It was one of those lovely productive kind of days. The sun was shining, it wasn’t too hot and the children allowed me to get on with a few overdue jobs in and around the vegetable garden. My partner even built a new door to the chicken coop so that I can start shutting them in at night. I have a little ‘egg disappearing act’ going on I’ve become wise to. I’ll have to start getting up earlier in the morning to let them out to avoid getting chicken guilt. I didn’t have any biodynamically relevant jobs to do today in the vegetable garden as it was a ‘root’ day on a ascending, waxing moon. For those of you who haven’t the slightest idea about what that statement means, I’ll explain a little. Put simply, it is farming and gardening according to the phases of the moon and where the moon is positioned on a particular day. The methods are all organic, where soil health is key, only natural fertilisers are used, and it also incorporates an element of well-being and spirit in nature for the gardener. Sound good? I will allow you to look into it further yourselves if you are interested so as to not alienate anyone. It is the way I have chosen to garden here and I have a superb calendar that keeps me ‘in tune with the moon’. I’ve always had an intimate relationship with the moon throughout my life and it just makes sense to me that the moon’s effect on all living things and its powerful gravitational pull must be a force to work with. Back to the patch, I noticed today that the wild plants have put on a lot of substantial growth in the past week with all of the rain and warm days we’ve had. I found that I was concentrating mainly on trimming dock and nettles back from our many paths across the field and around the chicken enclosure. That’s great exercise I can tell you. I want to ‘re-wild’ the top field and meadow as I have said before, so I’m using only woman power to keep large growths of what the children call “naughty plants” down. I opened the gate to the vegetable garden and proceeded to trim the long grass, dock, a few nettles and edges of the beds. Still no “weeding”. As a lover of wild plants and those that are useful I am allowing a few to grow and flower in there for bees and for my needs. I’m using them for defense purposes too, disguising the succulent cultivated plants I’ve grown from seed. I say quietly, it is working but for many traditional gardener friends reading this, it does look messy. My feeling on the matter is that it’s a garden for producing delicious home-grown food, not for entering into any kind of competition. In my eyes it’s just how I want it and I love it. The children love it too and it has a wonderful fairy house we made together right in the middle of it out of old bits from the barn. We did have a blackbird last week that came in and turfed up a few small seedlings but they needed thinning anyway. The radishes and carrots that were flattened sprang back up so I didn’t mind about that either. I was hesitant today to start “weeding” among the broad bean plants, peas, corn, pumpkins, and cauliflower seedlings. After all, “weeds” are perfectly nice plants just growing somewhere we don’t want them to, right? They grow so vigorously in soil that is suited to them. My thoughts were turning over an intriguing idea that I read about a couple of months ago when researching ways to start a new vegetable garden. It is called “Do Nothing Farming” developed by Masanobu Fukuoka who was a Japanese farmer and philosopher. He developed a system of natural farming where he did not plow his fields (no digging), used no pesticides or artificial fertilisers, did not flood his fields like so many were doing and yet his yield equaled or surpassed the most productive farms in his country. With no “weeding” or agricultural practices, a farm or garden is considered a complete ecosystem that is self-supporting. This resonates with me in relation to working in harmony with nature here and not wanting to constantly be at war with it. Nature decides what grows and what does not. I find this an extremely eyebrow-raising notion, in a good way. As in biodynamic gardening, I have already established “companion planting” where the plants help each other to thrive. This happens because of a belief that certain combinations of plants offer support mutually by deterring or attracting insects and improving nutrient imbalances in the soil. My garden will have to grow a bit more before I can report on any successes with that one. My hope is that the munching little critters like mice, deer and insects steer clear so that we can enjoy one or two peas this year! I knelt down in the soil and decided to do a bit of light “weeding” just so that the new vegetable plants I sowed would have enough light and water to get ahead of the game. It also helps if you are able to see where they are. I only removed a small amount of so-called “weeds” so hopefully, Masanobu Fukuoka won’t mind too much.