Natural Agriculture and Me

Ever since I heard about natural agriculture and read Masanobu Fukuoka's book "One Straw Revolution" I have been interested in the theory. Stop tilling the fields, work with nature, not against it, use less time and labor, and so on.

There is only one problem....

I like digging! I love the way a freshly double dug bio-intensive bed looks! The smell of the freshly tilled ground, counting the earthworms, the neat and tidy look of it... I just love it! I even love to weed the garden- I just don't have time to do it!

So I think I will continue to double dig for now at least, and just admire my Natural Agriculture practicing friends.

Seedballs

Goodness gracious great balls of Seeds!

I finally did it. I cleaned out my seed collection, emptying any packet of seeds that was more than two years old into a big jar. It came to quite a collection. After that I shook up the jar to mix them around, and took one scoop of seeds, and four scoops of clay, added a little water, and began to mix it up. That was beastly cold work, since the clay was fresh off the mountain and still had some chunks of ice in it!!!

After a few minutes, when the mix felt pretty even, I pinched off some pieces and started rolling them around on my palms to make marbles. These I lined up in an old Amazon box (ironically the one that they shipped "One Straw Revolution" by Masanobu Fukuoka in). Now they are slowly drying out, waiting for me to toss them out in the "experiment." More on that later. It was a lot of fun playing in the mud again.