Mother's Minigardens Experiment

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The deep-mulch system can, in principle, substantially enrich the soil. Essentially, it imitates the natural process of the forest, where fallen leaves gradually break down to a rich, black humus. People tell of long-established DM gardens that have soil—under the mulch—so loose you can push your hand down into it. The drawback is time: It may take years for the soil to become significantly developed.

WHY WE USE BFI

While the above words pretty well sum up the lessons we learned from the first year of our minigarden experiment, I'd like to share a major—and undiscussed—reason why we choose to demonstrate the biodynamic/French intensive method in our main Eco-Village gardens. This method, with its antecedents in Chinese and ancient Greek cultures, its reflection of the influence of Rudolf Steiner and of the refinements added by Alan Chadwick, is inseparable from a philosophy that looks beyond the immediate personal gain of food on the table. Chadwick said, "The ob ject of gardening is not production-it is happiness in God's Creation." He meant not only the happiness of the gardener as he or she works in the air and sun or enjoys the fruit of those labors, but also the happiness (or well-being) of the soil, the plants, and the other living creatures making up the plot's "ecosystem." The gardener expresses in his or her own garden the love and caring that he or she feels for the earth and for all life.

It is clearly possible to have this same attitude while using a gardening method other than BFI. This technique, however, encourages a caring philosophy every step of the way. It's built right into the method—from the intimate connection with the soil that comes through hand-digging, to the sowing of seeds in flats and their gentle transplanting, to the beauty of the living-mulch concept.

We like to urge our Eco-Village visitors to try this method, even if they put in only one hand-dug bed beside a large, rototilled garden. That one bed will become a laboratory in which the gardener can learn about soil and plants and about the subtle, interweaving factors that lead to health in each. It will be a place to enjoy the physical movements of digging and tilthing, and a place to see for oneself if Chadwick was right: if the object of gardening is happiness in God's Creation.

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