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.
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.
Plaw Hatch Farm just up the road has cattle at its epicentre. This is the way Steiner would have wanted it. Indeed, Laurie Donaldson of Michael Hall School got his cow manure for growing vegetables from here.
I didn’t get the opportunity to meet the herd, but inside the deliciously-stocked farm shop there are photos of them all with their names.
This is the first post in what is a large series of six posts covering Biodynamic gardens and farms I have visited in the past year and a half.
The first three posts date from Saturday July 22nd, just over a year ago, when I visited Forest Row. Forest Row, a small town in East Sussex, is the spiritual home of Rudolf Steiner’s Biodynamic agriculture in the UK. There are the notable Biodynamic farms Plaw Hatch and Tablehurst Farm, as well as the Steiner adult education centre, Emerson College.
Remarkably, very nearby, ten minutes away, is the important Scientology HQ at Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead. So you’re really spoilt for esoteric religions. Nearby too is Ashdown Forest, home of Winnie the Pooh’s sylvan forays. Rock fans might be interested to know of the proximity of Hammerwood Park, once owned by Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour was once a resident. Presumably there is something of a spaghetti junction of ley lines running through the area.
The then-resident gardener Laurie Donaldson, who now works in Hereford at the Growing Local CSA, showed me around the vegetable garden of Michael Hall School. I had reached out to Laurie through the WWOOF network, where they were advertising for assistance.
This Steiner children’s school (photos visible towards the foot of the column) was relying on Laurie to look after their beautiful walled garden. Part of the children’s education was to take part in working with the plants.
Laurie was able to point out, with justified pride, that the garden was financially profitable. There was an eager market for the incredibly vital biodynamic produce he had been growing there.
This was my first sighting of the Phacelia flower, which pollinators adore.
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.
I planted a couple of chitting spuds in a fabric pot in March. I watered the abundant foliage until the plant looked like it was dying. That’s how it’s done. At this point, I stopped watering it so it would dry it out. Then, what is this magic? I dug out the fellers. Delicious taters – quite a return on my original investment!
In the course of my research for my book “The Garden” time and again, I came across the work of the husband and wife Eugen Kolisko (21 March 1893 – 29 November 1939) and Lili Kolisko (September 1, 1889 – November 20, 1976).
They shared with Ehrenfried Pfeiffer the role of putting the flesh on Rudolf Steiner’s biological theories. It is my understanding that, while Pfeiffer was tied up on other Anthroposophical business during Steiner’s “Agriculture Course” lectures, the Koliskos were present at Breslau for them. This was the birth of the Biodynamic movement, which this year is celebrating its centenary.
Eugen Kolisko had a perhaps broader range of interest than his wife. This above is my copy of “Zoology for Everybody” (1944) that I discovered in the bargain bin in the bookshop at Emerson College. But his other works include writings on nutrition, natural history, geology, chemistry, medicine, even fiction.
Lili Kolisko, on the other hand, was dedicated to the scientific method. Early on, pursuant to Steiner’s esoteric ideas about the function of the spleen, through her microscope she discovered a new type of speckled platelet, which she and Steiner termed “regulator cells”. This reminds me somewhat of Wilhelm Reich’s microscopic investigations.
As much as Steiner himself celebrated her work, she was met with a cold shoulder by the medics and scientists of the Anthroposophical Society. These internal disagreements between the couple and other senior figures in the movement effectively drove them from Germany to resettle in England in the thirties. Eugen Kolisko died relatively shortly afterwards in 1939 leaving Lili in penury and eking out a living sewing purses.
10 Euros on eBay.
In 1936 Lili Kolisko published “Moon and Plant Growth” in which she showed, by means of statistics and these beautiful photographs, how the influence of the waxing and waning moon could be used to optimise sowing. The Biodynamic idea is, in short, that you should plant root vegetables on a full moon, and leafy ones on the waxing moon.
Agriculture of Tomorrow in the library at Steiner House.
The couple’s book, Agriculture of Tomorrow (1939) is probably their masterpiece. Although Eugen had compiled the research with his wife, just as they were about to start writing it, he died, leaving the task to her. In it, they set out a series of experiments exploring the influence of the moon and planets and the role of chemical elements on plant growth, and upon the subject of nutrition. They also perform a scientific breakdown of Steiner’s suggestions for the renewal of agriculture.
In a sentence that could be penned today, in the book’s introduction Lili writes, “I want to write therefore about the regeneration of agriculture, which is the basis of the physical existence of men. Without proper food mediating life-forces to the human organism, human beings cannot grow strong and healthy, nor become able to develop the clear minds and moral strength we so urgently need.”
Among the photographs in the book (see below) you can glimpse the Kolisko’s house, Rudge Cottage, Edge, Stroud in Gloucestershire. Lili Kolisko died there in 1976, and it’s interesting for me to reflect that at that very moment I was living only 3 miles away in Lypiatt, Stroud.
Because I am in Gloucestershire often, with two uncles and aunts living just outside Stroud, and on this occasion travelling back from Wales, I thought I would drive past their old house and have a look.
I love to visit this shop. It’s the best fruit and vegetable shop I know in London. Looking at it from across the road today, I thought to myself, “This shop isn’t ALWAYS going to be there…” So I reasoned I had better take some photos of it. Just like I used to chronicle record shops back in the day.
This evening, reflecting further on that transience, I remembered Compendium Books by Camden Lock, just around the corner from Parkway Greens, a remarkable store and something of a cultural hub for the many years it was there.
We don’t think of green grocers in quite the same affectionate way as bookshops, but of course we should. The owner here is a particularly lovely chap. Long may he prosper.
Fooling around with 20m2 on a roof terrace in the centre of London, there are distinct limitations to one what can achieve in a garden. I could, as the genius Mark Ridsdill Smith does, grow a lot more vegetables. However, my own view is that whatever vegetables I grow to eat – and this year it’s been spinach, leeks, rocket, red cabbage, yacon, potatoes, runner beans, broad beans, beetroot, and tomatoes – is only ever going to be a token, for giggles…
For whatever reason, after growing cavalo nero, lettuces, and spinach erbette, I’ve cooled on growing leaves. I’ll grow spinach again over the winter but, although they are touted as the best things to grow in the city (because they are fast to grow and expensive to buy), I find leaves somehow boring.
Equally I find most ornamentals, often highly cultivated plants you couldn’t imagine happening in nature, almost products of a laboratory, a very tedious thing to grow. The flowers I’m growing, borage, phacelia, limanthes, marigolds, sunflowers, dandelions, nasturtiums are found at vegetable-growing seed suppliers as varieties that are good for insect life. Even my most ornamental flowers honeysuckle, poppies, zinnias, dahlias, (this last especially a concession to Mrs Ingram who loves them – they are beautiful…) are renowned for being attractive to pollinators.
What works very well among these select vegetables, trees, and carefully-chosen flowers, are herbs. Ever since I came across Juliette de Baïracli Levy and went on Kirsten Hartvig’s amazing country ramble at Forest Row I’ve been enchanted by them and their awesome potential. In the city they really work well, they don’t take up masses of space, the bugs love them, and they are fascinating. Currently, I am growing nothing particularly far out.
ThymeOreganoBayLavenderRosemaryChamomileMint
I believe that what one grows in the city should fundamentally address our urban alienation from nature. That selection should be geared to making us connect with the process of growing, with the seasons, with the cycle of life and death, and our cosmic alignment. In the city, we can’t pretend that we’re living wholly natural lives, but at least we can use growing to keep in touch with those things; like a diver underwater has an oxygen tank.
