‘Tis the season to get busy. Flowers are busting open, zucchinis are swelling to indecent proportions, and the local farms’ CSA programs are multiplying as fast as the same farms’ population of rabbits and stinging nettles. After the contemplative stillness of winter’s Apollonian dream-world, the colorful excess and urgency of springtime makes everyone want a piece of the action.
Love swells in the spring, and as we have learned repeatedly through our partners in agriculture, delicious food is the result of plants and animals giving back the love you give them. This can be as simple as the occasional PDA with your pasture-raised goat, or the more involved process of making herbal tea for your strawberry beds to drink.
This tea contains nettles, hop leaves, raspberry leaves, yarrow, and mullein. Not only do the weeds and herbs contain within them the same microbiology that the cultivated crops contain, but their resulting brew is energized by streaming in opposite directions through a double-vortex flow form.
When pumped into the irrigation lines, the tea activates the microflora in the soil. It’s like Activia for your row crops.
If non-industrial, sustainable farming is a labor of love, biodynamic farming is more like a marriage. It demands not only abstinence from artificial chemicals and seeds that have been tinkered with; it requires an intimate knowledge of your farm as a closed system, with its idiosyncratic weather patterns, soil conditions, and seasonal rhythms. The central idea is that the farm is its own organism, and the strength of the farm involves treating it as a body, recycling its own energies of water, sun and soil to feed back into it, and receiving the fruits of the land as a welcome byproduct.
The principles of biodynamic agriculture were developed in 1924 by Rudolf Steiner, from whose prolific mind also sprang anthroposophy and Waldorf schools. Along with advocating the intimate knowledge of one’s land, it prescribes nine different “preparations” to help with fertilization, all of which are made with the farm’s own detritus. These preparations walk a fine line between homeopathy and witchcraft; they might as easily have been conceived by hooded figures with long beards in the afterglow of a druidic ritual. For your consideration, Preparation #505:
“Oak bark (Quercus robur) is chopped in small pieces, placed inside the skull of a domesticated animal, surrounded by peat and buried in earth in a place where lots of rain water runs past. …One to three grams of each preparation is added to a dung heap by digging 50 cm deep holes with a distance of 2 meters from each other. …One study found that the oak bark preparation improved disease resistance in zucchini.”
Here’s another favorite of mine:
“Weeds are combated (besides the usual mechanical methods) by collecting seeds from the weeds and burning them above a wooden flame that was kindled by the weeds. The ashes from the seeds are then spread on the fields, then lightly sprayed with the clear urine of a sterile cow (the urine should be exposed to the full moon for six hours), this is intended to block the influence from the full moon on the particular weed and make it infertile.”
The thing is that it works–did you try the rhubarb pie last week? (If not, try it on Thursday night.) Studies aside, the biodynamic approach makes sense. Crop rotation, fallow fields, congenital fertilizer, and climate symbiosis contribute to any healthy ecosystem–it’s encouraging nature to be itself.
The farm store runs on the honor system.
Tierra Miguel, a 85-acre spread in the shelter of Palomar Mountain, has been the local outpost of biodynamic farming for the last ten years. It was a project ten years in the making by a group of amateurs, whose fledgling farm was rescued from development by the Pauma Band of Mission Indians, who bought and then leased the land back to them. Leadership has changed hands many times over the years, but the ideals have remained constant. It functions primarily as a nonprofit educational center, and also hosts a flourishing CSA program. Some of their notable projects include the Growers Collaborative (an effort to consolidate distribution for local family farms), a Farm to School program (to get locally-grown food into local school cafeterias), and a training ground for the Somali-Bantu immigrants who participate in the IRC’s New Roots garden. There are frequent visits from local schools and a monthly volunteer day that culminates in a potluck lunch.
The Pauma Valley is a beautiful place at the end of a beautiful journey through rolling hills of orange groves. The light plays fickle through the quickly-moving clouds, and the wind sounds like opera in your ears. We went there for the sake of rhubarb, but we found ourselves strongly inclined to run with primitive abandon through the strawberry fields and eat ourselves sick on the ripe fruit.
“And then and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.”
We tasted first- and second-growth fruits of three different varieties. It was like wine-tasting, only subtler. Chandlers taste like an Italian ice, Albions have a syrupy taste, and Camarosas taste like red-hot candies. I made notes. I think Amanda hid some berries in her jacket.
Also, we climbed on an old tractor.
Look for mulberries in a few weeks, and stonefruit as the weather grows warmer. Also, we hope to win the good graces of their ancient beekeeper, and bring you some local honey fed by the neighboring orange and avocado groves.
It’s all happening.
Please. Stop.