Lavender Lane Biodynamic Farm

Let us give thanks for a bounty of people.

For children who are our second planting, and though they
grow like weeds and the wind too soon blows them away, may
they forgive us our cultivation and fondly remember where
their roots are.

Let us give thanks;

For generous friends…with hearts…and smiles as bright
as their blossoms;

For feisty friends, as tart as apples;

For continuous friends, who, like scallions and cucumbers,
keep reminding us that we’ve had them;

For crotchety friends, sour as rhubarb and as indestructible;

For handsome friends, who are as gorgeous as eggplants and
as elegant as a row of corn, and the others, as plain as
potatoes and so good for you;

For funny friends, who are as silly as Brussels sprouts and
as amusing as Jerusalem artichokes;

And serious friends as unpretentious as cabbages, as subtle
as summer squash, as persistent as parsley, as delightful as
dill, as endless as zucchini and who, like parsnips, can be
counted on to see you through the winter;

For old friends, nodding like sunflowers in the evening-time,
and young friends coming on as fast as radishes;

For loving friends, who wind around us like tendrils and hold
us, despite our blights, wilts and witherings;

And finally, for those friends now gone, like gardens past
that have been harvested, but who fed us in their times that
we might have life thereafter.

For all these we give thanks...(Max Coots) 

When yeast compost is worked into garden soils, those soils change. Compost joins with molecules of clay (something we particularly enjoy here in Ohio!), and the compost-clay glue together. Stable and rich, and believe it or not with the fragrance of a deep pine forest after an afternoon rain, compost retains 90 percent of its moisture, making it extremely useful when we forget to water our gardens. Compost also helps build soil structure by allowing for quite a lot of air circulation and air is vital to keep not only us alive, but our precious soil as well. Now I am not one to usually go out to my garden with pH paper—I just look at the kinds of weeds that are growing—so the good news is that I really don’t have to—thanks to compost. This gold moderates the pH of garden soil, keeping it in balance between a 6.0-6.8 range that is ideal for most garden vegetables and beautiful flowers. For those of us who want to provide the healthiest vegetables for our children, compost has the ability to absorb toxins present in the soil! As it absorbs these toxins, it provides at the same time a welcoming environment for beneficial organisms.

Everything that is or was once alive will become a part of your compost pile and turn into this black gold. Kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, thick ropes of weeds, old potting soil, branches, leaves, left-over supper, dust, herbivore animal manure (not dog and cat, in other words), human hair, saw dust, Kleenex, old love letters, newspaper that is not glossy, even old wool sweaters. These ingredients will "live again" in our compost pile and nourish the microbes in "live" garden soil.

The most important ingredient to add to a compost pile is air. Air allows our compost pile to decay aerobically, so that we don’t get that ammonia smell. When we smell that, precious nitrogen, which should remain in the compost, drifts into the atmosphere and is therefore not readily available in our compost and hence for our nitrogen-loving garden vegetables.

The next fundamental ingredient is water. Air, of course is the fuel for our garden, but water provides structure as well as a flowing passageway for nutrients and organisms. The old saying is that “good compost is as moist as a wrung-out sponge." Too much water is not good either. As my mentor in life, Michel de Montaigne would say, balance in everything is always something to strive for!

After air and water, the primary ingredients that make up or compost is what we call either carbon or nitrogen ingredients. Carbon—like ‘carbs’ for human nutrition—is where the energy comes from. When you feel the heat of a good compost pile, think of the fact that carbon is being digested by the billions of wonderful microorganisms in our pile. What are the carbon ingredients of our compost pile? Anything brown. Straw, shredded office documents, sawdust, woodchips, dry stems of old pea vines, flowers, sunflower stalks, peanut shells, etc.

Now the other side of the spectrum—nitrogen. If carbon is the energy, nitrogen is the protein. Nitrogen is of course responsible for the growth of healthy vegetable tissue. Nitrogen ingredients in the compost pile are wet and green—fresh seedless weeds, kitchen garbage, and here we add manure. Please compost manure rather than tossing it in your gardens or in your raised beds. While it looks brown, it really does fall under our green category, as the food the animals ate (cows, chickens, rabbits, goats, sheep, horses) was once mostly green.

Now what about the balance of brown and green? We know what happens to us if we eat too many beans? We are overwhelming our stomachs with nitrogen. We need that balance of carbon and nitrogen. I mentioned ammonia that we can smell. That is too much nitrogen (“compost farts”) being released into the air. I have read and still believe that the proper ratio in our diets and in our compost pile should ideally be 30 parts carbon (“carbs”) to 1 part nitrogen (“protein”). If you have a bunch of green kitchen waste and you want to toss it onto a compost pile, have next to your pile a black bag of old oaks leaves or a bale of straw. Add that on top of the green waste in what looks like 30 times more brown stuff than green stuff.

As far as the location of your compost pile, it is best to stack it in a shady spot, not too far from your kitchen or a garden hose. Remember, air is important. That is why there are slats in a wooden compost bin. My favorite compost material is hardware wire. The end result looks like a 5x3 foot high drum. I like this because I don’t have to toss and turn the compost so much, if any at all. Air gets through wires and into the compost. If you just throw the compost on the ground, you will have to turn the pile with a pitchfork once a week or so. When that layered drum is finished, leave it be. Water it on occasion, but make a new one right next to it. It is so enjoyable to watch our layered compost turn a deep brown color over time and bottom up through the fenced drum! If we begin a compost drum in the spring, it is ready to be put into our soil in the fall, etc. If you want compost quickly, put it on the ground in a pile. You can make it a “hot, quick compost” by then tossing and turning it 2 or 3 times a week. I prefer not to use those plastic tumblers. I feel that sunlight is the essence of life. Compost needs to feel and be beholden to the light of day and the dark of night.

As we are a practicing biodynamic farm, we add healing herbs to our compost pile when our bins are full. These herbs—yarrow, stinging nettle, and more—add “vital forces” from the universe (moonlight, stars, our sun) to our compost pile. Regardless, you cannot go wrong with adding compost with our without biodynamic preparations to your garden and into our precious earth to heal Her. Your backyard compost seems small, but it is an enormous gesture and certainly the earth thanks you, but so will your body and soul.

Hog manure-root crops; horse manure-great for raised beds and grain and grass fields; cow manure-composts; rabbit manure-green, leafy vegetables; chicken manure-flowers and fruit trees; goat and sheep manure-herbs.

Rudolf Steiner: “What is manure? Food gave occasion for the development of dynamic forces and influences in the animal, but it was excreted. Nevertheless it has been INSIDE the animal, but it was excreted. Nevertheless it has been permeated with that animal’s forces, which in turn are responsible for carrying LIVE nitrogen and live oxygen to the soil.”

Interestingly, whatever part of plant upon which an animal characteristically feeds upon is best fertilized by that animal. A hog roots around in the soil—root crops!

A teacher: -asked whether children should be broken of left-handedness.

Rudolf Steiner (the father of Biodynamic Farming/Gardening): As a rule, yes! The phenomenon of left-handedness is decidedly karmic, in fact a karmic weakness. (R.S. "Conferences with Teachers-Vol. 4, p. 29.)

Perhaps Steiner is correct. This from today’s article in Salon: “the version most commonly heard is that left-handers die an average of nine years sooner, and that by about the age of forty most have disappeared…”

Yet, it is common knowledge that Rudolf Steiner lauded the peasant culture for their intuitive approach to farming. “We go through the fields, and all of the sudden the knowledge is there in us. We know it absolutely. Afterwards we put it to the test and find it confirmed. In in my youth, at least, when I lived among the peasant folk, I witnessed this again and again. We must begin again from such things.” “Agricultural Course,” p. 53.

I wonder to myself, are there more left-handed or more right-handed farmers out there? Do farmers and gardeners rely more on the right side of their brains (creative, intuitive, and usually left handed) or more on the left side of their brains (logical, organized, and usually right handed).

 

The common scientific wisdom concurs that mushrooms are OK to eat. In fact, they contain the trace mineral germanium, which is noted for its antiviral and antitumor effects. Germanium also energizes the body. With so many healing abilities and such variety of flavors and textures, mushrooms just may help the body generate energy, offer protection against tumors and virus infection, and bring complete satiety to the mushroom aficionado.

From a Biodynamic Viewpoint, harmful parasites always consort with mushrooms. In fact, you should have a patch of mushrooms on your lawn or on your farm to “keep all sorts of pests away from your garden.” You might well imagine then what happens when you ingest this parasitic-loving food in your body! Dr. B. Toth (“Cancer induction in mice by feeding mushroom ‘Gyromitra esculenta.” “Cancer Research,” 1992; 52(8): 2279-84) found that mushrooms are associated with cancer in lungs, liver, thyroid, nasal cavity, stomach, colon, and gallbladder in mice.

I hope that you enjoy a new series of blogs. I signed off for awhile but am working on the story and magic of Lavender Lane Biodynamic Farm. The unique, cosmic/spiritual, premium organic method of gardening and farming is on my mind.

I often want to share "out-of-the-box insights" by Rudolf Steiner. Some are hard to swallow, but they begin to work on you to the point that they make a whole lot of sense and are then difficult to forget. To balance viewpoints, I shall present a more common viewpoint from time to time and counter that with a Biodynamic Viewpoint. There will be many to follow. Did you know that nitrogen is the most important element when one meditates? Why is sand important for children to play in? I hope that you find them at the very least provocative! Here we go!

From a Botanist Viewpoint, flower colors are used to attract pollinators. Since pollinators fly and therefore have a bird's-eye view, the vivid colors attract these insects from high above. The brighter the flower, the more likely it will be visited.

From a Biodynamic Viewpoint, flower colors have little to do with pollinators. Pollinators are more concerned with odors. Flower colors are a reflection of the cosmos. When we contemplate a red rose, its red color reflects the forces of Mars. Or when we look at the yellow sunflower, its yellow color has less to do with the sun and more to do with Jupiter. A yellow sapphire is the gemstone of Jupiter. What planet would we associate the bright blue flowers of chicory with? Saturn. Sure enough, blue is the predominant atmospheric color of this beautiful planet. The forces of these planets work most strongly below the earth’s surface. That which shines out in the coloring of the flower is what is happening most strongly in the roots of the the plant from a cosmic point of view.

Next year, the plans are for Lavender Lane to team up with Blessing Acres Farm, a 40-acre organic Amish farm that is converting this year to biodynamic farming. This is a sweet family whose patriarch is 20-year-old Abe. The large family lost their father last year to a bout of cancer. As Abe tells me, "we stopped using chemicals when Dad got sick. It's no secret: we Amish have to make a living so we have been dousing our fruits and vegetables with chemicals to have more available for the "English" to buy at our stands and at the auction. I started reading about how bad hybrid food is for you and how Round-up Ready corn wind pollinates corn grown miles and miles away. We decided then to plant our corn in a forest that is south-facing." We'll begin our partnership with Blessing Acres this year by putting several ears of this forest-grown corn in your baskets next week. This is the only corn we can, in good conscience, feed our own children. We will also begin to heal Blessing Acres this year with our biodynamic herbal preparations and provide Biodynamic Turtle Trees seeds for next year's crop. Your bounty will increase dramatically with this newfound room to grow our fruits and vegetables. The Amish are known for living simply and being true to their traditions. As a result, they only grow what they term "traditional vegetables." Lavender Lane will grow items the Amish just don't care for: lots and lots of greens, distinctive and heirloom varieties of beloved staples, more "exotic" vegetables and herbs.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ PS Look for news about our Thanksgiving Biodynamic Baskets that will be on sale this fall. A healthy, novel way of giving thanks. We will supply most everything for your feast: a bottle of Biodynamic wine, Thompson Raisins, a jug of maple syrup, a pound of freshly milled biodynamic flour, greens that were sweetened by the frost, a dozen of our famous fresh eggs, fresh sage, a loaf of bread (using our eggs, flour, and honey) baked in our clay oven, two sugar sweet baking pumpkins, a bag of Golden Delicious Apples, and more...

The honeybee is precious to us in so many ways. She is responsible for about three fourths of what we eat. The honeybee is the best pollinator because she is focused on what she pollinates. If there are dandelions around an apple tree but she has chosen apple blossoms, she will remain only on the apple blossoms. Numerically, the honeybee is the only insect that overwinters. In the springtime, there is a colony of 20,000 to 30,000 honeybees ready to pollinate; whereas, with a bumblebee, there is only the queen and she uses the spring to start a new colony. What are some statistic currently about the honeybee crisis? We have to import bees--hundreds of thousands of colonies--from Australia to pollinate the orchards of California and Florida. We used to have 7-and-half-million registered colonies here in the United States and last year we were down to 1-and-half million. Ecologically, there is more to the honeybee than pollination. She gives formic acid to all of the plants she pollinates. This formic acid is an invigorator of plant life. The plants in spring have a yearning for this formic acid when they have reached a peak, especially when in bloom. They can then produce enough oxalic acid. We eat this oxalic acid, which our own bodies then turn into formic acid. This process is so important that we could not live in the physical body. The importance of stinging insects is much greater than just pollination. We have lost 65 percent of all animal species due to conventional or industrial agriculture, such as the stag beetle. The honeybee is susceptible to this demise. To overcome our materialistic mindset we have to spiritualize our understanding of nature. If we look at a dog or a cow and we see the physical being. What we don't see is the group soul, as Rudolf Steiner called it. The Native Americans called this the Great Bear or Great Buffalo. They paid homage to this invisible spiritual being that radiates wisdom into the individual animals, and this wisdom we call instinct. Whenever we go against the instinct of an animal, like feeding corn to cows--which we should not--we reduce the level of health or vitality of an animal. A chicken's instinct is to scratch for bugs, not to be imprisoned in a metal cage. We reap what we sow and therefore the quality of meat and eggs is diminished considerably. In this way, we are all karmically responsible for this lack of respect and often our own health pays the toll. Modern beekeeping has gone against the instinct of the honeybee in many ways. It was the last 200 or 300 years that have given us insight into the honeybee-physically-but in what we have gained physically, we have lost a lot-spiritually. Take the scarab beetle, for example. In Iowa or Illinois, the black soils that are 10 to 20 feet is not only due the prairie grass that were tilled under but to the dung of buffalo and cows that were dragged into the ground by the scarab beetle for thousands of years to compost. The basis of evolution, which basically states that the simple evolves into the complex is not necessarily true in this case. The scarab beetle needed the cow or the buffalo and its dung to exist. The Egyptians, who understood this insect's significance, revered her as sacred. Today we laugh as such reverence, especially for a dung beetle. Let us not think that we ourselves have evolved in our wisdom! This unfortunately rings true for our current methods of beekeeping. For example, one of the things that beekeepers love to do in our modern mechanistic era is to provide a foundation of wax whereupon the cell structure is imprinted on wax sheets and inserted into the Langstroth hives. New beekeepers that picked up bees a couple of weeks ago at Walter Kelley Company in Kentucky were given a demonstration about how to put packages of bees into new hives. The gentleman said: "I encourage you to buy these pre-formed sheets of wax because we need to give the honeybees a head start. We want to give them a break. This also makes it easier for us to extract honey." Forget the old German saying--Arbeit macht das Leben süß ("work makes life sweet")--which is within the very fiber of the honeybee. If we look at embryology and how our own human bones are formed, it is similar to how the wax is produced in the honeybee--out of its own bloodstream. The wax is the transformation of the precious substances of nectar and pollen that are collected by the honeybees from flowers. The honeycomb is to the bees what bones are to our body. This would be terrible for us, that we have an adult skeleton prefabricated for our body to grow on. No, our bodies grow as our skeleton grows. The same for the beehive's honeycomb. For our top bar hive, I put a little bit of wax along the tip of each bar to give them some guidance and the rest is up to them. The result is a beautifully shaped, almost heart-like comb for honey and brood. If we rely on rectangular wax foundations that have been pre-stamped, we are undoubtedly incorporating impure wax into the hive, meaning recycled wax that if filled with herbicides and pesticide from bees that have foraged from sprayed lawns and rosebushes, and, of course, from the larger fields of industrial agriculture. Aside from that, we think that we are saving the honeybee work and therefore time in which she can produce honey. It takes the work of 7 pounds of honey to produce 1 pound of wax. What it boils down to sadly is that bees are much too much of a commodity regarding their honey production. Taking honey in the fall, as most beekeepers do, is again about convenience for the beekeeper. Honey flows best in the fall, and so honey extraction equipment is able to extract honey easier. The honey is more crystallized in the spring. But it is in the spring that we should really be asking the bees if it is OK to have the honey stores they now do not need for overwintering. We then look upon the honey, as we should, as a gift from the honeybees. After they give us this gift, they have all summer long to build up the honey stores for next winter. How awful it is to think that, when we take their honey in the fall, which they have made to get through the winter, we give them sugar water. Sugar, which comes from a beet, is not healthy for the honeybee. Besides that, it is a denatured substance and over-acidifies the honeybee's blood. This leads to foulbrood, an infectious honeybee blood disease. Bayer has produced a medicine which will "treat foulbrood," but again, like many medications, it does not get to the source and actually weakens the the immune systems of the honeybees. The Great Bee has every reason to be upset. The critical point is that in modern beekeeping, most all techniques boil down to what is advantageous for the beekeeper and not for the honeybee. We look to blame the honeybee crisis on Varroa mites, cell phone towers, pesticides and herbicides. Each of these aspects has weakened the honeybee, but the beekeepers have worn down her resistance to fight against these problems. She then become susceptible to an array of harmful factors. Bringing bees into university laboratories, which may be funded by Hagen Daz or Burt's Bees, to identify a virus that causes Colony Collapse Disorder brings about the possibility of tenure for a college professor but does not bring us closer to identifying the problem. The honeybees are currently shipped from the citrus groves of Florida to the blueberry bushes in Maine to the canola fields in Canada. They are shipped from one monoculture to another. There are no dandelions there, no wild mustard, no weeds, none of these which are truly healing plants for the honeybees. If we eat one thing, such as broccoli, this would not be good for you and it is certainly not good for the honeybee. We need vitamins, trace minerals, enzymes, etc. from an array of vegetables. But let us not place blame solely on the beekeeper. Consumers demand cheap honey. With honey prices the way they are, beekeepers should not look upon beekeeping as a way to make a living. Beekeeping should be a hobby. When honey is sold, it should not be sold at 5 dollars a pound but rather at 20 dollars a pound and should be marketed as a medicine and not as a sweetener for cakes, biscuits, or tea. For the latter, honey loses its vitality to if put in teas. But let us think on these facts the next time we reach for that jar of honey: two million flowers have to be visited to make a pound of honey; bees travel a total of 55,000 miles to make a pound of honey; a worker bee spends most of her life foraging and at the end, she makes a total of 1/12 of a tsp. of honey. Let us revere this solitary insect's life by not wasting honey as a food product. Little wonder that hard as we have tried, this amazing substance which has everything in it to sustain life, has never been duplicated by human engineering. If the honeybee disappears, to will this sacred substance. Now drones, those superfluous lazy bums, are often sacrificed to catch a few mites. This is a deeply unspiritual way to treat the honeybee hive, which in totality is an organ. Take the drones out and you have upset the honeybee hive organism. It's like saying, well, I don't need this kidney or that liver. The gravest sin beekeepers have committed is to prevent swarming. Swarming is sought to be prevented because colonies are dwindled, lost etc. Queens are quarantined; queens' wings are clipped... Of course, if you have 15,000 hives you can't have them swarm. Even with 2 to 30, you have to get ladders out or climb trees. The big professional beekeeper say that they love their bees. Here is the paradox: how can you have an intimate relationship with an industrial number of hives. Love is about caring, about understanding, about a sacrifice and selflessness. Swarming is for rejuvenation and procreation. What is swarming? The old queen leaves the established hive, which is prepared for a new queen. New queen eggs have been prepared in a circular cell, not a hexagonal one and they face down rather than horizontally. This, along with the time difference for hatching is the difference between a worker and queen. Along with the old queen, about 60 percent of the bees go with her. They simply find a new home, leaving the old home to start up again with the new queen. This is nature but a disaster for commercial beekeepers. The silver lining for beekeepers was the discovery that when an old queen in a mating flight gets snatched by a bird or a dragonfly, workers make an emergency queen out of another worker. After this was discovered, that you can make a queen out of worker was a revelation for commercial beekeeping. We have taken larvae and placed them in round cells to produce emergency queens which we pass off as real queens. The emergency queen is not a full-fledged queen. The worker bees know that and usually kill the emergency queen within a year and make a real queen. Selling queen bees is a big business, but again, it is a business, a human business that cares little for the unfolding drama of why emergency queens are brought about in the first place. Let us look at the horizontal plane that workers emerge from, as well as the emergency queen. The horizontal plane, the locale of our hands, is the plane of socialization and work. Real and true queens are capped in a round cell and are placed vertically. The upright position is the position of spiritual integrity and our spiritual position. By being in the horizontal and an artificial structure, the nobility is bred out of the queen with an emergency. 99.9 percent of the queen bees that we purchase as a nucleus colony or as a package are packaged with an artificial queen. We rarely ask the companies to give us a notification in writing that this is NOT an artificial queen. Lawyers love documents that are in writing! Yes, cell phone towers are not good for us, perhaps giving rise to brain tumors in us, are bound not to be good for the honeybees. Trucking honeybees is not good for her either. It takes a week for honeybees to map out their forage area. They want to know where the medicinal plants are and need time for orientation. Herbicides and pesticides are certainly unhealthy for the honeybee. We simply need to give the honeybee the freedom to give her what she needs. We have worn down her integrity and her immune systems to the point where it will take years for her to make a population comeback. Even the wild honeybees have been worn down. Swarms that go into the forest usually succumb to mites. In return, we receive the gift of her surplus of honey which we should have no more than a teaspoon a day. On a final note, Mike and Sue of Bath, Ohio gave me a call, telling me that a major swarm of honeybees was about 20 feet in their tree. Sue said that she called an exterminator and he told her that they were honeybees and it was up to her. She replied that she did not want to kill honeybees. Sue's decision was remarkably sensitive for the sake of the honeybees. Me, my wife, Linda and our two volunteer WWOOFER's (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), Philip and Kim sped off in our cars to capture it. This was indeed a swarm, for it was at least 2 feet across and 1 foot wide. We managed to get two large boxes of honeybees and placed them next to our Russian bees in our top bar hive. That afternoon, we received another call from the City of Barberton, Ohio that there was a swarm at a gas station. We could not do it, as we are in need of more hives. My wish is to follow my mentor and create a honeybee sanctuary here in Akron, Ohio. With your help, we can begin to establish it. We currently have two top bar hives but would gladly like more to begin to house these swarms. If you or your organization are so inclined to adopt a hive for 275 dollars, both the Great Honeybee and Lavender Lane Biodynamic Farm would appreciate it. We would be delighted to emblazon any name that you would like on the front of the hive that you adopt. Please e-mail Farmer Jake if you are interested in this very worthy gesture. Thank you! (lavenderlane@earthlink.net)

We are very busy and happy planting our seeds this spring, but in the midst of this joy comes a deep regret which I must share with you. My biodynamic mentor does not offer corn to his CSA members and, unfortunately, we will folllow suit this year. Our concern is for your health, the health of your children, and the health of this planet. Here at Lavender Lane, we have prided ourselves in never offering our community what we would not serve to our own children. Hard decisions have to be made and this is one of them. GMO Roundup-Ready corn is grown throughout Ohio and, as you know, corn is pollinated predominantly by the wind. Basically the problem is this: "Roundup-Ready corn" does not die when Roundup is sprayed on and around the crop to kill weeds. Instead, the corn aborbs this herbicide. Put simply, we have wonderful biodynamic corn seeds that are not genetically modified. But when this premium organic corn seed is planted, it becomes tainted by wind pollination. Even though my biodynamic farming mentor has a 75-acre farm, he knows that big gusts of wind can carry the genetically modified Roundup-ready corn pollen quite a long ways. This is from an article, "Monsanto and the Roundup Ready Controversy:" "A recent study testing the effects of glyphosate on human cells which "corresponds to low levels of residues in food or feed" has found that "the proprietary mixtures available on the market could cause cell damage and even death around residual levels to be expected, especially in food and feed derived from R[oundup] formulation-treated crops" Glyphosate Formulations Induce Apoptosis and Necrosis in Human Umbilical, Embryonic, and Placental Cells. And though disputed by Monsanto, studies have also indicated that exposure to glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) increases the risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and other serious health concerns." I am saddened by this, but to consume corn, any corn at this point, is passively saying that Round-up Ready corn is healthy for people and animals. Please join us and the Organic Consumers Association by demanding a global moratorium on all genetically engineered foods and crops ~ www.organicconsumers.org

"Let me tell you 'bout the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, the moon up above, and the thing called love." These are the opening lyrics to Martin Dean's well-known ditty, "Birds and Bees." Some of us when we were children remember our parents' prelude to "the talk" and it went something like this: "let's have a little talk about the birds and the bees..." Now let us be frank–this was not going to be a discussion about platonic love; it was about sex pure and simple with a little bit of love thrown in to ground the discussion in abstention. Meaning, "the talk" was still about sex. And, yes, the dictionary defines "Birds and Bees" as "a phrase that refers to coy explanations of basic information about sex and reproduction to children." Cole Porter and Dr. Rudolf Steiner helped me to sort this out. What confused me is that I always thought that the phrase as the dictionary defines it was correct and yet when I would catch myself singing Martin Dean's song in front of my children, I thought, "that's OK, isn't it? Martin didn't sing, '...the moon up above, and the thing called sex.' " I pondered this: does the phrase refer to just love, just sex, or sex and love? I thought for sure that Cole Porter, just by the title of his 1928 song, "Let's Do It" would most certainly clarify the phrase for me. But I was wrong. Here are his lyrics: "And that's why birds do it, bees do it Even educated fleas do it Let's do it, let's fall in love." By weighing in on the side of love, Cole Porter appears to agree with Martin Dean. Right? But isn't sex an expression of love? Still confused, I went to the source, as they say. Someone asked Rudolf Steiner what the difference was between bees and wasps. The phrase, "birds and bees" was beautifully clarified for me after reading Steiner's typically wondrous response to the query. "You would be able to gain a correct and true understanding of life within the beehive if you were to allow for the fact that everything in the environment that surrounds the Earth in all directions has an extremely strong influence on what goes on in a beehive. Life in the beehive, much more so than with ants and wasps, is based on successfully cooperating and working with the other bees in the hive. If you try to figure out how this comes about, you will, after careful observation, draw the following conclusion. The bees have a life in which that element is strongly suppressed, which in other animals is expressed through their sexual life. With bees, this element is very much repressed. "You see, with bees it is always the case that only very few chosen females, the queen bees, take care of all propagation of the species. With the rest, the sexual life is more or less repressed, but in this sexual life there is another element–love life–which is, above all, a matter concerning the soul... "If you try to describe on one hand, wasps and ants in this regard, then they are considered animals that remove themselves from the influence of the planet Venus. Bees, on the other hand, are completely open to this influence and develop this love life throughout the entire bee colony... "But the thing that a bee profits from the most is that it derives its sustenance from the very parts of the plant that are pervaded by the plant's love life. The bee sucks its nourishment, which it makes into honey, from the parts of the plant that are steeped in love. And the bee, if you could express it this way, brings love life from the flowers into the beehive... "This is less true with ants and wasps. If you study how they live, you will see that they are not like bees in this respect, that they engage in a more sexual behavior. The bee, with the exception of the queen bee, is a being that would say, if I may put it this way: "As individuals we want to renounce all sexual life, so that we make each one of us into a supporter of the hive's love life." They have indeed carried into the hive that which lives in the flowers. When you think through all of this properly, you will have unlocked the whole secret of the beehive. The living element of this thriving, germinating love that is spread out over the flowers is also contained in the honey the bees make. "You can study this matter further by eating honey. What does this honey do? Honey creates sensual pleasure, at the most, on the tongue. At the moment when you eat honey, it creates the proper connection and relationship between the airy and fluid elements in the human being. There is nothing better for the human being than to add a little honey in the right quantity to food. In a very wonderful way, the bees see to it that a person learns to work on the internal organs by means of this soul element...the entire cosmos can find its way into human beings and help make them sound in mind and body."

For those who are new to our hens and to our pair of extremely happy roosters, these are FREE RANGE. As many of you have seen (which is really the point behind this blog), when not found roosting on top of Alexis, our goat, they are rooting around in our compost for juicy grubs. Here’s the point to my atypically sarcastic title: The USDA does not to date have a definition for free-range eggs and instead relies on the producer to supply that information. "In fact, there is no commercial or legal definition for free-range eggs in the United States,” according to Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns, a Potomac, Maryland-based animal advocacy organization. “Neither is there an association of free-range egg producers to set and maintain standards." I am not writing to say that our free-range chickens are more "free rangy" than another farmer's. I am writing to state a fact and, as a local farmer, to advocate for an open window so that you can see with your own eyes where your food comes from for the sake of your health and for the sake of animals suffering heedlessly. As a worse case scenario but certainly in the ballpark of not being held accountable, I can keep an entire flock of chickens in a closet, debeak them, declaw them, open that closet door for a few minutes to relieve my conscience, slam it shut, and still call the eggs produced in that closet–free range–and sell them as such. Don’t get me wrong: I like the idea of not being regulated. I like the idea of a backyard chicken flock. More than that, I like the idea for the consumer to be free to take a look at that backyard chicken flock.

The standards held by Demeter for Biodynamic certification tend to be more stringent than that of Organic certification. What then are some of the differences between Organic methods of growing and Biodynamic? The Biodynamic farmer conceives her or his farm in terms of forces and processes, whereas the Organic farmer tends to think in terms of substances that can and cannot be used–nitrogen, neem oil, etc. The Biodynamic farmer relies upon a minimal amount of nutrients from remote sources and, ideally will generate the richness of the soil through cover-cropping and the use of manure from animals that dwell on the farm. The farm is thus to be self-sustaining. Organic fertilizers bought from a garden store provide only a bandage for what should be a goal of total and complete healing and vitalization of the soil and her plants. The Biodynamic farmer realizes that by importing fertilizers, problems from the source may be brought onto the farm. When we purchase a bag of peat moss, for example, we are not only depleting the world's peat lands that have been forming for 360 million years, but regarding our health, peat may contain traces of heavy metals such as mercury. The source of mercury may be methane that has penetrated upward from great depths and binds with the peat above. The Biodynamic farmer also uses specifically prepared homeopathic herbs and minerals for the compost and for the farm that were outlined by the founder of Biodynamic farming, Rudolf Steiner, in his "Agriculture Course" from 1924. Also, and as different from Organic farming, Steiner believed that much like the moon affects the tides, so does it affect the growing phases of planting and harvesting. Take, for example, a juicy tomato that is made mostly of water. Of course, that tomato plant that is exposed all night to the forces of the moon and all day to the forces of the sun will be greatly impacted by those forces. Therefore, complex stellar and planetary Biodynamic calendars chart the influences of these forces for gardeners and farmers to follow to achieve optimum growing conditions and cosmic vitality for the crops. An Organic tomato-while delicious and safe to consume-is thus not the same as a Biodynamic tomato. When you consume Biodynamic food, you are ensuring the highest quality of healing and protection for your body and for the environment. To date, there are only a handful or Demeter Certified farms in the United States (about 110), but the number is growing as Biodynamic methods of farming and gardening have made great inroads, especially in the production of wine. In a nutshell, Biodynamic produce is 100% organic, but, in addition, the Biodynamic farmer/gardener has gone beyond these safeguards to bring the farming process more closely in tune with nature and her unseen forces of vitality.

Americans tend to push children competitively and they feel that they succeed: they listen to Mozart on CDs to develop brains; they learn to read early on; they become computer savvy; they excel at all ages in organized sports. Children in Finland are headed in the exact opposite direction in each way. Yet the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development reviewed the fact that Finland’s children have both the highest literacy rate and, when tested in high school, score first in the world in the sciences and in math. Where is the United States? The middle of the pack. As explained in the "New York Times," the recipe for Finland is basic. For one, they don’t start school until 7 years of age, thereby reading, writing, using analytical skills is held off. Aside from this, what do they do to advance their children’s smarts so much? They have no gifted programs and frown on organized sports. The secret is their priority. The children learn by doing on a farm or in a forest or with an animal. “The core of learning is not in the information being digested on computers, the times tables learned, the books being read, it is that we stress environmentally-based education,” states Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. Please let us know how are children-friendly farm can be of assistance to you, to your child, or to your school to awaken the wonder and awe of nature.