spring is long overdue."

The opening line touches a cosmic note in accord with my book, "The Garden". It starts, "Nature is one and indivisible..."

Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture

 

A clean version of the presentation I gave at Capel Manor College, Groundswell, Green Gathering, and The Organic Growers Gathering.

Winding things up

I recently harvested my tomato crop and turned it into chutney.

It seemed like a good moment to reflect on four years of growing.

Whole Earth Discipline

 

I’ve mentioned it before that one of the quirks of researching history is that you are usually only presented with information which draws you further into the past. Sometimes it is possible to be unaware of more recent events and discourse. This is how I belatedly encountered things such as the “Zig Zag Zen” book, a landmark retrospective survey of Psychedelics and Buddhism, and the phenomenon of Cuba’s organic agricultural revolution. And it’s always a surprise!

However, even as I went deep into the connection between the Whole Earth Catalog and radical agriculture, I was aware of the significance of Stewart Brand’s more recent ecological thinking, as well as his late sixties and early seventies activities which I chronicled. That’s because of Brand’s well-known support for nuclear power, and the influence his example of reframing ecological problems has lent to George Monbiot’s position on land sparing and lab meat. Furthermore, Brand’s example must have inspired Bill “Greenfinger” Gates’ own interventions.

Stewart Brand became famous in the sixties for his role at the Trips Festival (1966), and conceiving of the badge which asked, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” This prompted NASA to create just that. Brand was instrumental in setting up the Whole Earth Catalog to give his colleagues, who were heading back-to-the land, access to information.

Even before his more recent breaks with the traditional ecology movement, Brand had increasingly less sympathy with the back-to-the-land movement that he supported with the information in the Whole Earth Catalog. Although he frames this difference in absolute philosophical terms, I think it might be one more of temperament. I believe the urbane Brand simply felt more comfortable in the town, and doesn’t understand the perspective of people who profess to enjoy working the land. Rather than acknowledge the difference in that lifestyle choice, and come to terms with his own preferences, he may have sought to position himself as correct in his own choices. For all his apples, I suspect George Monbiot, who has been openly critical of what he has called “neo-peasant bullshit” might be another example of this. It seems it is harder to admit something is not your cup of tea than acknowledge that your chosen lifestyle is, on those terms, out of kilter.

OK, so this is a book review that’s 16 years late, but I think it’s important to circle back and examine the evolution of Brand’s thinking here, as one might comb one’s hair repeatedly, because I sense these locks are knotted, and the bearing on the evolution of our collective thought is evidently at stake.

Brand’s influential book “Whole Earth Discipline” (2009) introduced controversial ideas into the ecological debate. Rather than a Green manifesto, this was as he described it, a Turquoise one, responsible in no small respect for creating a turquoise sensibility. As much as I found myself disagreeing with it, it’s an interesting and thought-provoking read. There’s quite a lot of what Brand says that I don’t mind. Here are the big three topics in the book:

(1) That human society is much better and more efficiently served by living in cities.

I don’t particularly mind the idea that it is more ecological to live in cities. It is probably my own personal preference too. And I like the idea of greening-up cities also. It’s only one example but I remember as a child being driven endlessly around the countryside. Most people in the countryside drive everywhere, and all the time. However, that and other arguments against living in the country are largely to do with how it is currently arranged. People should be encouraged to go back to the land if they want to. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but if more people were prepared to do it, and set about it intelligently like in Wales’s stringent One Planet Development framework, the evidence shows that within the context of biological agriculture it could greatly enhance productivity.

Tied up with this is the idea of land sparing – over land sharing. Brand prefers the idea of spared land in the form of wilderness areas (he uses the examples of the area around the Soviet reactor which melted down in Chernobyl, and the corridor between North and South Korea), as opposed to shared land (which “sparers” generally envision only as land farmed with industrial agricultural techniques). This is even enshrined at policy level in the UK where subsidies don’t benefit ecological agriculture; only either leaving land alone or farming it chemically. However, in direct conflict with his position on sparing land, Brand celebrates native population’s careful management, cultivation, and shepherding of nature. Here he cites the Indians of California. So, which is it?

There’s no getting away from the fact that agriculture is extractive, but well-managed it can increase biodiversity and, it is coherently argued, can even sequester carbon.

(2) That Nuclear power ought to be embraced by the green movement.

I don’t mind this so much either. It makes sense in the developed world. But not so much in the developing one. One thing that I didn’t feel was emphasised enough in “Whole Earth Discipline” was the fact that energy use needs to be radically reduced. Brand takes the perspective that society’s energy needs to be generated without elevating carbon dioxide with little thought of behaviour change. What’s missing here is David Holmgren’s idea of “Descent”, the necessity of everyone using less energy, and the benefits of that initially painful adjustment.

(3) That genetic engineering ought to be welcomed by Greens.

This is where I really diverge with his thinking. Brand thinks that Genetic Engineering is the natural bedfellow of organic agriculture. He sets about describing how plants are all already, by processes not involving gene splicing and the like, genetically engineered. He describes maize being cultivated from a Teosinte grass as a miracle. OK, the argument runs – that process took thousands of years – but nevertheless it was a miracle of genetic engineering achieved without CRISPR. Methods of creating cultivars without recourse to these techniques are already so sophisticated (noting recent innovations like Corteva’s drought-resistant wheat) that it is arguable that these gene processes are risky and basically unnecessary.

I don’t believe it’s any coincidence at all that GE crops are, like they were in the Green Revolution, strictly the bedfellows of industrial agriculture with its chemical fertilisers, herbicides, and massive destructive irrigation schemes. The problem here is the celebration of reductionist science over the strawman of purism. What we need to be celebrating is science which is mature, and therefore by definition holistic. Again, it comes down to confusing not shiny progressive science with luddite rusticism, but bad management with good.

---

There’s a lot to love about Brand’s book though. Obviously not the dreaded chemtrails, but some of the geo-engineering ideas sound, well, fun! Like many of the counterculture, Brand who started on his odyssey in the sixties fascinated by the American Indians, loves the idea of the Inca’s Terra Preta, today’s Biochar. He also cites John Latham’s idea to brighten the albedo of the earth by adding more water droplets to the stratocumulus clouds that cover a third of the oceans, and John Martin’s plans to seed the oceans with iron filings to increase phytoplankton which would die off and sequester carbon. No doubt people will be horrified by these latter two, but they felt OK to me.

I also remember vividly that my hero Masanobu Fukuoka had no problem at all with plants being grown in zones they had previously not been – and was therefore totally enchanted by the idea of Josh Donlan’s, which Brand cites, of introducing surrogate replacements of big mammals to the North American ecosystem: cheetahs, lions, and elephants. Bring it on!

Zig Zag Zen

 

My research for “Retreat” was pretty exhaustive, however one thing you find researching a particular era is that all the references within books and among the rest of the material (interviews, articles, documentaries etc) only relate to then-contemporary or historic writing. So while it’s natural that research will lead you further into the past, it’s harder to discover more recent things which might be relevant to you.

In writing “The Garden” the case in point was the Cuban urban organic growing revolution which happened in the early nineties with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with its horto intensivos and Organopónicos. It wasn’t that I missed it out of the book where it should have been included – it wasn’t countercultural as such, but the phenomenon was so fascinating within the context of “The Garden” that I had to double-take when I first came across it. I’m sure all the countercultural growers and farmers I interviewed would, in the nineties, have been incredibly excited about it. But no one ever mentioned it to me!

So, there are things that one misses out… And this book “Zig Zag Zen” first published in 2002, and then updated in 2015, was definitely one of them. It looks at the interface between Buddhism and psychedelics, most explicitly against the background of the counterculture. I read it with bated breath, nervous that I was going to have missed something significant out of my own history, and was genuinely relieved that I hadn’t. I had read Rick Fields’ book “How the Swans Came to the Lake” (1992) but Fields’ excellent and entertaining article “A High History of Buddhism in America” comtained within "Zig Zag Zen" is one of the neatest historical summaries I’ve read of the confluence.

 

Trungpa.

Throughout the book, there are a lot of mentions of Chögyam Trungpa which didn’t surprise me, but was nevertheless good to see. Someone I hadn’t come across was Neem Karoli Baba’s student, the controversial Lama Surya Das. L.S.D, geddit? If there’s one omission it would be him, but the beloved Bhagavan Das, who I did discuss and interview, is a more significant character from the same niche.

Besides Fields’, the other strong article was an interview with Terence McKenna. McKenna is a magnetic personality and a very powerful orator, but what I’ve read of his writing, “Food of the Gods” (1999) is nonsense. Maybe because this article is a transcribed interview with Allan Badiner (Zig Zag Zen’s compiler), and flows with McKenna’s diction, it’s much more coherent.

What might be the most commonly acknowledged role of psychedelics is as a waystation. Alan Watts puts it, “many of us who have experimented with psychedelic chemicals have left them behind, like the raft which you use to cross a river…” McKenna summarises his own position in the interview that, “Psychedelics give people the power to overcome habitual behaviours.” He wanted to see this combined with the compassion of Buddhism, “Buddhism and psychedelics are together probably the best hope we have for an antidote to egotism and materialism.”

I wrote “Retreat” in what was the summer of the psychedelic renaissance. Michael Pollen’s book “How to Change Your Mind” (2018), probably the high-watermark of the enthusiasm, came out somewhere in the middle of my research. If you’ve read it, you will know that my chunky little book pulls no punches in what is a brutal depiction of the aftermath of psychedelics in the sixties. The book could not have been much more negative about psychedelics, and especially the power-play around it.

I remember the distaste with which this presentation “Psilocybin & LSD: Lessons from the Counterculture” was received the first time I gave it to the Psychedelic Society. And at least two people who I had approached with “Retreat”, who I now notice are contributors to “Zig Zag Zen”, went from initial interest in “Retreat” to frostiness and anger upon reading it.

However, and I take no pleasure in this, in the five years since the book came out in 2020, when I haven’t been much preoccupied by psychedelics, there have been a depressing litany of abuse and scandals associated with them. There’s been a lot of coverage of this, and I don’t feel like adding to the censure, so google it if you are curious. The major culminating event might have been the FDA rejecting MAPS bid to legitimise MDMA-assisted therapy.

In retrospect, what’s cool about “Zig Zag Zen” is the surprisingly open platform it gives to a lot of psychedelic sceptics. There is an extensive refutation of the drugs’ importance in an interview with Esalen’s Michael Murphy (who is chaperoned by his friend George Leonard), and a very powerful essay by recovering marijuana addict China Galland, in which she concludes as she avoids an ayahuasca ceremony, “I did not go to the jungle.” My favourite essay, however, is by Zen Buddhist Brad Warner, who I have only just discovered, and, a fellow nerd, am greatly appreciating.

In “Retreat” I took the angle that it was the process of the subject’s descent from the etheric heights that mattered; what Jack Kornfield describes as “the laundry.” This grounding, or alignment, in the process of descent constitutes the real “learning”. These lessons are not impossible, but harder, to glean from the quick comedown of psychedelics. Whether more likely to be grasped coming down from the spiritual high, or harder to learn from the psychedelic experience, this lesson might be described as a more-willing readiness to accept existence for what it is – with less compulsion, even, to go clambering up further mountains: “I have seen the peaks, thank you. There is a great deal which needs accomplishing in the valley.”

…unlike the tourist who will comfortably get back into the cabin and be delivered again to the valley, for the mountaineer (like Jung for instance) the return journey is fraught. Gone is the adrenaline that swept him to the summit, his rations are exhausted, the sun has begun to set, and the weather has closed in. It is raining. He may have figured out the path to the top slowly over a long period of time from the comfort of the valley, possibly even trying a number of routes before finally reaching the peak. To avoid becoming a statistic, the mountaineer will need to rally all their human resources to find their way down in the dark alive.

Me “Retreat” p 105.

What I didn’t know writing that passage was that a study in 2017, by Dr Martin Faulhaber at the University of Innsbruck of mountain climbing in the Austrian Alps, revealed that the most common cause of accident when climbing is falling, and that 75% of falls happen on the descent.

Just like I did, Brad Warner used the same analogy of the trip being like a helicopter ride to the top of the mountain. But his angle is slightly different. He says:

To a mountain climber, the goal is not the moment of sitting on top enjoying the view. That’s just one small part of the experience. It may not even be the best part. To a mountain climber, every view, from every point on the mountain is significant and wonderful. People who think that the pinnacle of the experience is that moment of being right on the tippy-top, don’t understand the experience at all.

Brad Warner “Zig Zag Zen” p182.

Brad’s big takeaway is that what Buddhist practice is about: “Learning to wake up by yourself.” He argues that you can’t just take “medicine” to achieve that.

Jay Stevens (1953–2025)

 

Jay Stevens in his kitchen in Vermont in 2022.

For the past seven years, since 2018, my world has been dominated by work on the two books Retreat (2020) and The Garden (2025). There have been other projects during this time, the comic book TPM (2022) and my book about spirituality in alternative music, The “S” Word (2022), but these were essentially accompanying volumes to the big two.

Not everyone I met I ended up interviewing or being part of the fabric of these books: most notably, one particularly special person, Jay Stevens, who to my eternal sadness died of a heart attack with brutal abruptness this February 2025.

Storming Heaven.

I first contacted Jay out of the blue in 2018 when I was writing Retreat. I was searching for contacts, and wanted his advice. Jay’s book Storming Heaven (1988) is, without a shadow of a doubt, the very best book about LSD. I think it’s also one of the very best books ever. There can be only two or three books I have ever bothered to read twice, this is because, in its pages, Jay touched upon the fundamental nature of reality, on the very fabric of the universe itself. Jay was an incredibly perceptive, startlingly intelligent, and highly sensitive individual. And enchantingly modest to boot.

After giving me some excellent advice, we stayed in touch. Jay was passing through London on a trip to Europe in 2022, and we met for lunch on Old Street. I told him what I was working on as a sequel to Retreat, and Jay came up with some great insights that were helpful with The Garden, the most important of which was hipping me to the New Alchemy Institute and the Green Machines. I had never heard of them and their work. Jay, whose family had farmed for decades in Vermont, instantly understood how radical agriculture connected together with the counterculture when I pitched my idea to him. That was a massive encouragement to me, as was his very generous contribution of an endorsement to the book.

Yurt with Jay’s trailer loaded with books visible.

One of Jay’s collection of indigenous artwork.

When I was passing through Vermont in 2023 he put me up for a night in the yurt in the garden and regaled me with wonderful stories of Rudolf Steiner, his brush with Bernie Sanders, time spent with Stephen and Ina May Gaskin, and Vermont’s period as a rebel republic.

Moonlight in Vermont.

In the yurt.

In 2024, Jay and his lovely wife Sara came for dinner with us at home on Old Street, and it really felt that we now knew each other well. Jay and Mrs Ingram talked art history together. I was looking forward to many years of his sparkling company. That wasn’t to be.

Drumming at the Edge of Magic.

When I interviewed Dave Chapman of the Real Organic Project who is based just 15 minutes up the road from Jay in Vermont, he mentioned that his wife was a huge fan of Jay’s other notable book Drumming at the Edge of Magic (1990). Despite being a music nerd I had never read this. After learning of his death, when I had dried my tears, I resolved I would find a copy and see what I had been missing.

And damn, Stevens writes like an absolute angel here, too. Once again, the research is very deep. The contributions he martialled from Zakir Hussain, Olatunjii, and Airto Moiera combine so well with the Ethnomusicological information on drumming and shamanism, and the colourful touches of Mickey Hart’s own life. It is one of the great cosmic books about music, up there with David Toop’s Ocean of Sound (1995).

But of course, I was looking out for signs of my friend and his elegant turns of phrase. When I read the following, “The Yoruba say that anyone who does something so great that he or she can never be forgotten has become an Orisha.” – and I thought of Jay himself. It was very moving to me that the book’s epilogue is about Jay, who Mickey Hart refers to as “the last dancer” and “the prince of words.” May he rest in peace.

Munch’s Garden

   

Mrs. Ingram and Celyn Brazier’s “Munch is Missing” is a total delight, a veritable banquet. The work involved in creating these books is mind-blowing.

Commissioned by the MUNCH Museum in Oslo, Catherine went to exhaustive ends researching Munch and the cosmos which has woven itself around his art and ideas; even traveling to Norway to trace the artist’s steps.

She painstakingly devised these concepts and blocked out these layouts, which Brazier has rendered into exquisite and iridescent dioramas.

There’s way too much to mention, but I have a personal attachment to “Munch’s Garden.” Munch grew his own vegetables and canvassed for people to eat more veg.

Here at the first page is macrobiotic pioneer George Ohsawa eating a bowl of brown rice sitting atop a mushroom; beside him is vegetarian Sun Ra. There’s Paul and Linda with a friendly ram. Look at vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson… and attending one of Bergson’s lectures, George Bernard Shaw accompanied by one of the ladies with fruit laden hats who flocked to hear the great French philosopher.

There’s vegetarian Philip Glass, Chuck Close’s portrait of him in the style of Arcimboldo. Jane Goodall and Nico in a bananadrama. And Mahatma Gandhi!

And who is that hiding naked in the bushes?

Gravetye Manor

 

To visit William Robinson’s oval vegetable garden at Gravetye Manor, we had to eat an expensive lunch, because the hotel that runs the site doesn’t let people wander around otherwise.

I think that, probably without question, this is the most important historic vegetable garden in the UK. Robinson (1838-1935), who reacted against the artificiality and strictures [edit: and impracticality…] of pompous Victorian gardens, developed his idea of the “Wild Garden”.

And there was room in his vision for more than ornamental horticulture. Robinson loved trees, and with this oval vegetable garden he showed how important growing food was to him also. Think of him, therefore, as one of the great horticultural rebels alongside the likes of Masanobu Fukuoka and Eliot Coleman. The garden is kept in rude health by head gardener Tom Coward – and provides an abundance of vegetables for the hotel.

Save Soil Interview

Sadhguru's Save Soil Article.

Interview with Matthew Ingram - Author of 'The Garden'

Apr 23, 2025

Save Soil was delighted to speak to Matthew Ingram about his fascinating new book, “The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture”. The book explores the transformative journey of the 1970s countercultural farmers and growers whose radical practices redefined how we grow and eat today. He has interviewed Save Soil founder Sadhguru for the book, which is available online via Amazon.

In this fascinating interview, we discover his motivation for writing the book, and insights he gleaned into connections between soil, spirit and society.

 

Matthew, what inspired you to write the garden, and what was your motivation for getting started in this project?

Well, the previous book I wrote, called ‘Retreat’ was about health and counterculture, [exploring] the health modalities that happened in the hippie era. So things like macrobiotic food, transcendental meditation, LSD, psychiatry, those kinds of things. There’s a big dose of Eastern philosophy in that, and I ended up following the guy who coined the term ‘counterculture’ called Theodore Roszak. He went on to coin something called ‘Eco-Psychology’, which is a reasonably well known kind of discipline now, relating to health and well being and how that relates to the environment. I started reading into that, and then immediately I came across growing and farming. So it seemed like it was a natural route out from the health thing. 

The Garden is chronicling individuals, some of whom don’t come from farming backgrounds, but in some ways changed agriculture, or how many people see agriculture. Did you feel there was a core internal driver that was consistent across the people featured in your book?

It’s interesting, because almost all of the people that I talked to weren't from agricultural backgrounds, and they all got involved in it for philosophical reasons, or reasons of rebellion or spiritual reasons. It was quite unusual that, for instance, Patrick Holden (CBE, founder of the U.K. The Sustainable Food Trust and U.S. Sustainable Food Alliance), who I spoke to, became a follower of Gurdjieff (20th Century Mystic and Spiritual teacher born in Russia). Then someone like David Holmgren, who is the guy who coined the term ‘permaculture’ and the permaculture co-originator - he had psychedelic experiences that influenced him. Eliot Coleman (American farmer and proponent of organic farming) is another good example. He came at it through outdoor sports. He was an Olympic canoeist, whitewater rapid canoeist, and he was just interested in being in the outdoors. But there's this kind of underlying idea of health and well being, ecological well being and spiritual ideas were a common thread through all of them. I was thinking, that's great! 

Within those kinds of ideas, are there specific insights that helped frame the kind of narrative of the progress, or in particular that stood out to you, or inspired you?

Absolutely, there is something that's consistently picked up by even the founders of this kind of era or you might say movement, like Rudolf Steiner (Austrian social reformer and esotericist), Masanobu Fukuoka (Japanese farmer and philosopher), and someone like Lady Eve Balfour (British organic farmer and co-founder of the Soil Association). They're all coming to ideas, I would say, through Eastern philosophy of ‘holism’. So, thinking of ourselves and our actions as related to the environment and everything being interconnected. These are fundamental  ideas in Buddhism, the Vedas and Taoism. These ideas came from the east to west through conduits like Herman Hesse (German-Swiss poet and novelist) and the visiting gurus like Mahesh Maharishi Yogi and Prabhupada. And so that idea of holism, and it's something I know that Sadhguru talks about, when he says your pulmonary system is out there hanging on a tree, which is his way of expressing it. That has led people to think, well, what am I eating? How am I making my food? How can I do that in the sort of way that's dharmic, or that embodies right livelihood.

That's wonderful. In our context with Save Soil, Sadhguru relates soil degradation very much to both mental and physical well being. He says that one reason why we’re seeing a global mental health crisis is because we're not getting enough nutrients or micronutrients in our food.

That’s very true. Our environments are degraded. Wendell Berry, who's an interesting American writer, says that the growing alienation from farming as an activity has a root cause behind mental ill health, in the sense that people are not used to physical labor, and that therefore they're not as hardy emotionally.

Perhaps then moving on to a more practical question - a lot of the people in your book have very kind of powerful ideals, or approaches to farming. Are there particular practical hurdles that really stuck out to you that they were encountering when they were trying to manifest these ideals on the ground?

Great question. I mean, the one that immediately springs to mind is how the Hare Krishna movement have adapted dairy farming. People take it for granted in the West, they'll say, “I'm a vegetarian, but I have cheese and milk and butter” - obviously that necessitates killing male calves to make the cow lactate to produce milk. And so the Hare Krishna farms have developed - I think it's a traditional Indian way of doing it - but they brought over with them to the west very careful management of the relationship between the mother and the calves, so that you didn't have to kill a calf. So that's one example of how the spiritual ideas mapped onto a reality. Another very good one would be Masanobu Fukuoka, his Buddhist-influenced idea of ‘do nothing farming’ was actually quite a lot of hard work, his idea of do nothing farming, but implied not tilling and instead using mulches. So that was another practical idea that grew out of a philosophy.

Conventional farming is obviously very profit driven, and we could say success is measured by yield and profit. How did some of the counterculture figures and farmers that you were exploring define success? Was it perhaps more measured by biodiversity, or soil vitality, or community resilience - perhaps personal growth?

These are really, very genuinely interesting questions, and not put to me before. I think that there was an emphasis on self sufficiency. For instance, in something like The Farm in Tennessee (a large community of families and friends living on three square miles in southern middle Tennessee, founded on the principles of nonviolence and respect for the earth), which was this mega commune, the role of the farming was to feed the community. I think it was a 1500 strong population at some point, so it involved a massive amount of food farming. What came through organic pioneers - people like Elliot Coleman would see success is feeding their community. But success could also be defined as sustainability - so not destroying the soil, not taking everything out of it. This idea of the Sustainable Food Trust, which is Patrick Holden's brainchild is leaving the land in good health, having something to pass on, and not just stripping all its assets.

Patrick Holden spoke at one of our panel discussions at the Save Soil pavilion at COP 29. Really wonderful work. For the next question Matthew, beyond the kind of historical narrative that you explore throughout the book, how has researching and writing the garden personally impacted your own connection to food or the land or even spirituality?

Well, my previous book (Retreat) tracked what I describe as the ‘etheric counterculture’ - the use of psychedelic drugs and transcendental meditation - things were very much geared towards being “disintegrated”, in a sense. I think that in a way, the experience of writing that first book and subsequently of writing ‘The Garden’ matches the experience of that generation where they all went very far out, and needed to come back to earth. In 1969 there was this big movement back to the land, and in spiritual terms, it was all about grounding. It was about needing to get connected again, that they’ve been very abstract and etheric, and needed now to get integrated. And so I think that my journey through reading and researching and meeting these people followed that same course. I started gardening on my roof garden, and also visiting a lot of farms, spending time in the countryside. In a way my journey has been a journey of integration. That's why it's so interesting to read Sadhguru’s work, and to come across him, because although he frames himself within the very etheric Vedic tradition, he actually has a lot of currents in his thinking that are very integrated. So he's a very interesting figure for me.


There's such a breadth of different ideas and perspectives and origins of the kind of characters in the book. Do you think there was one particular method, figure, or practice that has come from the counterculture and made the large impact on how we see modern farming or food systems?

Yeah, well, the really dominant thing is permaculture. It's not widely appreciated that David Holmgren, who originated the idea with Bill Molison, was 100% counterculture. How I kind of summarize Permaculture is that it’s about ‘harmonizing efficiencies’. An example is saying, “we've got too many slugs here”. The classic permaculture answer to that is, instead, “you haven't got enough ducks”. The best example of it is - do it the way nature works. Especially how a forest works. Everything is in harmony, working together and feeding on each other's systems and efficiencies. It owes so much to indigenous thinking, but also to Buddhist ideas of holism. I don't think people realize how much that even the word ‘Permaculture’ relates to counterculture

Jumping topics slightly, counter culture is not usually associated with an abundance of resources or necessarily with profit. Obviously farms need resources, and to take a concept to a large scale does take a certain level of resource and visibility. In our context, Sadhguru talks a lot about marrying economy and ecology, and how important it is that ecological solutions need to be economically viable to scale them up. How did the individuals you were looking at for your book approach the economics of their operations, and was there a particular economic model that was pioneered that you found interesting?

One of the one of the things that characterized that era (the early to mid 70s), was that the economics of growing your own food were actually quite good. Then in the Reagan / Thatcher era in the West, a whole generation found they were swimming against the tide. It wasn't economic any more, and so that's why a lot of these communes went bust. But in terms of access to assets and energy, the interesting innovation that the counterculture bought was to put more hands on the land,. You can run a small plot of land, with more labor and closer  management, with a much higher yield than you would otherwise. The model of chemical agriculture is one individual with a lot of machinery and chemicals managing 1000s of acres. But actually, if you reverse that and have more hands on the land, more people essentially interested in agriculture as a profession that is valued, you could have a much greater productivity. 

Furthermore, when you start planting for biodiversity, as Vandana Shiva often remarks, if you have the traditional Indian farm system with all these hundreds of different crops, you actually have much higher yields than if you're just doing rice or wheat. A big reference point of the book is this guy called E F Schumacher (British Statistician and Economist), who wrote this idea of Buddhist economics, which was, again, that same principle of tweaking the understanding of ‘value’, thinking more about sustainability, thinking more about labor and those kinds of ideas.

You just mentioned ‘Buddhist economics’, which perhaps is very particular to certain geographies. In your research, what were the similarities or differences in how different geographies impacted how these sustainable farming movements?

Pretty much every single one of the farming setups that I covered had an individuality to it, and I think it related to geography. So for instance, Patrick Holden started growing vegetables in Wales, but progressively moved more and more to dairy, because of the Welsh climate. But then sometimes the challenges are different. With The Farm, they had terrible soil. So, you know, they pioneered using green manure on a really large scale. In fact, that was larger than, for instance, the Rodale Institute was doing it (a non-profit organization that supports research into organic farming). So it's very different for all of them.

In our own work, something we hear about often from different experts is the immense variety in soil type. Agricultural practices have to be so tailored to the local landscape.

One of the things that did come through, looking at all these different systems, was Albert Howard's (English botanist and founder of the organic farming movement) idea of the “Law of Return” - the idea of bringing organic matter back to the land, which actually works in almost all of those scenarios. So even if you talk to a chemical farmer, and I happen to know some farmers from Gloucestershire in the UK who are chemical farmers - even they will respond to this idea of bringing more organic matter back to the land. It's probably the strongest universal principle that I came across.

Beautiful, that very ties in with our work with Save Soil. Our core ask of policy makers is to help establish policies and prioritize returning organic matter to soil, and maintaining a minimum level of organic matter in agricultural soils.

Well, I mean, that's got to be the absolute most important thing, and I've always admired that in your messaging.

A final question for you on that note, if there was one message or experience you wanted to leave readers with when reading your book?

Because I live on Old Street, in the middle of the City of London in the UK, one of the things that is obvious to me, having done all this research, is how alienated people are from the countryside and the ways of agriculture and the ways in which food is made. So if there was one thing, it’s to try to wear down that rural urban divide, and to encourage people to eat organically, or eat biologically grown food, or maybe try gardening themselves. Just to get in the mindset of it. I grow vegetables like potatoes and cabbages - it's not meaningful in scale - but it is a symbolic gesture. Those kinds of things, a bit of gardening, eating biological food, if you're in the city, just establishes that connection and that understanding.

JADAM Sulphur

This is my third and final JADAM post. Beyond JADAM’s pesticide and JADAM Microorganism Solution the third preparation which has appealed to me is JADAM Sulphur. or JS for short. JS claims to be “Effective against black spot, pear rust, powdery mildew, downy mildew, etc.” That’s to say as an “organic” herbicide treating fungal problems.

I don’t get much of this but what I do get I don’t like. Naturally I am doing what I can to make sure the soil health is as good as I can make it in containers, and that always needs to be one’s first step, but I need a little more help with these plants.

Here for instance is something which starts to affect my tiny apple tree’s leaves in spring, and by the summer has devoured the entire plant.

And here is a problem which affects the Acers in the back yard.

As you can see from Youngsang Cho’s video on YouTube the process of making JADAM Sulphur for oneself is a little bit fiddly and dangerous, but not prohibitively so.

It’s actually remarkable that one can perform the necessary chemistry at all. In the JADAM Organic Farming book Cho elaborates, “After nearly 100 experiments, I found the method to completely liquefy sulfur. I have still not forgotten the joy I felt that time. My small kitchen was my lab, it was around 3 a.m. that I knew I finally made it.” After further tweaks which meant that you didn’t need steel containers (the temperature gets very high) and the process could be done in plastic ones instead of immediately patenting his method Cho disclosed the knowledge.

However, in no circumstances will I need the 100 litres of concentrated JS that the recipe produces. Not even a fraction of that. To spray the plants I wanted I needed only 1 ml. That would be different if I had a market garden to deal with. So again, I used the JADAM concoction made by Dr Forest.

For one litre of solution (and this was 75cl) you need 10 ml of JWA.

I added to that 1 ml of Liquid Sulphur.

And sprayed it on my Japanese Maple and Amelanchier.

On another Japanese Maple and my Apple tree.

Maybe that will mean they stand a better chance this year? I feel optimistic! I took greater precautions this time when spraying. Wore rubber gloves and goggles. But I neglected to wear a face mask which was stupid. Even at this tiny concentration the Sulphur’s fumes are very strong. Today, the following day, one can still smell it. Last night there were absolutely no slugs whatsoever in the garden. That is uncanny. So perhaps they don’t like the smell either. That would be a bonus.

One final reflection. I thought that using JWA, the wetting agent, was supposed to mean that one doesn’t get droplets like these when one sprays. That’s evidently not working for here.

All told I have enjoyed following these three processes. However, I am neither totally convinced as to their efficacy, nor particularly enthusiastic about spraying chemicals like these in my garden. How these plants sprayed with JS fare in the coming months will be something of a litmus test for me.