What is Biodynamics?
Biodynamics is using a set of
eight preparations made from
vegetable/herbal, animal and mineral compounds to enhance the soil and the
plants. They are used in conjunction with, not instead of, good organic
practices such as composting, manuring and crop rotation. They work
directly with the dynamic, biological processes and cycles of the soil which
are the basis of soil fertility, as well as with the growing plants
themselves. The Preps are not fertilisers but they greatly assist the
whole fertilising process, and you need only very small amounts.
Biodynamics is a holistic systems approach, like
the Gaia principle, where the garden, allotment, nursery or other
horticultural undertaking is viewed as a living whole, and in which each
activity affects the others. You put the preparations on the soil and
plants, and into the compost heap, in time with the rhythms of the Earth
with the help of the star calendar. This
produces strong and healthy plants in a healthy, well-structured soil, rich
in humus and high in biological activity … all prerequisites for any
sustainable horticultural system.
Lewis Thomas, in
The Lives of a Cell, says …
Viewed from the distance of the moon, the
astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive.
The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground,
dead as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming
membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing
in this part of the cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the
swirling of the great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the
half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long time,
geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion,
drifting apart on their crustal plates, held aloft by the fire beneath. It
has the organised, self-contained look of a live creature, full of
information, marvellously skilled in handling the sun.
(Lewis
Thomas (1913–1993)
was a physician, poet, etymologist,
essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher.)
I find this a wonderful description of our planet and
how she works. Biodynamics and the Gaia principle work together.
