elderflower liqueur, so simple. this infusion is stunningly, unforgettably flavourful. i love a tiny glass with a squeeze of lemon and a drop of stevia. now we’re impatiently waiting for even a few days’ infusion! thanks to my appleturnover supporters for helping to make these small works possible. subscribe at appletunover.tv for big news of new things in the works. #elderflowerliqueur #elderflower #wildforaging#tipple
cooking outside in a charcoal-fired earth oven while we gather to make biochar to nurture the soil is primal joy. we can all contribute something, and in working together, work becomes play. like many hands round the biochar kiln, collaborative cookery lightens the load, shares the wealth and makes much more than the sum of its parts. this charcoal social is double pot-luck, everyone goes away nourished, to nurture land and community in turn.
to deeply relocalise and meet more of our needs right where we live, is at once to increase our resilience in a world of fragile systems, to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and the destruction of people and places that continues to escalate in their pursuit and from their use, and to build the collaborative world we need to thrive simply together.
it’s a sound pattern for a flourishing future.
how will we get from here to there? follow @appleturnoverfarm for more small works on new patterns for living well.
watch the long form film, 'biochar kiln' in our previous post.
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thanks to @saltspring farmland trust and the root food hub for hosting the burn in the #permaculturegarden on the beautiful ancestral, unceded traditional land of the Hul’qumi’num and SENĆOŦEN speaking peoples, and screening my new film, ‘biochar kiln’, to our jolly #biochar expert and #woodfirecooking mentor @brian smallshaw, and to #saltspring apple festival and all the good appleturnover members whose support made the film possible. #outdoorcooking #communitygarden #carbonsequestration #carbonfarming #relocalise
in seven years on this land, we’ve seen hundred-year windstorms fell trees and electric lines, floods sweep away roads and through houses, wildfire smoke turn sunrise to sunset. the fierce cold of last winter burst pipes and froze well-houses so widely that it became hopeless to reach any of the plumbers on the island. these are the moments when we turn to each other. good friends, good neighbours have helped so much in these times and more critically, they’ve taught me skills that i had found thoroughly intimidating. a community model of collective empowerment is a sign of resilience and a rural heritage tends to foster this. even local businesses participate in the commons, sharing knowledge and tools, and in each lesson i am so deeply grateful. for all my education, i am most thankful for the practical knowledge to mend what’s broken and design for the future we want to see, come what may (and for sleeping better for the greater peace of mind). relationships are the heart of this work. if you’re also riveted by practical + philosophical, in a word, the praxis, of meeting the future with equanimity, you might like to meet me live(-streaming) on the second saturday q&a and farm tour.
transforming an old fence into simple, stackable box frames gives us a flexible solution to multiple needs in the garden. we can make compost in place, right where the soil wants more life and organic matter. if we time it right we could use the heat of the compost to start seedlings as if in a heated greenhouse (and i didn’t, i scorched mine thoroughly, so sorry babies!) or add a layer of soil to grow early crops (the elusive hotbed we are eager to experiment with.) we could sit a bucket or coils of water to produce hot water from the heat of the microbial fire. this failing (but we will try again!) we have nevertheless produced a fast, hot compost, and can simply move the modular boxes over and turn the compost to have a second or third burst of oxygenated decomposition, right where it is needed. and then, then we can fill these rich boxes with vegetable and flower seedlings, and grow what we want to eat. in autumn we could hinge a glass to them for a coldframe, come winter we might move the boxes to another spot for a new hotbed (wish us luck! we’ll favour goat manure over so much chicken manure this time, that stuff is volcanic!) and the cycle starts again.get the ‘postcards’ to see what stacking functions these stacking boxes generate over the next year, in an upcoming film. #growyourownfood #composting #upcycling #gardenhacks
elderflower oxymel stops time, pausing june and savouring it. vinegar and honey ferment, infused with the floral i first fell in love with while foraging in the wilder corners of london. i figure it must be medicinal like its late summer counterpart, the elderberry, but what it heals is a deep longing to attach to the seasons, not the calendar, the harvests, not the clock, to a sense of time spiralling forth with us firmly embedded in all that lives. not bad for one of the simplest of recipes and one that uses ingredients from around us. a strong jar with a rubber seal that allows the pressure to diffuse a little is an excellent choice, as i will never remember to check on lids. have you made an oxymel? the elderflower is one of the starlets of june’s farm-tour film and live q&a; more about how you can join us at the next one at appleturnover.
meet the greywater bed, a snippet from last month’s farm tour as we get ready for saturday’s watch party and q&a (tickets in bio.) this bit of may’s tour looked at the hazelnut tree greywater mulch bed design. what happens when we redesign the outflows (wasted materials) so that they stay circulating within the system and meet its needs in multiple ways? in this design by our dear, brilliant friend gord baird, the water from kitchen, laundry and bathtub pipes into four wood-chipped mulch beds planted with four varieties of hazelnut trees. the water filters back into the orchard, producing an increasing harvest of nutrient dense protein, and makes it way to nourish and irrigate the old pear, the bamboo grove, the apple orchard and the grapevine that shades the house. chickens harvest worms from the beds now and then and when we dig out the mulch beds to refill with fresh chips, a rich compost is generated. there is no waste, there are multiple benefits, and the systems grows more resilient and productive each year. this is the sort of simple redesign that will carry us into a thriving future. our lives are inherently designed, based on root patterns, and when we shift those designs we alter the patterns that repeat throughout our lives. moving into reciprocity with our biosphere is not just urgently needed but profoundly possible. the small work of repatterning from the roots up, it reverberates out in big waves of change. if you are now itching to know what mistake i made (when we experiment with how we might live so that life flourishes around us, there are always plenty of mistakes!) you might like to become a farm + farmhouse tour patron to access the replay of previous tours and q&a’s in our growing library. and if it would help you to find ways to live regeneratively if you had supportive community and a vivid picture of how (the practices) and why (the philosophy) then you’ll love saturday’s event. the next zoom tour is this saturday, june 10th at
before i tended goats in a food forest i tended children in parks, playgrounds, and assure you that there is no error in calling them both kids. in either case you might find me with a ball of yarn trailing from pocket to needles as regularly as you might spot me with a book and pen. i had no idea at the time that these are the habits of the neurodiverse, eternal fidgets, i swam so deeply in the waters of being an artist-child of artists, and those are diverse minds by definition. very recently, this week, in fact, i am seeing through a prism that notices my absorption (and consequent tendency to get lost in some impulsive project like eating a pathway through the thicket of blackberry until we can cross the creek but forgetting that dinner happens every night and it’s well past time to start it) as rather telling. naturally, once a young visitor’s enthusiasm for the ‘thrift flip’ or renovating old clothing got us all immersed in sewing projects, stopping was impossible. even more naturally to me, i recognise that sitting still isn’t my forte and so you find me sewing in the orchard, plucking caterpillars whilst sternly redirecting the toddler-herd away from beleaguered apple trees. next time i’ll baste my hems so as not to risk losing pins (i never did but i confess my youngest found my seam-ripper on the path under the wisteria. i see myself plainly in the frame of attentiveness as i am eternally losing tools.) this little film was also absorbing to make, and i completed both the frock and the film in a couple of afternoons as i wanted to show you. you double me. you can glimpse within it another task i probably ought to have focused on first, building raised beds, for which the pockets of these overalls-turned-skirt are laden with carpenter’s tools as well as gardener’s and filmmaker’s and threaten to burst.you may like to get on the list at appleturnover to hear when i complete long-form films on clothing for the future we want to live in, and
as collaborations go, working with the ducks in the four-season kitchen garden meets multiple needs. timed well, all of us, plants, people, duckies, are happy and well fed. (okay, the slugs are not happy…but they certainly lived their best life in the potager!). if you missed the long-form film, ‘running ducks’, you’ll find everything you need to get started with your own flock, or just spend a gentle quarter of an hour watching these sweethearts.
now it’s time for some serious weeding, sowing, and planting out of seedlings. things are manic so it must be almost may! which brings us to the farm tours.
starting up in may, on the second saturday of the month, it’s the appleturnover farm + farmhouse tour. you are very welcome to join me in conversation after we watch a freshly filmed tour of the systems here, and get your questions answered. find details at appleturnover on patreon. i so look forward to spending some time together, getting into the small work that matters so much for our possible futures.
we can become fluent in multiple ways of making more life, and one of those is to learn to divide our plants in the springtime. some plants don’t mind at all if you split them up, in fact they thrive for it and will multiply to take up the space, grateful for the assistance, particularly if they were getting too snug in a pot. the ground-cover comfrey (nice for digging deep for minerals) and the lupine (excellent for nitrogren-fixing) are perfect for this. i regularly do this with mint, sunchokes, horseradish (okay, i keep this in a pot), chinese yam, rhubarb, iris. i’d like to learn to do much more, to diversify this garden with plants to fill every need in our biosphere. i was lucky to have a green-thumbed mother, so i witnessed enough of this sort of thing not to be quite as intimidated as i have been by, saying, tending a flock or assisting at animal births. nevertheless, the skill to grow what we need dwindled in the last couple of generations in spite of our farming roots. so much reconnection, so much re-skilling is needed. having the plant-knowledge in our repertoire is something we can pass to the next generation easily, just by living, immersed, just by doing these small, satisfying tasks together. when we do, we keep the language alive and set our children up for a life that might meet uncertain futures with equanimity. we can create the conditions for possible futures. we revive old language by speaking it to each other whenever we can, which is why community like this is so vital. we can teach each other so much in so many ways, and make a tremendous difference following a collaborative pattern. i call this the small work, you’ll see it in all my films, in my little book, in my letters to patrons, because i believe all our small works are what makes a world. what are you multiplying by dividing? comment below if you’d like to hear about the next farm tour at appleturnover.
the espaliered fruit tree fits into a small garden or a tiny farm so neatly. we like to train them against the tall fences here like it’s a victorian walled kitchen garden, facing the south for a warm, protected spot. this is ideal for peach, apricot or nectarine, essential for most citrus here, and i’ve tried espaliering quince, peach, apple, persimmon, lemon and fig so far. this quince is much happier now i’ve removed the encroaching ivy, and cut down a fence post (i’ve moved it over) which i’ve been meaning to get to for oh, seven years. after we planted it we found four rather wild quinces nearby in the thicket. but one rarely has enough for the likes of quince jelly, quince brandy, quince butter or quince cheese, so the more the merrier. to grow a large tree, yet take up hardly any space at all, espaliering and cordoning are amazing skills. this is proper vertical gardening, much like the grapevine happily illustrates. while it’s much fussier than any other kind of pruning around here, what a pleasure when you see the tree taking shape and enjoying its spot along the fence. every sunny wall offers another excuse to plant more trees in the edible garden. have you tried this? get the ‘postcards’ to see how this bit of pruning and weeding shapes up. i’ve planted haybale potatoes at the feet of this quince, too! thanks to the appleturnover patrons for helping to make these films.
to make new grapevines from the old grapevine and share them with our neighbours feels like magic. it’s the edge of pruning season so i took some dormant cuttings for a bicycle ride in the community to swap and share with neighbours. it’s a humble model for resilience, bonding us to each other, to the plants, to the land, within another economy that begins to co-create the conditions for a thriving world. are you gardening in collaboration? relocalising food? what have you been exchanging? this small work is a companion to the long-form piece, ‘grapevine’ on appleturnover. it really is a plant with tremendously multiple functions and the half-century-old vine we live with is integral to the farm and farmhouse. get the postcards to hear how the red-wine grape cuttings do in the woodchip nursery i made in this short, and stay tuned for another sort of plant nursery. thanks jeremiah, michael, moe, thanks to the fine folks who support the making of these films.
haybale potatoes in a mulberry tree guild, a small work* experimenting with meeting multiple needs in concert: protecting the growing spuds from marauding ducks, chickens, goats and geese; offering continuous nutrient-rich mulch for potatoes and the mulberry, comfrey and self-sowing wildflowers to share; no-dig to reduce labour, allowing us to grow potatoes near the roots of trees, nurturing soil life while producing a crop in a spot that’s already protected, freeing up space in the annual kitchen gardens; water-holding in the dense hay for potatoes and tree and the whole guild of plants to have a slow steady drink despite free-draining shale; increasing food production by mixing it up and thinking in mutual biodiverse relationships of reciprocity and collaboration not monoculture competition. will my plan work? get the postcards to hear how this one turns out, in a future film. with enormous thanks to our local permaculture mentors, moe, nigel and the folks down in their south end neighbourhood transition emergency pod who grow food collaboratively, and to the appleturnover film supporters. have you tried this? what else shall i add to this tree guild, perennial or annual?
