Posted on Abr 27, 2017
By Paul Haygood
A small, untended garden-space Is dug, turned, fed And planted... I in my old holey-blue sweater And green-net hat Feeling quite pagan and quite priestly, Gently setting tiny plants Into the Earth, Giving thanks For sun, water and worms... She seems receptive, this tiny patch Of newly re-cared for earth, And I need her love.......
Posted on Abr 5, 2017
By Coree Entwistle
With photos by Sarah Weber
When we crossed the Canadian border into Sarnia, the sky was light, and there were sparkles of snow in the air. The effect was tropical, to my southern eyes. We don't get partly cloudy snow down in our part of the world. I was enchanted. My Canadian husband was less impressed and directed us to a store to pick up some anti-freeze windshield wiper fluid. It was a cold weekend, and we were poorly prepared, but the snow that day, and into the night, was magical.
I knew when we walked in the door, nearly at the end of Friday's opening day session of the annual Fellowship of the Preparation Makers Conference (March 2-5, 2017), that we were in a good place. The conference was held in a historic community meeting hall. It was a singular spacious room, with a small kitchen curtained...
Posted on Mar 15, 2017
By Richard Chomko Village Market Manager, Thornhill, ON
Originally published in the Village Market and S ociety for Biodynamic Farming and Gardening in Ontario newsletters
In December of last year, the Grade Seven class at the Toronto Waldorf School was raising funds for their Grade Eight trip by selling cookie mixes at the Village Market . There was some debate among the parents as to whether to continue to use organic ingredients in these mixes, due to cost. One of the parents in the class asked me write something about why I thought it was important to use organic ingredients. This is what I wrote (with some subsequent editing, specifically for publication in the Ontario Biodynamic newsletter):
People often find their way to organic food because of personal health challenges. That was the case for me. As a child...
Posted on Feb 8, 2017
By Jessie Crow Mermel
Originally posted on the Angelic Organics Learning Center Blog (Jan. 18, 2017)
“Farms are the places where we negotiate our relationship with nature,” explained Tom Spaulding, Angelic Organics Learning Center ’s co-founder and Executive Director at the Midwestern Ecology Symposium at the Janesville Muslim Dawa Circle. Tom accompanied other distinguished speakers at the symposium, including his wife and Learning Center co-founder, Dr. Neddy Astudillo. Tom addressed the topic of biodynamic farming at the symposium.
Biodynamic agriculture found its genesis in a series of agriculture lectures by the Austrian spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner, who also founded Waldorf education. The lectures were addressing farmers lamenting that food had lost quality with the more...
Posted on Oct 25, 2016
By H ilary Higginbotham
Just outside of Nashville, Tennessee, 8,000 beautiful acres of rich bottomland cradled by the Cumberland River make up an area called Bells Bend. A few years ago, community members saved this rural, agricultural land from a huge development. Bells Bend is a place where community members of all ages welcome Nashville friends and enjoy weekly potlucks, square dances, harvest festivals, and farm harvest days. Most everyone you meet in Nashville smiles broadly when you mention the farm community in Bells Bend. It’s known for sharing, dancing, amazing food, creative partnerships, and rich community history intermingling with energized young folks drawn to traditional ways and food you can feel great about.
When Jeff Poppen , the biodynamic farming “father figure” here in the Southeast, helped get several new...
Posted on Oct 18, 2016
By Beth Corymb , Meadowlark Hearth Biodynamic Seed Initiative , Scottsbluff, NE
7th installment in the Tierra Viva series, the theme of the 2016 Biodynamic Conference in Santa Fe, NM, November 16-20.
It is another beautiful day on the high plains of Nebraska. The air is clear and the surrounding hills white. Their sandstone shines out to us as we harvest our vegetables and vegetable seed crops. Out here on the Nebraska plateau we are picking seed from our biennial crops of carrot, beet, and onion seed, then letting them dry until they crackle under our threshing feet. 13-pea-seed-stomp-rs-4.jpgPea seed stomp
The horned cows of our micro raw milk dairy come running when I call them. They know that yodel means rotten cantaloupe, their favorite snack. We humans get the best...
Posted on Oct 5, 2016
By Courtney White
The (boring) Carbon Cycle Carbon is the most important element on Earth and the best way to begin explaining its significance is with the terribly important carbon cycle. The trouble is whenever I see the word ‘cycle’ my eyes start to glaze over. It doesn’t matter if it is the water, mineral, energy, nutrient, or some other cycle critical to our existence, for some reason my attention begins to wander the instant I see the word. I remember attending a conference years ago where a speaker displayed an image of the nitrogen cycle on a farm he was studying. It had something like sixty-four separate arrows flowing in every possible direction, including in circles. I took one look at the image and immediately put my pen down. No amount of notetaking was going to make sense of this cycle when I tried to explain it later....
