Last weekend I joined a group of local biodynamic practitioners to spend an hour stirring cow dung in water to make a super potent soil improver called Preparation 500. The cow dung is specially prepared by being buried in a cow’s horn for 6 months under certain astrological conditions. The stirring involves first stirring in one direction to create a whirlpool, then reversing the direction to create, first, chaos and then eventually a whirlpool in the reverse direction. Once stirred, the Preparation 500 is sprinkled over the garden (or paddocks for larger scale operations).

The best thing about the gathering was seeing the host’s (Debbie, pictured right) garden. There were lots of winter crops growing well, and spring planting in progress. Also, I learnt that in Wellington the time to start planting things outdoors is after Labour weekend, in about three weeks time. Until then it’s too cold with a continued risk of late frosts.

In terms of the biodymanics, I’m not totally into it. It’s certainly a system that’s very in-touch with the subtle life-energies involved in the garden, and I’m adopting many of the techniques. But some of the special biodynamic preparations are made using animal remains (e.g. a sheep’s skull, or a stag’s bladder). One of the core principles of Hare Krishna is living in a non-violent manner (Sanskrit: ‘ahimsa’). So, in my garden, I’m neither raising animals for slaughter (e.g. the chooks will live until they die of natural causes) nor using by-products of animal slaughter (such as blood-and-bone fertiliser).

In the future, it would be an interesting to research whether the biodynamic preparations could be made in a non-violent manner. But for now I’m busy enough just getting a few things to grow!

I’ve had some unexpected side-effects from feeding the chooks — the wheat and pigeon-peas that they haven’t eaten started growing. It’s unexpected, but not unwelcome. I’ll be quite interested to see how the wheat does, it’s still quite short:

It will either be a green manure (dug back into the garden bed), a carbon crop (straw for the compost) or it may even get as far as producing wheat — if so, I’ll buy a grain mill and bake bread with it.

Where the wheat is growing was supposed to be broad beans. I’ll be weeding out the wheat around where they’re growing to give them room. Some of them have sprouted up quite nicely:

The second bed didn’t get so much wheat scattered around on it. But it did get lots of pigeon peas, which have all come up quite nicely. Some of them I’ve just pulled out and eaten as sprouts. Pigeon peas are also known as Toor Dal, which is a common ingredient in Indian cooking. Like the wheat, I’m going to leave these to grow and I hope that I get a crop from them. If nothing else, they’ll fix nitrogen and improve the soil for whatever comes next.