I think this is one of the huge risks in climate change, that urban people completely don’t get. Farmers gamble, constantly. They make educated, considered, intuitive guesses based on gut feeling, the tiny signals that intimacy and experience allow. Those guesses are sometimes right, sometimes wrong. Bad guessers go broke or resort to mining the land. Good ones get it right more often than wrong and succeed. Climate change is…
One of the most important insights that really changed the way I garden was realising just how long plants are babies for.
So this planting break I have planted seeds of:
I’m loving the selection of greens in my garden this time of year. There’s such an abundance, I pick some for us and some for the chook bucket every day. It gives us eggs with glorious deep yellow yolks and lots of Vitamin A.
I’ve taken lots of finger thick cuttings, using a very sharp knife to cut at an angle just below a bud. I’ve dipped the bottom of the cuttings in a bucket in which I’ve been steeping the willow cuttings – willow is a rich source of rooting hormones
I quite like deadlines – they give me a target. Without them I find that, in my busy busy life, things that are important get put aside in favour of the things that are most noisily urgent. And seasons don’t scream urgent, but they don’t wait. They are a wonderful reminder that we humans can argue all we like but nature holds trump cards. We live on a little spinning…
In the southern hemisphere, we are about to turn the corner into Spring. We are about to pass the point on the bell curve when the rate of change in day length begins increasing exponentially. The season of short days is about to end!
I’m planting another round of all my root staples – carrots, parsnips, spring onions, beetroots – starting seeds off in the shadehouse, and planting out the seedlings started last month. If I do just a tray like this every month, we have a good steady supply. But my main little task today is to dig up some turmeric to take some rhizomes for planting.
It is one of the reasons I use a lunar planting calendar though: in the hurly burly of arbitary fixed deadlines, it reminds me to make time for the more elastic but more real deadlines of the seasons. And then, by doing so I create real wealth – good food, health, beauty, integity, freedom.