Sustainability
Biodynamic farmers aspire to generate their own fertility and plant, spray and harvest crops according to the lunar calendar. It might sound modern, but the practice is two centuries old, finds Jane Wheatley
EVERY autumn, Jane Scotter collects fresh manure from a neighbour’s lactating cows, brings it home to her market garden, Fern Verrow in Herefordshire, and ladles it into her collection of cow horns. The horns are then buried close together in soil and left for six months over winter, after which the contents have composted into a perfectly balanced mix of bacteria and fungi.
Mrs Scotter tips the mix into a barrel of water—‘two or three pinches in 30 litres’— and stirs it vigorously with a broom handle. This precious potion is then applied to her 16 acres of f lower and vegetable beds: ‘I do it in the afternoon, on what is called a root day,’ she tells me, ‘walking up and down with a bucket and a brush f licking it over the soil. It is a tonic, a spring awakening for the land.’
Later in the season, horns filled with ground quartz silica and buried the previous summer will be excavated, emptied and the contents mixed with water to be sprayed in a fine mist over young plants and crops. ‘It is done on certain days,’ she notes, ‘one day for leaves, one for fruit, another for f lowers, according to the calendar.’
This is biodynamic gardening, dictated by movements of the moon and planets in relation to one another. But how, you might ask, did anyone even think of the horn thing?
I turn to Gabriel Kaye, chief executive of the Biodynamic Association: ‘It was a moment of inspiration,’ she says simply. ‘Rudolf Steiner was in touch with natural processes; he buried some horns, had the contents tested over time and saw the effect.’
In 1924, a year before his death, the philosopher and educationalist had turned his attention and considerable brain power to the business of agriculture. He encouraged farmers to dispense with chemical fertilisers and to build their own fertility by integrating livestock, rotation cropping and composting to create a single, self-sustaining organism.
So far, so organic, you could say, except that biodynamics goes further. Based on Steiner’s teaching, a German farmer called Maria Thun produced a calendar setting out planting, cultivation and harvesting plans for the year; it has been published annually for 60 years. My 2023 copy proposed picking fruit when the moon was in Sagittarius between September 22, at 6pm, and the 24th, at 8pm. To deal with certain pests, she recommends burning their corpses during the approp
