October Newsletter
Friends,
Here we are again, a few days late. September went by with a few downpours followed by a long dry spell. The high daytime temperatures are giving way to a pleasant autumn warmth, with nights here dropping to 8°C.
After weeks of constant, aggressive attacks from the wood pigeons, the cooler weather has finally brought some long-awaited peace, and we have taken most of the netting off the vegetable beds. The pruning of the agroforestry rows is finished, with hundreds of kilos of biomass returned to our system and, below ground, the pulse of root exudates that follows.
Autumn is a magical season, and not only for us, walking through the falling leaves in that warm, nostalgic light it has, catching our breath after a devastating summer. It is also the season when the soil’s microbial network gets ready to digest solid and liquid carbon with appetite and voracity. The soil is still warm, the rains have reactivated its biochemical processes, the vegetables and cover crops are feeding it with rich exudates, and the biomass we lay on the surface, compost included, acts both as a blanket and as a store for the winter.
This October I will be travelling a lot, between courses, consultancies and various explorations, so I hope to meet some of you in person on one of these occasions somewhere in Italy. You will find dates and places here.
In the meantime, as always, here are some reflections and some fresh seasonal content.
The second life of Living Soil Garden
A few weeks ago, chatting with a friend who used to farm the field next to ours in England, I asked him for news of the land where Living Soil Garden used to be, the business I started and co-ran from 2019 to 2023.
Living Soil Garden (LSG) was a regenerative market garden in Exeter, UK. The 2,500 m² garden was run with no-dig methods, with compost and woodchip as its only inputs, and without any powered machinery. For four years Living Soil Garden produced vegetables for the Exeter community through a CSA and several local markets, as well as supplying restaurants and shops. Alongside that, it had become a reference point for training and outreach in regenerative horticulture and the biointensive method in the South West of England.
It was moving to see again, in photos, the field where I learned and experimented so much. LSG was my first real farming venture, but it was also a connector of lives, a forge of collaborations and an alternative refuge for a varied community of people during Covid.
Now, under Vanessa’s guidance, LSG is a community garden that offers volunteering opportunities and grows vegetables for a charity shop in Exeter. Below are some photos of LSG from 2019 to 2023.
Many of you have asked me, and still ask, how it is possible, or how it feels, to leave a place you have invested so much in: money, energy, emotion. It is hard to put into words, so I won’t try in this newsletter. But if you think it might be useful, I could try in the future. Has it happened to you too, to start a project and then have to let it go?
Biomass from pruning: an autumn paradox
It is early October and the rains are back. Lift a corner of mulch and you will find the soil still warm from the summer, moist, and under the leaves a web of white mycelium that was not there a month ago. It is the time of year when the soil eats fastest — temperature and moisture are finally in agreement — and the organic matter we give it is broken down and mineralised within a few weeks.
And this is where a question opens up that has been going round our heads for a few seasons. If autumn is when the soil digests best, autumn should be when we mulch most. Except that in our system it does not work that way, and not by oversight: the heavy pruning, the stimulus pruning, we do in spring, once the plants have recovered from the autumn stratification pruning. The result is that the bulk of the biomass arrives before summer, dries out on the surface and works mostly as a shield — shading the soil, holding in moisture — rather than as food for microorganisms. And when the soil is hungry and has the teeth for it, in autumn, is precisely when we have the least material to give it, because we prune more lightly then, to let the plants recover before the frosts.
On delegating: AI, mechanisation and care work
A while ago, sowing a tray of lettuce one seed at a time, I found myself thinking again about the act of delegating in farming. Many of us assume it is normal to hand the repetitive, mechanisable jobs over to machines, the less technical but non-mechanisable ones to employees, and to keep for ourselves the work that calls for fine-grained, specialist skills.
Often, though, on small farms, what we delegate is what we like least. As long as machines only did mechanical work the deal held and nobody noticed: handing over sowing, weeding, ploughing, washing the dishes and the laundry was a liberation for many. Now that an AI can write an article in thirty seconds, design a logo in a minute and solve complex problems in half an hour, we have all gone into crisis. That crisis is interesting precisely because it reveals inner and outer dynamics we may not have been aware of.
Eucalyptus in the market garden: a closer look
A topic that always seems to spark a lot of interest, and no small amount of worry, among visitors to our market garden is the presence of eucalyptus as an emergent support species. Eucalyptus, like many other trees, has earned an undeserved reputation as a killer of other plants. “Nothing grows under a eucalyptus,” I keep hearing. Judge for yourselves.
My two videos (in Italian): Eucalipti nell’orto: hanno senso? · Eucalipti nell’orto?
And two from other projects: Vegetables Loves Eucalyptus · 8 reasons you need eucalyptus in your food forest
A look elsewhere: Byron Grows
Byron Grows is an educator specialising in syntropic agriculture and agroforestry. After graduating in environmental science in the United States in 2018, he moved to New Zealand, where he documents his work on YouTube and runs training programmes, including the Food Forest Fellowship. His content is deliberately practical and covers ecosystem dynamics, planting and species-consortium design, and regenerative management, with the aim of equipping those who follow him to design and manage resilient food systems. On his channel you will find both training videos on syntropic agroforestry and long tours of some of the most innovative agroforestry projects in the world, including, in Italy, Amadeco and Iside.
At the Margins
The column of this newsletter: a quote, a person, a book — often from outside the furrow of agriculture, because it is at the margins that the most interesting things turn up.
The quote - Theodore Roszak
“There is one way forward: the creation of flesh and blood examples of low-consumption, high quality alternatives to the mainstream pattern of life. This we can see happening already on the counter-cultural fringes. And nothing – no amount of argument or research – will take the place of such living proof. What people must see is that ecologically sane, socially responsible living is good living; that simplicity, thrift and reciprocity make for an existence that is free.” (Theodore Roszak)
The person - James Lovelock
James Lovelock was a scientist who fitted no category: chemist, inventor, and for most of his life an independent researcher working from the laboratory he had built at home. In the 1960s, at NASA, he was designing instruments to search for life on Mars, and he proposed studying the planet’s atmosphere rather than its soil; in his view a living planet keeps in its air gases that chemically should not coexist, such as oxygen and methane, whereas a lifeless planet slides towards equilibrium. From there, with the microbiologist Lynn Margulis, he arrived at the Gaia hypothesis: life does not merely adapt to the conditions of the planet, it takes part in regulating them. And when he was told that a planet cannot regulate itself without intention, Lovelock answered with a model, Daisyworld, in which black and white daisies stabilise the temperature of an imaginary planet simply by growing where they do best.
Lovelock played a decisive part in training in me a systemic way of looking at the natural world, one I later found again in the work of Ernst Götsch.
The book I would recommend starting with is Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979). In his last work, Novacene (2019), he imagines that the artificial intelligences of the future, in order to survive, will need a habitable planet as much as we do, and will therefore become Gaia’s allies in keeping it that way.
The book - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Memories, Dreams, Reflections is Carl Gustav Jung’s autobiography, published in 1962, the year after his death. An unusual autobiography: he wrote part of it himself, and part was gathered by his collaborator Aniela Jaffé from conversations in his last years. It tells almost exclusively of his inner life — dreams, visions, the long crisis that followed his break with Freud — leaving outer events in the background.
It is not the most fascinating chapter, but for those of us who work the land the most relevant is the one on the tower at Bollingen, the stone house Jung built for himself from 1923 onwards on Lake Zurich, with no electricity or running water. There he chopped wood, pumped water and cooked for himself, convinced that simple acts make us simple, and that being simple is the hardest thing of all.
And that is all for this month — as they used to say on the radio. I am writing to you from the night train taking me from Sicily back to Florence, on my way home from a wonderfully rich course at Inferno Food Forest.
As always, let me know what you make of the many things written above. Wishing you a cool and productive October.
See you soon,
Dario
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