This week @ Plukrijp

We did:

We continue to harvest every morning for the shop, offering beautiful & tasty veggies to neighbors & friends.

We weeded the center three short beds at the Hei, shuffled them, put rye straw from our farm onto the beds & transplanted more strawberries from the long raised beds. More & more of the Hei will be turned into perennial, lower maintenance plants so that we can focus more on the high maintenance crops near home.

We spread a mix of compost, horse manure, phacelia, field peas, & rye onto the previous rye field at Hei to help decompose the remaining roots, cover the soil, & have a living cover for fall/winter.

We shuffled in between the leek & carrots a at Hei.

We cleared the left side & right side of closed tunnel of all end-of-life crops & gave it to the chickens, leaving the peppers, tomatoes, melons, & watermelons to harvest from for the coming weeks.

We cut leftover wood into pieces & put them into boxes, stored for our cold winters.

We welded a broken wheelbarrow back to functionality with the help of our technical guys. Thanks Alex & Antonio!

With the renovation of the kitchen & bathroom in little plukrijp house, we have set it to be the new center of activity in Plukrijp. We now spend our time there eating, planning, talking, listening to & playing music, & generally enjoying being together. Thanks everyone for helping set up such a cozy new atmosphere!

We lit the sauna & warmed up after a week (or three?) of cold & rainy weather.

Our newest friends Istvan & Suzanna, have arrived from Hungary & have helped us around the farm with outdated electrical systems, teaching us how to solder, introducing us to local Hungarian food, & generally giving great life advice & conversation. Thanks for your presence!

We set up an easier watering system for washing the veggies that come to the little shop in the morning.

Inspiring Video

Stop It

‘I mean, you don’t want to go through life being scared of being buried alive in a box, do ya? I mean that sounds frightening!’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Then stop it!’

A few words from Niels

Do we save seeds or do we buy seeds? Is it necessary to preserve a specific attribute or variety of crop?

Nature advances and adapts through natural and sexual selection. Seeds are the results of plants sexual propagation. Other forms of plant propagation like cuttings or suckers produces genetically identical plants. Through cuttings and grafting and the like we can hold on to certain properties of plants that we like.

The downside of having many genetically identical plants is that one disease can easily wipe out the lot. Like the banana monoculture variety that will eventually succumb to Panama disease.

Many seeds that are available through mass production are genetically engineered and mass produced and have many of the same problems. Often when we buy seed we get older seeds from a weaker genetic stock that has known illnesses.

Organic and heirloom varieties are generally more dynamic and more expensive. Breeding plants and controlling pollination and keeping it all organized is a complex operation, not to mention the regulations around this stuff.

Permaculture gardeners offer another way that mimics nature. We allow at least some of our plants to experience their entire life cycle. We save the seed of whichever vital and tasty plants that reach the seed stage. Not only do these seeds have excellent germinating power, you also tend to have them in abundance. This allows you to spread and sow in abundance. Being part of nature, we will only end up eating and saving seeds from the plants whose properties work well for us. Natural selection.

So just start saving seeds. It doesn’t take much experience or complicated tools to participate in the natural selection processes. It does take a bit of letting go of the predictability and impatience that many modern people experience.

Also don’t worry about reverse engineering genetically engineered seeds, just have what works and you will naturalize your crops again. This may take a couple of generations. If you are lucky, someone will share their heirloom varieties with you, making the properties and selection process very stable already.

Seed saving asks of us basic momentum and continuity of social dynamics and cultural capital. For some crops like parsnip, the seeds don’t stay viable for much more than a year so its not so forgiving if your group dissolves or fragments or forgets about seeds.

Even so, as long as you don’t live totally isolated, you will be able to start with someone else’s seed again. Even if some of the legendary varieties you’ve produced over time, perfectly adapted to your soil, get lost.

You can always plant a new seed.

John Williams

It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Inspiring Music

ᴍᴏsᴛ ᴀɴᴄɪᴇɴᴛ ʟᴏᴠᴇ ᴘᴏᴇᴍ: 𝑺𝒐𝒏𝒈 𝒐𝒇 𝒔𝒐𝒏𝒈𝒔 | نَشِيدُ الأَنَاشِيدِ | שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים – 𝑯𝒂𝒅𝒂𝒓 𝑵𝒆𝒉𝒆𝒎𝒚𝒂

𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘩 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦, 𝘯𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘥𝘴 𝘥𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘪𝘵 (8, 7) 𝘈𝘴 𝘢 𝘭𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘯𝘴, 𝘴𝘰 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘺 𝘭
𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘲𝘶𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘩 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦,
𝘯𝘦𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘥𝘴 𝘥𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘪𝘵
𝘈𝘴 𝘢 𝘭𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘯𝘴,
𝘴𝘰 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘺 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴
𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘨𝘰𝘯𝘦,
𝘖 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯?

Song of Solomon

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