It feels like something of a miracle that plants will grow through the winter. Certainly, because the temperature is lower, progress is slower. But check out these brassicas which I put out at the start of October.
I had to protect the soil with stones because the Black Cat started digging in there. This is definitely not something you could do at scale!
I was very annoyed to see some of them being nommed. I thought it might be snails, but nightly scopes revealed nothing. Then one afternoon I saw a greedy caterpillar curled up in plain sight at the centre of this plant. Not one of these guys, who I tolerated previously on my nasturtiums, but a Cabbage Looper. Grr.
Probably because of the cats, there are no birds who will venture into the roof garden and eat the caterpillars.
Recently I’ve sprayed them with some soap (Dr Forest’s Wetting Agent). I’m not sure if that will do any good. And in fact, think I will double back and spray with neem oil. However, one of the good things about winter is that pest pressure is much lower. All told, the plants are looking well.
There’s been a lot of support for RFK Jr from unusual quarters in recent weeks. A number of my acquaintances have expressed hopes for his potential role as director of the Department of Health and Human Services in the otherwise dreaded Trump administration.
RFK Jr is Democratic Party royalty. He’s the nephew of assassinated president John F. Kennedy, and son of the assassinated senator and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy. He ran an independent campaign for president, which was successful in swing states like Michigan but, to the disgust of his family, threw his weight behind Donald Trump. And he has bad form for choosing friends in the past too, hanging out with, at various times, Harvey Weinstein, OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, and Bill Cosby.
RFK Jr, to his chagrin, is mainly known as a COVID vaccine denier. He does temper this position when he’s scrutinised in public forums, claiming that he just wants to see proper trials for vaccines, but in more intimate surroundings it seems to be a different story. His involvement in a measles’ outbreak in Samoa LOOKS pretty bad.
I don’t have a problem with vaccines. I’ve travelled a lot in the developing world – and you get very blasé about taking them. I took three vaccinations for COVID. I did it out of social responsibility to protect vulnerable people in my household and community, but also (lol) so I could leave the UK on holiday. It didn’t do me any good because I subsequently tested positive for COVID twice. The first time I caught the virus, it was very bad. I was the most ill I have ever been. Whether I should or shouldn’t have taken the vaccine is immaterial to me. It didn’t really make any difference either way – but it was worth doing out of esprit de corps. This is nothing more than my personal opinion, but I don’t think vaccines, which have done modern societies an immeasurable service, pose significant risks.
What does pose significant risks to health? Diet. And diet, especially with regard to nutrition, connects us to farming, because biologically-grown food is more nutritious. And this is where it gets complicated because, even if you disagree with RFK Jr’s position on vaccines, he is simultaneously a staunch opponent of processed foods. Here, in a video with 4.3 million views, he is railing against food additives, singling out Tartrazine. Why on earth are food additives like this still allowed?
The platform he shares with Trump is deregulation: Trump for corrupt ends and to give tax breaks to the richest (speciously) in the name of growth; RFK Jr to support small businesses crushed by expensive bureaucracy. However, it’s ironic that the removal of additives from food is largely going to be one requiring… yup, that’s right… regulation. Indeed, he praises the previous Trump administration for making some additives illegal where the Democrats did nothing.
Even firebrand of the left, senator for Vermont (like being the MP for Brighton), Bernie Sanders has recently found common ground with RFK Jr in a shared focus upon obesity and diabetes. Overlooking processed meat and the absence of micronutrients in chemically-grown food, the true enemy, however, is not additives but something far simpler: sugar. Good luck regulating (or deregulating?) that! It’s closer to a society-wide addiction, a social problem like alcoholism, than anything to do with government.
As well as his interesting approach to foods, RFK Jr also has an impressive grasp of the arguments around organic farming. This is on display in this interview he undertakes with legendary progressive farmer Joel Salatin, the star of Michael Pollen’s landmark book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Salatin, a Republican, talks passionately about his ability to be able to compete with much larger organisations and to be able to leverage technology to reach markets which have been stifled by their local administrations. It is a strategy right out of the small-state play book.
I’ve got to admit that on the back of research I’ve been doing for the past three years, what RFK hints at sounds potentially very interesting. The problem with agriculture in the US and UK is that government subsidies, bolstered by the claim that food security is only possible under the aegis of chemical agriculture, have pumped money into supporting industrial farming. Truthfully, large farms do NOT farm their lands for profit, they farm the government for subsidies. A whole toxic architecture is held in place by these subsidies. This is the principal reason that organic food seems expensive. Yes, their removal would be cataclysmic if it happened quickly. We’ve come so far from the small-farm, local food model, that it’s almost inconceivable that we could turn the clock back. But the current status quo is still a nightmare on many fronts, not least ecologically.
Besides this call for a reduction in state regulation, RFK’s position feels like it ought to be a position taken by a Democrat – and his family background in the blue camp makes sense. However, equally, there is plenty of libertarian anarchism inherent in the idea of growing organic food. The fundamental principle is, after all, that a healthy undisturbed soil creates a healthy plant. That can be construed, as in Sir Albert Howard’s model of the forest manuring itself, or Masanobu Fukuoka’s call for no tillage, as a call for no intervention – a classic right-wing trope. Of course, this ignores the idea and role of composting – which might be equated to lavish state intervention.
Organic cranks have always taken pride in not taking medicines or stimulants, and historically there have been minority elements within the organic movement that have been on the right. Knowing the history, I wouldn’t overemphasise this especially, but it’s a factor.
The libertarian aspect of these ideas have already influenced fringe ecologists such as the beautiful Artist as Family group. This fascinating, radical self-sufficiency collective from Australia who I find entirely enchanting, also, like RFK Jr, adopted an anti-vax position. No, I don’t necessarily agree with them, but unlike so many commentators I’m not fearful of it, and I appreciate the coherency of their logic.
So what’s going to happen as this Trump/RFK Jr saga unfolds? As I understand it, he’s yet to actually secure the nomination. Like the woebegone Pete Hegseth, he might even now fall by the wayside. And if he gets the job, will Trump actually keep him in the role? I can’t see that working. RFK Jr is going to infuriate too many rich and powerful people who the Donald will want to ingratiate. But maybe, just maybe, RFK Jr will hang in there and will have a positive effect! Who would have thought there might be a silver-lining in this dark cloud?
These little guys grown from seed: Brussels sprouts, savoy cabbage, cabbage, and calabrese broccoli. They have had enough time under the grow lights.
They need to go out under the cool autumn sun. It’s amazing how much more light there is outdoors, even on an autumn day, than indoors under lights.
They’re going in here, which is some of the finest topsoil rescued from my raised bed, with added biochar (not stirred in yet).
God bless the little blighters. Just the strongest seedlings which have shown the most vigorous growth. The rest I am going to eat as microgreens for my tea.
All tucked in for the winter. With, I think, plenty of space for them. At least for the time being. If Kiki the cat digs these out, I will throttle her. Or at least swear at her!
I had grown a little before November 2021, zinnias from seed and dahlias from bulbs in 2020, but never vegetables or indeed anything with serious intent.
It was a combination of two things, reading Theodore Roszak’s collection of essays “Ecopsychology” (1995) in August 2021, and watching an interview with Eliot Coleman in October 2021, that truly set me on this path. The latter providing maybe the lightning bolt moment.
Immediately before this I had been reading Alfred Adler’s majestic “Understanding Human Nature” (1927), at the tail end of my research after “Retreat” , which carried on quite a long time after the end of that book’s publication in 2020. Indeed, I must have finished “Retreat” in mid 2019 and there I was still working through, not even yet fully integrating, the ideas I had unearthed in that book.
So my journey into gardening had nothing, per se, to do with lockdown, as it did for many people. However, the same etheric conditions that we all experienced in lockdown, the ones which gave rise to other phenomenon like the huge growth in the amount of dreaming recorded in western populations, and the emergence of racial trauma out from the unconscious onto the social canvas, tracked in parallel my own etheric research into the dematerialised highs of LSD and meditation against the backdrop of the counterculture, and that generation’s subsequent post-countercultural integrated fascination with organic farming.
The immediate upshot was that I was keen to get involved somehow in growing food. I’m yet to totally work out how to make that transition in a meaningful way. It is, after all, a massive leap for a music-obsessed animator working in the centre of a city to undertake. A more etheric, less integrated existence it would be hard to devise, perhaps a coder working on a space station would be able to trump me? In consequence, the journey back to earth is harder to make.
Working on my psyche art project, I got in the habit of picking up pieces of wood in the street. Some time in November 2021 I found two huge beautiful huge planks of wood in this skip on Pear Tree Street round the corner from where I live, and decided that they would make the basis of an excellent raised bed.
I cut them to size outside in the street, soaked them in linseed oil to protect them from the weather, and assembled them with beautiful rust-proof, stainless steel screws. The frame looked great already.
Because it was going to be resting on a slate roof, with a base level of large stones beneath the soil, I left a centimetre gap along the bottom to help with drainage. I didn’t want it filling up like a swimming pool and busting through the roof. Accordingly, I rested it straddled on top of a supporting wall which runs beneath the surface.
I designed the bed with a central column, so I could suspend mesh across it. The mesh to protect against insects, slugs, and snails. This worked very well, but was a faff to remove every time. Eventually, when it became clear that the black cat wanted to scramble over the top of it, I built a bamboo frame to rest upon the columns.
I bought a number of bags of a mixture of topsoil and compost. This is where I betrayed my ignorance, indeed none other than Charles Dowding rolled his eyes when I revealed to him that I had been convinced by a garden supplier that it was necessary to have a mix of the two. Compost on its own would have been superior. I mixed a huge bag of perlite in with this – both to lighten the mixture and allow it to drain better. I don’t really like perlite, an industrial product, with the benefit of hindsight biochar would have been better, if more expensive.
And so it was for nearly three years.
Perhaps you’ve seen the pictures I’ve posted of all the things I grew here over the past three years? Carrots, Cabbage, Spinach, Pumpkin, Lettuce, Cavalo Nero, Rocket, and Beetroot. More besides.
But this year it had to come to an end.
I got sick of the rigmarole of removing and replacing the netting. I’m figuring that a small greenhouse, or a cold frame would be more interactive, that I might have more fun with something like that if we stay put.
Also, I needed to tidy up the roof garden because we’ve put the house on the market and, well, it looked too bloody eccentric.
So everything got harvested.
And the whole thing was dismantled. I was surprised how horrible and clay-like the first soil I used was. It came off in large clods. Also, how meagre was the inch-thick topsoil which I had created with fine mulches and biochar. This I bagged up and kept. There was no digging ever on this patch, and I would have liked to have seen more evidence of soil structure. Maybe that’s precisely what I had? Sure, it was productive…
And this is how the space looks now. Like a regular bourgeois roof terrace.
I’ve got to work out the big picture. Sure, I’m dismantling this tiny part of the dream – but I’m working on a much larger and transformative scale these days. Times are very hard in consequence, but that’s to be expected.
When in Devon, we went to lunch at the Riverford Field Kitchen. Wow, what a treat that was! What they cook is largely made from ingredients grown on-site.
After lunch, we went and had a look at the kitchen’s gardens. There is a large field to its right and an incredibly long poly tunnel.
This is the seventh and final post picturing my trips to Biodynamic farms in 2023 and 2024.
The background to these visits is the research for my forthcoming book “The Garden”, which is due to be published by Repeater in 2025. There’s a very thoroughly researched chapter on Steiner, agriculture, and the Hippies at the front of it.
I was extremely fortunate to meet, beforehand, director of the Apricot Centre Rachel Phillips. Visiting Devon this summer for my tiny 5-day yearly holiday, I took the opportunity to drop in and see the market garden and CSA she runs with legendary Biodynamic grower Marina O’Connell. I came across Marina’s work some time previously when, visiting Steiner House, I was recommended and bought a copy of her excellent book Designing Regenerative Food Systems.
Nobody was around when, this time with the beautiful Mrs Ingram, we dropped under invitation to see the exquisite site. The pollinator garden of flowers was particularly special and welcome to see. My aunt recently remarked to me that a visit by car to Devon in the sixties would leave a car’s windscreen thick with dead bugs – and that today there will be practically none.
Everything was bursting with life, though there were the telltale signs that the year’s growing season was coming to an end.
This is the sixth instalment of the seven posts on Biodynamic farming.
I came across Jason Warland online – reached out to him – and so when travelling back from a conference in Wales arranged to drop in and see him. He works in the gardens at Ruskin Mill outside Stroud as a therapist helping young people. He’s astonishingly knowledgable about the history of Steiner’s thought, and also on the topic of growing – entirely self-educated as far as I’m aware.
Jason is something of a superstar in his own right, as he contributes a column on Biodynamics to one of Rick Rubin’s channels. I didn’t know this before we met in person, and it was funny when Jason told me, because I suspect I was the first person he’d ever mentioned it to who knew who the world-famous record producer Rick Rubin was.
It was a beautiful evening on Sunday July 7th and we walked up a narrow valley past vegetable gardens, fish ponds, flowforms, past a wood and a pottery workshop. Then we turned left up a steep hill through Park Wood to Gables Farm. This is the main growing centre with whole fields, the characteristic attendant livestock, poly tunnels, and composting site.
Thanks so much to Jason for showing me around. I am so grateful.
My third visit of the day was to Tablehurst Farm. It is possibly the most renowned of the local Biodynamic farms. Once connected to Emerson College, the agricultural wing of it so-to-speak, for many years it has operated autonomously. It abuts the college.
Notable sights here were the enormous water-tower-sized barrels for making Steiner’s preparations at massive scale. This featured impressive Steinerite flowforms that are visible in the photo. The huge compost mounds were also remarkable. I thought that the pigs and chickens seemed especially happy and lively.
Just like Plaw Hatch, Tablehust Farm has a shop, but also a very nice café where I ate lunch.
Unlike with last year’s batch, temperatures in my HotBin have been solidly in the green on its dial. It’s been steaming away. I’ve been filling it up with uncooked vegetable kitchen waste since February, when I set it up after the scaffolding had come down. I’ve been mixing these GREENS with BROWNS, these fine wood chips, and paper waste. If anything, I would say I need a higher proportion of BROWNS in future, but it still smells good and aerobically composted.
The cats were pretty fascinated as I prized off the lid and scooped out the very bottom later from the HotBin. It looks pretty disgusting, I’d agree.
The first thing was to sieve the composted material. Because it’s a HotBin, and by its very nature moist, the result is not a fine tilth, but more like a cakey sludge. That’s a problem I was determined to solve.
Because I’ve found that my own compost is too much like a Black Forest gâteau, I’ve given a lot of thought as to what to add to it to give it some lightness and also the ability to drain better. In the past, I’ve used Perlite, but it’s not really doing anything in the soil.
So, after I’ve come across it repeatedly in my research for “The Garden”, and I’m a huge fan of the Carbon Gold range of compost mixes, I thought I would try amending it with biochar. In the past, I have used Carbon Gold’s own biochar amendment, but I need larger quantities than the small punnets I can get from them.
Then for good measure, and because I’m a little concerned about the possible acidity of my mix, I added a handful or two of Moorland Gold which I’ve been trialling. Really, I’d like to be making all my own compost. I bought too much this year. It seems crazy to be buying compost and throwing away organic matter from the household.
Because I only scooped out the bottom layer, this process only resulted in four small pots-worth. I moved four Lemon Tree seedlings into these pots, which I have grown from pips. There’s a lot of light on the roof garden, so I’m hoping these thrive.
