I was feeling a bit left out from all this tidying up, as so far our contribution from the garden team has been to carry on hoeing the carrots in Sunny Acres and try to pretend nothing unusual is going on. But yesterday Sebastian taught me how to use the topper. The topper is basically a big lawnmower that goes on the back of the tractor. You are meant to use it to tidy up a field after the cows have been grazing; it cuts down any tufty grass, thistles, docks and such like that the cows didn’t fancy eating, and helps to stop the pasture being taken over by inedible weeds. It is less dangerous and less precise than the actual mower on the tractor that we use for cutting the grass to make hay or silage. In the garden, Henning has traditionally used the topper to roughly mow the grass round the edge of the field, on the headlands, and also the green manure leys.

Topping has been on my to do list for a couple of weeks at least, but somehow never quite happened. It nearly didn’t happen yesterday either; just hitching the machine up to the tractor proved fraught with difficulties. First of all I had to tie the link arms of the tractor together with baler twine to get them lined up with machine properly, then the top link on the tractor was too long, so I swapped it for another one which then didn’t have the right size pin, and when I stole a pin off another tractor, the PTO was stuck and wouldn’t lengthen to reach the tractor. Sebastian very patiently helped me through all these calamities and also managed to unstick the PTO by taking it off the tractor, hanging it up on a chain and attaching a heavy weight on the other end of it. Anyway, eventually we got started, and then I spent most of the rest of the day driving round and round the garden and Sunny Acres encased in my ear defenders, topping.

In a way it seems sad and wrong to expend a lot of time and energy cutting down the joyful profusion of growing greenery round the edges of the fields and in the weedy patches that never got sown with green manure, turning them in to something flat and civilised. At one point on the far side of the potatoes I was driving through amazing grass taller than the bonnet of the tractor. In the weed patch between Eden’s grain and his carrots, the grass seed heads were waving in a beautiful wide sea in a dozen hues of grey and brown and purple. William asked me why I was topping at all, and Sebastian persuaded me not to do the bit beyond the hedge in the garden where the poppies are growing. There is, I think, though, something right and satisfying in finding order and edges, cutting down the thistles before they seed everywhere, keeping the brambles and bracken in the field edges at bay.

Perhaps there are different ways of approaching it through. I’d like to buy a scythe one day. And I have a vision of gardening smaller and more intimately, where, if you don’t use a tractor, you don’t need a big wide headland for turning around in, which means you don’t have even half as much grass to keep mowing. And perhaps a garden that is less flat and straight in its own right too; a garden in three dimensions instead of two.

This hedge is part of the grand vision Henning created for a smaller, enclosed garden with a thick hedge laid out along according to the golden mean in a gently swooping spiral from the barn extension down to the watermeadows. Early in the spring we enthusiastically started digging out an old hedge by hand one afternoon and, with the help of the front loader, managed to replant a bit of it along the line of the new hedge. Since that afternoon of enthusiasm the whole hedge project has been more or less put on hold in favour of more pressing and more achievable tasks. The plants, though, have mostly, miraculously, survived despite the lack of rain and almost complete neglect.

Then a couple of weeks ago, when it was silage making day, Sebastian mowed the long grass at the far end of the garden and around the headlands of Sunny Acres with the tractor. But then left the cut grass lying on the field because it wasn’t worth sending round the baler for such small fiddly amounts. And just yesterday Ruben mowed the area beyond the soft fruit ready for his chickens. So we currently have a huge quantity of grass clippings and nearly-hay at our disposal. Some of it is destined for incorporation in to a smart new compost heap soon. And today a large quantity of it became hedge mulching material. The whole Thursday afternoon garden team (except Debbie who was looking after the dried elderflowers) set to with rakes and wheelbarrows, and I recovered the smaller saplings that had disappeared in to the long grass and weeds. By the end of the afternoon the whole first quarter of the hedge was roughly mulched, so now I can begin to imagine what this new garden could look like.

PS Apologies for the lack of blogging activity. It reflects not a scarcity of garden activity, but rather a surplus. I am just uploading lots of pictures of silage making and polytunnels and pigs in the garden and such like, so do have a look…

It’s kind of traditional that the garden team and the farm team each do an ‘outing’ at least once a year, to visit other farms or gardens and learn about how they work. We never did one of these outings last year, so this was my first. Duncan and I had both wanted to visit Charles and his garden at Lower Farm for months, and especially with the grand chaos and infinite possibilities of the garden redesign underway, we thought it would be a good time to find out more about his no-dig methods.

It was an hour and half of driving either way, and the journey was almost as entertaining as the garden. Imagine I’m sitting on the back seat of the caravel. On my right is Jane gently snoozing, waking occasionally to make urgent enquiries about the proximity of teabreak. On my left is John, singing songs from the shows under his breath and, from time to time joining the general conversation. The general conversation drifts erratically across topics as varied as silage making, recycling, and what we might have for supper, but the basis of it all is a non-stop audio description of the passing countryside supplied by Neill and Robert sitting up ahead. All the way there and back.

The garden itself was very impressive. Smaller than I’d imagined; less than an acre, on a north facing slope and down a narrow lane twisting and plunging through wooded valleys and farm land. Charles grows mostly salad leaves, as that’s where the money is, but he also had beautiful spinach and parsnips and apple trees and tomatoes and cucumbers and lots more. He literally does no digging, but every autumn spreads a thick layer of well rotted muck or compost on all his beds. The result is a strong, undisturbed soil with plenty of nutrients and very few weeds. Plus, because there is no cultivation needed in the spring, or between crops, Charles can start sowing and planting early, and, for example, plant his cucumbers straight in to the gaps where he’s harvesting early carrots from the polytunnel. The whole garden was immaculate; nowhere did we see a weedy patch or a failed crop or an area that had run away with itself. At the same time it was full of life and diversity, with a band of hedging and wild flowers halfway up, flowers dotted here and there, cordon apple trees between the beds, mesh on the polytunnel door neatly patched up with string, a cat basking in the sunshine.

We saw some simple experiments exploring the differences between a no-dig bed right next to a dug bed growing exactly the same crops, and crops sown on roots days versus ‘nothing’ days growing side by side. We tasted sea kale flowers, and heard about the importance of keeping tunnels and greenhouses well ventilated. We saw the effect of tractors slowly pushing soil down slope in the neighbouring field, admired spectacularly healthy looking crops, asked questions about sowing and harvesting and carried home some delicious bags of salad after handing over a couple of wedges of Sturts Farm cheese.

I think everyone really enjoyed the day, even if some of us were more interested in the picnic lunch than the gardening. Duncan, Caroline and I all came home inspired, and resolved to do no more digging – at least on part of the garden inside this fabled hedge that we’re meant to be planting. For me it was fantastic to be able to see something really working in practice, and to be able to share that experience with pretty much the whole of the rest of the garden team. So next time I’m enthusing about not digging and using more muck and harvesting salad leaves, I’ll hopefully get some spark of recognition from my faithful gardeners…

On Wednesday we each ate half a strawberry at tea break time. They weren’t quite the very first strawberries, but close enough. Sebastian had the very very first properly rich red ripe one on Monday, but didn’t quite realise its significance at the time. The birds ate a few too, and Ruben, almost quicker than the birds, had a couple of stained red handfuls for himself before we got the strawberry netting fixed on Thursday.

The first outdoor lettuces are ready to harvest. We’re just trying to eat up the last of the indoor ones, which have been hastily pulled out to make way for tomatoes and sweetcorn in the old polytunnel.

This week we sent the first of our early greenhouse carrots to the market. They are clean and bright and fresh and crunchy orange, especially after the big tired old grey carrots stored from last year. It would be criminal to peel these carrots; criminal almost to cook them even. Though they are fantastic roasted whole. Ruben and Brendan and Alexander have been enjoying baby carrots straight out of the ground for weeks, but the rest of us were waiting for them to be a decent size before we started harvesting. In the end, the need to plant tomatoes pushed the decision to pull out a whole bed of beautiful carrots, which are, in my opinion just the perfect size anyway.

The first beetroots should perhaps have been larger, but they are just beginning to bolt in the heat of the polytunnel, so we started on harvesting delicious baby beetroot this week too. Also recommended roasted whole.

I’ve been hearing the first real cuckoo calling this week; on and on, loud and clear from the woods.

6:30am – 5mm
7:30am – 10mm

Still raining

Ironically and inevitably, the drip irrigation is running in the greenhouse.

So we’ve been thinking about water quite a lot. Before Easter, we brought down all the big black irrigation pipes from Sunny Acres. They are light weight, but long and awkward and it took Sebastian and Robert and several helpers half a day to bring them all down. Then Henning initiated Duncan in to the mysteries of the Sunny Acres irrigation system. It was one of Henning’s projects last year, finally set up and working, after delays and tribulations, just in time for the late planting of the leeks in July and then the unusually wet August. He never quite finished it how he wanted it, though, so all the pipes had to come back down to the garden to be fitted out with new couplings, which does make it much easier to clip them together and take them apart again. Then on Good Friday, as part of the traditional morning of common work, Henning and Sebastian and Robert and Bob took all the pipes back up to Sunny Acres and got the whole system working again.

This is how it works. Underneath the farm yard in a big concrete tank. All the runoff water from the farm yard collects in to that tank, so it gradually fills with a rich black brew of rain water mixed with a sort of slurry from the yard, the water from washing down the dairy, and the poisonous looking stuff that seeps out of the bottoms of the muck heaps. That black water can then be pumped up the track to a man hole by Sunny Acres. There, we connect one of the big black pipes, run it all the way along the bottom of the field, and link it up to a set of three sprinklers. Henning made a filter that sits in the pipe just before the sprinklers, so they don’t get clogged up with slurry, and the pump works on a timer so it can be switched on for half an hour, an hour or two hours. All pretty straight forward really, and a great way of catching and storing some of the water and nutrients from the farm yard and applying them where we need them in dry weather.

After getting thoroughly splattered with stinking black slurry water, Henning got the sprinklers going and had them running for several hours. I wasn’t too sure about spraying all this stinky water on the onions, but under the combined circumstances of drought and an underground tank of slurry overflowing in to the ditch to the stream, it seemed like a pretty good option. The first time I moved the sprinklers to set them up on a new patch I had a terrible battle sloshing and slipping about in smelly sludgy mud where the sprinklers had leaked, panicking as the water surged out of the pipes when I disconnected the sprinklers, and then struggling to heave around suddenly not-so-lightweight pipes now filled with litres and litres of water. I learned quite fast though, that it’s best to disconnect the pipes as close to the tap as possible, and so that the spare water gushes on the the grass rather than the bare soil of the field. Moving the pipes is one of those jobs that for one person takes an hour of struggle, sweat, and possibly swearing, whereas with two people it’s twenty minutes of quite simple and sensible work.

So good so far. But then on Easter Sunday the sprinklers stopped going round, and each only poured a gentle trickle of water on to its neighbouring cabbage. After a good deal of running up and down between pumps, taps, and sprinklers, in between consulting with Henning who was tied to his office in the house, it appeared that the problem was not in the sprinklers, or the pipes, but either in the pumps or the tanks. Further investigations by William, Sebastian and Henning after Easter revealed that the water level in the tank might be too low, or perhaps that the tank is full with sludge and slurry rather than water. Which rather surprised us all because we thought the tank was unimaginably enormous and effectively bottomless when it comes to doing a bit of watering in Sunny Acres. So now rather than worrying about how to stop the tank overflowing in to the ditch, we’re working on ideas to make it fill up quicker. It’s quite fascinating to piece together a map of the network of drains and pipes and tanks under the concrete of the farm yard. No one (except possibly Markus) knows exactly how it all links up and what goes where. But today Stefan blocked up one underground pipe that should now divert the rainwater collected off the barn roof in to the tank under the yard, rather than straight to the ditch. And Henning has devised a cunning plan to collect the trickle of water running off the field from the land drains which now requires some lucky people to spend a morning digging a barrel in to the mud of the ditch.

As that thread of the water and irrigation story unfolds, we’ve also been using gallons and gallons of mains drinking water to irrigate the greenhouses and polytunnels, which seems close to criminal, but is currently the only option (other than letting everything wilt and die). We use main drinking water, too, to water in the lettuces and celeriac and kohl rabi and brussel sprouts newly planted out in to the dusty of Sunny Acres. That took Duncan a morning just to get all the hosepipes wheeled up to the field and connected across all the beds from the tap in the far corner by the water meadows. And then several more hours for Owen or Duncan or Sarah standing by each plant in turn, soaking it, moving to the next one, soaking it, moving to the next one… Hosepipes, I am sure, have some special magic that means they get tangled and twisted and knotted up even when they are lying still in what should have been a nice neat coil on the side of the grass. So then every time you might want to start using one, or move one, it takes half an hour just to untangle the thing before you even start with the watering.

Our other criminal use of precious mains drinking water is with the ingeniously clever watering tractor. It’s a sprinkler in the shape of a tractor, that can slowly propel itself along a bed, guided by the hosepipe paid down in front of it. It’s entirely powered by the flow of water through the mechanism inside, and can more or less be left to get on with the job. Earlier this week it developed a leak, though, which makes the whole thing fail; where it leaks under the tractor, the soil turns to mud and the tractor effectively does slow motion wheel spin, gets stuck and becomes a stationary sprinkler. Fortunately John, the multitalented bicycle repair man now graduated to tractor maintenance man, fixed the leak for me, and now the little watering tractor is back in action again.

So that’s a lot of stuff about watering and water, which is now finally bucketing down out of the sky. Hurrah.

Apart from messing around with water and irrigation, in the nearly a month since I last wrote, I’ve also been planting tomatoes, going on holiday, having my birthday, harrowing and ridging potatoes, hunting Easter eggs, sowing Easter grass, drilling leeks, making ridges for carrots and parsnips, ordering chicken food, not quite getting sunburnt, and digging up biodynamic preparations. Not quite in that order.

Happily, everyone else seems to enjoy planting onions too. We plant the onions sets by hand, plugging along with our yellow buckets of onions and our stripey bamboo measuring sticks. I made up the beds a couple of weeks ago using the bed maker machine, but they were still full of little clods of grass (we should have rotovated them earlier on, but I didn’t realise and it’s too late now), so I went over again with the bed maker, and then we hand weeded them, with a team of people picking out the grass lumps in front of the team of people sticking the onions in. The benefit of having gone over with the bed maker machine twice is that the soil is really soft and fluffy, so we can just push the onions straight in with no need for dibbers or furrows. Then I cover them up using the push hoe with two ridging bodies; it makes a small ridge over the line of onions to be sure they are covered, and planted in good and deep where the moisture is and where the birds can’t peck them out.

We plant the onions three lines in a bed, and 10cm apart in the lines. The beds are 100m long, and we’ve planted three and a half beds so far, with probably about half a bed worth of onions still to go in. I think that works out as over 10,000 onions. Fortunately when it comes to straight forward jobs like planting onions, we have a very substantial work force here, especially when not just the gardeners, but also the farmers, are drafted in to help out. Because the work is quite slow, can be done practically sitting down, and involves working close together in groups, it’s a great opportunity to chat and gossip as we inch our way along the beds. It’s also nice as different individuals come and go during the day, bringing their own news and conversation and characters with them.

I say it’s a bit like a holiday, and that is almost the atmosphere in this incredible warmth and sunshine as we plaster on the factor 30 and sit on the dusty dry sandy soil of our not-quite-beach in the middle of the field. But I also have the feeling of really carrying something there; of keeping the work together, explaining the system to each new person who turns up to help, checking we’re not accidentally double planting or mixing the white and red onions, making sure we stop early enough to get down to tea break on time, shuffling the teams as the planters catch up with the weeders; being somehow the will behind this task of planting 10,000 onions by hand.

So perhaps a brief catch up from the past three weeks of virtual silence, to start with. It’s been fairly busy. William says that’s a Camphill co-worker thing. Someone asks, How are you? You say, Busy. Because probably you really are, but also, if you say Fine thanks, doing good, or something to the same effect, there’s a danger that the next stage of the conversation is a request to take on a project or to do someone a favour, cover for holidays or write a new kind of report. There’s always more work to do.

In the past three weeks I’ve learnt to use three more machines on the tractor, put in the early potatoes, planted out the first summer cabbage and outdoor lettuce, and made the transition from thermals to suncream. I’ve suddenly become a serious tractor driver, ridging potatoes, spading whole areas of the rotation, and making up beds for onions and lettuce and cabbages. I’ve started spending Wednesday rest hour in a new kind of meeting, and watering in the propagation greenhouse most mornings before breakfast. I’ve spent a few slightly nerve racking hours with Class 3 on Tuesday lunchtimes, planting peas and courgettes and clearing out the chicory clamp. I’ve gratefully slipped off the milking rota altogether for the time being. I’ve pricked out tomatoes and peppers and aubergines, planted lots of flowers round the edges of the tunnels and greenhouses, thinned out the early carrots, and harvested the first radishes.

Beyond the limits of the garden, I’ve also officially become a Camphill co-worker, wondered where I’m going to live when Meteor is demolished in the summer, spent lots of nice times with Sebastian, visited Markus in hospital, failed to hoover my room for nearly three weeks, and been to see a very good play at Ibsley village hall.

The garden is simultaneously terrifyingly unstoppable and terrifyingly slow. Everything grows and we are behind with the cultivation work and half-made plans are continuously revised. I suppose ordinarily winter is the time for doing spreadsheets and writing sowing lists, not March. Of course we did have the beginnings of a plan created back then, which is where I started for the seed order. But with no Henning, everything changes somewhat. There’s a need to simplify and cut back. On Wednesday we had a meeting; me, Duncan and Henning, to start the official handing over of the garden. And slowly things are clarifying, as we talk through the field rotation and the polytunnels; which crops to miss out this year, what areas still need muck spreading, how many nets we’ll need to cover the cabbages or the lettuces, where to fit in two beds of celeriac. At least now we have a printed out plan saying how much of what we’re going to grow where in the tunnels and greenhouses, and I’m more than half way with a proper plan for Sunny Acres the same. Meanwhile we sort of make it up as we go along.

The greenhouse and polytunnels are exploding with salad and spinach and chard, which is wonderful and fantastic. It’s all far more than we can eat at this time of year when everything suddenly speeds up, and much of it just beginning to bolt. Salad bags galore for the market and Lantern and Sheiling and anyone who visits or anywhere we go visiting. We’ve started pulling out mizuna and rocket and purslane to prepare the beds for summer crops. On Friday I pricked out the first of the tomatoes, and sowed cucumbers and melons in the propagation greenhouse. Just think, one day we will be eating tomatoes, and even melons, again.

Up in Sunny Acres the farmers have been demonstrating great solidarity with us poor beleagured gardeners, and put in several hours tractor work for us. Leo spaded three whole areas of the rotation in Sunny Acres, where we’ll be growing potatoes, carrots, parsnips, pumpkins and all the fiddly things like beans and lettuce that would normally be in the garden field. Sebastian did the muck spreading on nearly the whole of the rest of the field. Class 3 pulled out most of the remaining cabbage stalks, and the power harrow is ready for action tomorrow. I am deeply frustrated that I can’t just do the tractor work myself (I’ve never used the spading machine or the power harrow or the bed maker before) but Henning has promised to teach me soon, and in the meantime I can appreciate the opportunity to potter along in the greenhouse quietly harvesting lettuce while someone else rattles and roars around in the field with big heavy oily machines. The potatoes are chitting in the greenhouse, and I’m hoping we might even be able to start planting them this week. The last of the onion sets were delivered on Wednesday, and I’m musing on the idea of a communal onion planting day. Invite everyone, pretend it’s a party, and the work is easy…

Meanwhile Duncan and much of the rest of the team have been doing wonders with the soft fruit. It’s a bit late, but it’s surely better than never. We now have red currants, blackcurrants and gooseberries all planted out in neat straight lines beyond the new polytunnel. We also have a brand new drainage trench all the way down the side of the polytunnel, lovingly dug by hand and carefully filled with gravel, ready for the creation of a brand new flowerbed to replace the one obliterated by the fruit garden.

On Wednesday we hoed through all the leafy greens in the tunnels and greenhouse, and on Thursday we hoed through all the strawberries outside, so by Friday I had brand new hoeing blisters on my hands. Not too bad, but a real indication of the changing seasons and changing work in the garden. We are still harvesting wheelbarrows and wheelbarrows of leeks every Monday, but not for much longer I think. The herbs are all coming back; when you walk in to the polytunnel or cold store at the right moment, you get a strong waft of fresh cut coriander in the air.

Other activities in this busy week included meetings and more meetings, spraying compost tea, mixing seed compost, a trip to the dentist, a much appreciated weekend off with Sebastian, a Saturday farm walk, more evolutions in who’s who and what’s what at Sturts Farm, failing to organise our Easter holiday, the arrival of the universally adored Johanna, and the rather belated removal of that snowy picture from the top of my blog.

After five days of talking about spiritual beings, incarnations of the earth, influences of the constellations, orbits of the planets, and the relationship of the ego to the etheric body, I have living in me a whole new swirling, vivid, only partly comprehended, story about the world.

We did do quite a lot of actual, ordinary, physical astronomy, which is probably the easiest bit to begin to explain. Recognising different constellations, understanding how they circle and swing through the sky, how the moon moves in relation to the earth, why planets sometimes appear to move backwards, where the sun is at different times of year. I have expanded my vocabulary so that I can talk half convincingly about the tropical zodiac (the one used in astrology) and the sidereal zodiac (what we actually see in the sky). I can look at the mass of figures in Raphael’s ephemeris and work out where mars is today. I have coloured in and cut out maps and diagrams and sticky magnets that show different pictures of the stars and planets moving through them.

All this quickly blurs, though, in to the mythical and poetic and possibly really real characteristics and qualities of the planets and of the zodiac constellations. How each is associated with one of the four elements of earth, water, air and fire, how these work in to the earth and the plants to give us root days and leaf days and flower and fruit days depending on where the moon is standing. How the whole picture gets incredibly complicated by oppositions and trines and nodes when planets cross invisible lines in the sky, or pile up in front of each other from where we see them here on the earth.

Move from here then, to the thought that all the earth and the constellations and planets are the relatively temporary physical embodiments of spiritual beings that have been evolving and incarnating for thousands and thousands of years. That the universe is populated by a whole hierarchy of spiritual beings, from angels to seraphims, and that human beings on earth today are caught in the centre of the latest battleground between good and evil. Consider that we ourselves are not just a collection of atoms and cells, but a complex and ever changing partnership between our mineral physical bodies, our life-giving etheric bodies, our feeling and sensing astral bodies and some sort of spiritual essence of ego. That we have the capacity to exist in different states of consciousness, in sleep or coma, dream or day awakeness, and that the experience of these states of consciousness depends on the relationships between our physical, etheric and astral bodies.

At the beginning of the first session on Monday morning, Michael proposed that the world is made up entirely of ‘the activity of beings’. From that point we swept through aspects of nutrition, philosophy, history and fairytale; discussed the nature of reality and the mathematical probability of nuclear disaster; talked about love, human destiny, and the importance of free will.

This is the last of the four week-long block courses in the apprenticeship, and I can see why it’s the last one. If I’d been on this course a year ago I probably would have run away to hide. It’s a difficult thing to walk the balance between open mindedness and healthy scepticism; between the desire to be swept along in the story and the desire to pick apart the plot and characters and internal logic of the whole thing. Ian has dozens of fantastic models and maps of the sky; clear plastic globes, little cogs and wheels moving planets through their orbits, constellations circling a paper horizon. Each model tells us something about the world, adds something to our understanding of the cosmos. The challenge is knowing which models to use to explain what phenomena; not to confuse the heliocentric with the geocentric, the vertical with the horizontal. And the same perhaps with these huge new stories I’ve been learning. There is something very true and alive in these pictures of the world, but it’s also true that no story tells the whole truth all of the time or in every place.

For me the highlight of the week was probably meeting with Tony, the legendary gardener at the Grange. He speaks about biodynamics in a way that I’ve not heard from anyone else. It seemed that whilst most of us spray some preparations because we read it in a book, for Tony biodynamics is really something that he lives and senses all around him. It’s not an intellectual exercise, nor an only-half-convincing airy fairy sort of hippy thing, but very real and grounded practice from an earthy bloke with massive gardener’s hands and a roll up stuck in the corner of his mouth.

The whole week was, at a minimum, really interesting. We also had positively luxurious accommodation, cake for every tea break, and wonderful hospitality from the lovely people at the Grange. It was good to spend time with my fellow apprentices from across the country, and reassuring to feel part of this small-world network linked through Camphill and biodynamics. There was also some sense of anticlimax, though. With no fanfare or ceremony, that’s it; my apprenticeship is over.

I had thought that perhaps this blog would also be over, come to a natural end. But it seems quite a few people like reading it, and, more than that, I enjoy writing it. I’m also keenly aware that whilst I’m no longer an apprentice as such, am I still, absolutely – and perhaps always will be – an apprentice in the garden. So for the time being, the blog will live on.