No I haven't been brewing intoxicating substances but something has been brewing..my worm tea. My worm workers have been asking for a pay rise so I added another tower to the worm farm because they are being so productive.
As I don't have a cow I can't bury cow horns and use their cow dung by the light of the full moon and make preparations to biodynamically spray all over the garden BUT I can use my worm castings and do a home grown biodynamic preparation by swirling it all into a bucket. Then I cast the worm tea all over the garden and pray please Lord of creation and worms as I cast out this super charged worm tea grow and live and turn this dead soil alive.
I'm hoping it will work. I had been watching a dvd called 'one cow, one man, one planet' about Peter Proctor who, it seems is a biodynamic practitioner. He went to India to tell all the farmers who had been using degrading chemical agriculture which destroyed their soil to dust, to switch to organic farming, and taught them how to compost, how to fertilise their soil naturally, and other things like crop rotation, seed saving and natural forms of farming and agriculture. It seems entire villages are catching on and there's a green revolution (or is it rebellion?) happening to counter the chemical/genetically engineered/modern poisonous methods of farming to make money.
It's pretty amazing and you can see the difference in the soil. Now my soil, what's left of it, is still a few years away from being that healthy fertile soil you can just grow anything in. The first year of starting this garden I couldn't grow any shrubs they all died because they didn't like the hard as rock clay soil. I still find it hard going as there's still not enough humus to sustain life. But I've managed to get a few plants started the easier ones like succulents, ground covers, manukas, apples, bulbs and plants that are marginally weeds like swan plants. Everything else like veges I've got in pots. So here's hoping as the more I compost and add green manures, and the more Martha and my worms produce manure that I will get more life into this place and the soil will be nice and healthy not dead and barren.
Why I live in the hardest area to create a garden I don't know but we all have to start somewhere. Teri's asked me how do you garden on a clay hillside and I'm thinking with much determination! Soil is like our hearts for anything to grow they must be sort of soft and spongy not hardened, cracked and broken. We had a sermon at church last Sunday and the scripture was 2 Chronicles 7:14 it was talking about no rain and the locusts eating all the land. BUT God says 'If my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray, and turn from their wicked ways and seek my face, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and heal their land."
So God please answer my prayers to heal my land!
