Damery - Between Heaven and Earth

Between Heaven and Earth:

The Biodynamic Compost Preparations

Blog Meditations on How We Do It

by Patricia Damery

Harms Vineyards and Lavender Fields

Helichrysum and Valley Oak. Photo by Art and Clarity

Between Heaven and Earth: The Biodynamic Compost Preparations: How We Do It

Patricia Damery

Copyright2014 by Leaping Goat Press

Published at Smashwords

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Between Heaven and Earth: The Biodynamic Compost Preparations by Patricia Damery

Table of Contents

The Living Earth

Once my sister and I dug a raccoon trap in the fall stubble of my fathers corn field, a 3 by 4 hole about 3 deep. In the bottom we placed marshmallows and then disguised the hole with dried corn stalks. The only thing we ever caught was the front tire of the tractor as my uncle was spring plowing, and then we really caught it! But one thing I remember and now find remarkable: We never hit subsoil: the topsoil was that deep.

We lived in a converted schoolhouse, the one my father and grandmother had both attended, in the middle of what had once been the great prairie of the central part of United States. Prairie grasses are deep and build top soil. We were the beneficiaries of this legacy of thousands of years of prairie, which, by the time we were living there, was 98% gone.

When the fields were plowed in the spring, the air was redolent with the rich smell of living earth. I took that smell for granted, as if it were a baseline experience upon which to judge all others. We were told we lived in an area with some of the best soil on earth, that only in one place in Ukraine, and maybe Iowa, was the earth any better.

It grew good crops, too. Our corn was thick and tall; our soybeans, deep green and loaded with pods. When we drove through southern Illinois, we felt sorry for the farmers with their thinner, weaker soils and less vigorous crops.

I heard once that the top soil of the Midwest is so rich and deep that it can handle years of abuse before its growing capacity collapses. Its vitality lends the earth to exploitation. The living quality of the earth: the microorganisms that colonize the soil, the decay that makes organic matter (humus), sequestering carbon, is not attended to, only that which grows from it. Production is the goal, not replenishing the living earth.

My husband and I live in an area in which we cannot take the top soil for granted. This means we have to be more conscious about our farming. Farming Soul: A Tale of Initiation tells of the farming crisis we were in, and how this crisis brought us into the redemptive discipline of Biodynamic farming in which the focus is the earth. In these short essays, I discuss some of the ways we work with the earth on our ranch and what it means.

Although the culture is beginning to address the impact of the use of chemicals and genetically modified seed on the environment, and even our own bodies, one issue greatly overlooked is the impact on the human psyche. The psychologist Carl Jung was very aware of the impact. He said:

if one touches the earth one cannot avoid the spirit. And if one touches it in the friendly way of Dionysus, the spirit of nature will be helpful; if in an unfriendly way, the spirit of nature will oppose one. We never pay attention, so we probably offend the spirits of things all the time, and because we have not been polite they will be against us, and this leads us more and more into a kind of dissociation from our own nature ( Vision Seminars , 459).

According to Jung, the neurotic is that person dissociated from his or her own nature. Healing involves re-membering ourselves, remembering we are physical beings that are a part of a whole of nature, but only one part.

But returning to smell: One of my favorite times during our June Open House at our ranch is a tour in which we describe how we apply biodynamic principles. As we walk through the thigh-deep lavender in full bloom, I describe how we compost. We begin with goat barn bedding, cow manure, lavender distilling debris, and grape pumice, layering manure alternately with bedding straw, then inserting compost preps, and covering the pile with a foot of straw to work over the next year. As we stand around the compost, I reach into the pile and pull out a handful of sweet-scented compost, moist, crumbly, and smelling of my fathers fields. People pull away at first, shocked, but when they overcome their initial reluctance, and most will after the initial reluctance, their eyes wander, as if they are remembering... re-membering

The Beginning

Stirring the horned manure, "500".

We begin the growing year with a biodynamic spray sequence: Barrel Compost (BC Prep), Horned Manure (500), Horned Crystal (501), and then fermented Equisetum tea. This is a kind of awakening sequence, awakening the soil, the vines, the lavender, and the many other plants growing here, as well as our own spirits.

We start one late afternoon, stirring first the BC Prep, and while that is being sprayed, another one of us stirring the 500. These are both earth sprays, working for fertility, and are sprayed on the ground.

Half an hour before sunrise the next morning we start stirring the 501. 501, or ground-up quartz crystal that has been treated in a special way, is a mineral source of silica, balancing solar/cosmic forces with the calcium of the earth sprays, and is sprayed above the plants early morning. But beware! One year we sprayed a little late in the morning after oversleeping and burned the lavender.

The fourth spray in this sequence, fermented equisetum tea, is a plant source of silica and is sprayed late afternoon on the ground. It enables us to use far less sulfur on our grapes to control mildew (or other fungal infections), working to keep the death forces on the earth where they belong, not in our grape bunches.

One of several ways to spray. You can also use a

new paint brush or evergreen branch.

The best way to learn biodynamics is by doing. Overtime you can make compost with the six compost preps and use the sprays for various imbalances in your garden or yard, but this spring spray sequence sets you up for the year.