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!
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.
I found my home-made compost was coming out too chunky. It’s partly to do with using woodchip in the HotBin as a source of “brown” carbon-rich material to counter the “green” nitrogenous material. If I had some coarse sawdust, I would use that instead.
I’m sure there are examples of this, but I’ve not seen it done before. Sieving compost is, after all, a similar process. Sometimes people run a lawnmower over a pile of woodchip – that’s similar in principle too. But I thought I would try grinding it down.
I bought a small industrial apple juicer online and ran the compost through it. Checking all the time for worms, of which there were none. It came out really well. I would like it a bit finer – but it’s an improvement. At the end, I turned a jug of biochar into the mixture and set the end result to work. It’s supported the growth of my red cabbages really well.
I don’t have much in the way of garden equipment: a trowel (which I bought, somewhat ironically, from No Dig guru Charles Dowding), some secateurs, a couple of watering cans, some propagating trays, a soil blocker, and some gloves. I like it like that.
However, my son bought me a dibber for my birthday. And it’s a very nice thing! The perfect complement to my seed cells.
Here I transplanted some zinnia seedlings into a planting box.
Out they come, and in they go!
And here they are a month or so later. Note the copper tape, which seems to work to repel slugs…
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.
Thanks to Sukhdev for sharing this documentary with me about New York City Garden Activists. Quite a lot of the film’s focus is upon things which happen in gardens, rather than growing. This is a typical media bias. It’s impossibly rare to come across any commentary which connects the dots between farming and culture.
However, the featured Adam Purple is definitely an interesting figure. I’d be including him and “The Garden of Life” in the book in greater depth were I, (a) not already discussing an arguably more interesting guerilla gardener, (b) as Sukhdev points out, Purple was, regrettably, an unsavoury character.
Purple’s “Garden of Eden”, built by him single-handedly over five years starting in 1975, was a well-known open, community garden on Forsyth Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The garden began when the city and the neighborhood were blighted with urban decay. A building was razed in 1973 on Eldridge Street behind Purple’s apartment, and he decided to plant something with his companion, Eve.
The process of clearing the lot took some time since the couple would only use hand tools. Modern machinery was considered “counter-revolutionary.” He would haul manure from the horse-drawn carriages around Central Park and created a highly fertile topsoil. The garden was ready to be planted in the spring of 1975. The garden was designed around concentric circles with a yin-yang symbol in the center. As buildings were torn down on either side, Purple would add new rings to the garden, allowing it to grow. By the end, it was 15,000 square feet featuring a wide range of produce, including corn, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, asparagus, black raspberries, strawberries, and 45 trees including eight black walnuts. He regularly bicycled to Central Park to collect horse manure to use as fertilizer.
In the film, Purple is shown with an enlargement of a photograph from the September 1984 edition of National Geographic. My curiosity got the better of me, and I tracked down a copy of the issue on eBay for a few bob. It’s a truly glorious photograph.
Adam Purple looking down upon “The Garden of Life”
The article which it is a part of, “Do we treat our soil like dirt?” By Boyd Gibbons, with photographs by Steven C. Wilson, is excellent. I thought I would go ahead and share it here. I love the illustrated soil cutaway especially.
I noticed this chap’s grave on my periodic visit to Bunhill Fields to say hello to William Blake and the other nonconformists. This being 2024 you can look up a performance of Shrubsole’s music. May he rest in peace.
The broad beans that I planted in December were ready to be picked. They hadn’t formed nearly as big a bush as last year.
The harvest wasn’t bad, but was not as impressive as before.
These stems went onto the compost heap.
I think this shows the limits of the viability of applying No Dig principles to containers. There’s not enough nutrients OR biology to support more growth.
And I’d taken measures. Rotating the crops, and after all beans are a legume, after the first round of them I’ve had buckwheat and nigella before this crop. I’ve also applied leaf mould. And chanted my mantra over them too, innit.
Digging it out, I WAS surprised to see that the trough was not root bound.
But equally it was rooty enough…
The box itself, given to me by my dear-departed father-in-law, was in need of some repairs. This was another reason to crack into it.
Sieving the soil produced these nuggety chunks of clay. So hard they felt almost like gravel. Sorry, but in no way could these be an optimal growing environment…
Biology
But it wasn’t all barren! There was a lot of insect life. No doubt from the poor guys who lost their homes in my demolishment. Aah, they’ll be OK! I will look after them. It’s mainly wood lice, but there’s other stuff happening. Wait for the cat’s miaow at the end.
But check out these nitrogen nodules on the broad bean plant’s roots. This has been the first time I have seen this with my own eyes. Very impressive.
I mixed the sieved soil from the wooden trough with a mixture of Lakeland Gold compost and some Carbon Gold fertiliser pellets. Heaven knows if that will work?
This new soil went into a shelter I’ve built for the next crop, buckwheat and a few others in pots.
The beans themselves were delicious.
I shared them, steamed and then dressed with olive oil and salt, with Mrs Ingram.
“Terminating” – that’s actually the correct technical term here. These clovers were planted last December and now are mostly (but not all) terminated to make way for my sunflowers.
They did an amazing job looking after two large pots of my compost – stopping them getting leached by the winter rains and preventing weeds growing on them.
I didn’t see any nitrogen nodules on their roots. If I had waited for them to flower, that would have been evident, I expect. Still, the biomass itself is great and goes straight into the compost heap.
