September newsletter

Friends,

We meet again on the far side of August, when in theory the air should be cooler and the soil damper. I hope that’s how it is where you are. Here in Florence the rain finally gave us the relief we had been waiting for after a scorching, drought-ridden summer that somehow still managed to feel more humid than ever. Then the heat came straight back. This, which seems to be the new normal, puts real pressure on the traditional timings for summer transplanting.

Normally, to harvest from September through to March of the following year, you need to transplant between the end of July and mid-August. Transplant much later and, even though temperatures may still be high enough, the total day length no longer allows plants to put on the growth they need to reach maturity in time.

With the temperatures and the droughts of recent years, though, transplanting in late July or early August has become an inhuman challenge. Between shade cloth, heavy and frequent irrigation and a soil with a steadily rising organic matter content, we have once again managed to get a good proportion of our transplants away with few losses.

The propagation house is another story, where raising small plants for summer transplanting is an order of magnitude harder than doing it in spring. Here too the list of adjustments is long: 70% shade cloth, irrigation for 15 minutes three times a day, a substrate enriched with vermicompost to offset nutrient leaching, a germination area kept in the shade to avoid gappy trays, and orange essential oil against flea beetle.

This August also had us dealing with a mite infestation in one of our two groups of hens, with some considerable ethical and practical doubts attached, which I have discussed in a video you’ll find below.

In short, farming in what some call the Anthropocene is quite the juggling act.

With the summer transplanting done (split into two batches: one in the first week of August and one in the last), a busy stretch begins here at OrtoForesta. First the autumn pruning of the agroforestry rows, which we have already started (videos below). Then a run of teaching. And in the meantime, a great deal of harvesting and the management of a garden that at this time of year always tends towards the wild and the undisciplined.

An extraordinary number of you — almost sixty! — wrote to me across social media, email, Substack, WhatsApp and Telegram to tell me to carry on writing this newsletter. I was not expecting that. But I am glad you prefer this slower, more reflective sort of thing to the frantic fairground of brevity we get on social media. Thank you for the feedback and, as always, keep telling me what goes through your head as you read what I write.

So here below, as usual, a series of things I hope will give you something to think about and to take away.

An update on the agroforestry rows

OrtoForesta was designed around a skeleton of experimental agroforestry rows. From the very beginning the intention was not to draw a monetary profit from them, but to use them as a testing ground for ideas, species consortia, pruning techniques, biomass management and much else. Between the original design and today, plenty has changed both in the rows themselves and in the way I see agroforestry. Some principles and techniques have been reinforced; others have been added to my overall picture of this attempt to imitate the workings of natural ecosystems in a productive key.

If there is interest, I will write a detailed article on the subject (let me know!). In the meantime, here is a series of posts and videos made recently, showing how both the rows and the design and management principles have evolved.

Incidentally, there are still 4 places left on the Agroforestry course on 20 September here at OrtoForesta. To book, click here.

The rows in their fourth year, species by species, filmed this summer: plums · peaches · apricots · apples

Two videos on two design questions: a high-density agroforestry row · agroforestry with no water and no inputs

And two articles, for the argument at length: Successional Accumulation — a syntropic strategy by Scott Hall · Support Plants for Temperate Climate Agroforestry

Consulting around Italy

These past months I have been travelling up and down the country following projects I helped design, or that I give technical support to. The more I do this work, the more I realise how many dimensions and how many layers have to be taken into account.

Some of you asked me to share something about that process, and I am glad to, even if only briefly.

A few days ago I received a video from a community farm in Cockington, England — Meadow Farm — whose focus is food self-sufficiency and independence. After Jane and David came to a farm visit at Living Soil Garden in 2022, I went to see them at Meadow Farm. I spent half a day there and was struck by the motivation, the enthusiasm and the cohesion of the volunteer group. The consultancy was simply a flow of ideas and prompts, which evidently served to connect the landscape of Meadow Farm, the dreams and wishes of the people who make it up, and the inspiration Jane and David had taken from other regenerative systems. Hearing the legendary Keith off camera (a tireless volunteer on other projects I have followed in the UK as well) running through everything the farm has achieved, with the enthusiasm of someone standing in front of an abundance they had not expected, gave me a lump in my throat.

Walking into someone else’s landscape and someone else’s life is an act of humility and of arrogance at the same time. When a grower or a landowner puts their trust in me, they often do so hoping that I, as the expert, will help them avoid mistakes or solve their problems. And while it is true that in most cases my contribution does support the cause, every time it is a delicate process; because designing and running a system yourself is one thing, and suggesting a vision and a direction to somebody else is quite another.

The challenge is to harmonise what the client wants, what they actually need, what is possible, and what the ecosystem and the landscape suggest and are suited to. The most interesting part of this work is watching those elements mix and shift over time, dynamically.

I will not hide the fact that I find myself saying no to a fair few projects: sometimes because they do not resonate with my vision or my way of working; sometimes because I do not think I am the right person, by inclination or by competence; and in some cases it is a matter of time and priorities.

Where I can, I favour contexts and people with an appetite for experimenting together, so as to break the barrier between consultant and client and end up doing participatory research, in which my role becomes guiding the experiment and helping to make it pay on several fronts.

The truth is that, like a lot of growers, I am hard to drag away from my own field. The only thing stronger than the pull of OrtoForesta and of my small, young family ecosystem is, occasionally, the urge to experiment and to learn.

Here are some photos taken over the last few days at a few young projects I helped design and went back to visit to see how they are getting on. You will find others, older and with photos and information, at this link.

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Transparency, hobbyists, and other ramblings

In August I recorded two videos rather different from the usual, thinking out loud about professional ethics. The first comes straight out of the mite infestation I mentioned above: through a serious oversight we lost two hens, and to bring the situation back under control we resorted to a synthetic insecticide — something that sits outside our scale of values. Of the people who have come to visit us, nearly all were surprised that I would talk about it so candidly, and all of them advised us not to say it publicly. And I went and said it anyway, in the video below, because I believe transparency is part of our trade.

In the videos I also talk, among other things, about the difference between doing things better than before or better than others, and doing them well; and about the idea that a hobbyist and a professional should work to different standards.

Let me know what you make of it in a comment under the videos, or in whatever other way you prefer to reach me.

Video (in Italian): Della trasparenza e del fare le cose bene

Video (in Italian): L’hobbista e il professionista devono fare la stessa cosa

A look elsewhere: Eric and Anne Nordell

Eric and Anne Nordell have been growing vegetables on 2.5 hectares in Pennsylvania since the 1980s. Their system is interesting for several reasons. Their method relies on animal traction alone (!) — no tractor, two horses; they farm entirely without irrigation; they keep the whole area free of weeds, with beautifully managed grassed pathways; and they have reduced tillage to a minimum, which has cut the impact of tornadoes and other erosive events.

Every year half of that area produces nothing to sell: it sits under cover crops, or in a short bare fallow, for the sole purpose of running down the weed seed bank. Hence their motto, weed the soil, not the crop: instead of chasing weeds between the crops, you work on the soil in the months and the years when there is no crop.

All of it run by the two of them, with no employees.

Among the many things about this system that intrigue, fascinate and inspire me, there is also how completely it contradicts the usual “more inputs, more mechanisation, more area” that we see so often in farming.

Three things worth your time if you want the detail of how Eric and Anne work:

Low- and No-Till Farming with Horses — the interview with Eric Nordell on No-Till Growers

Interseeding Vegetables — cover crops sown into the standing crop

Organic No-Till Garlic — garlic without tillage

Courses in Florence and elsewhere

Very few places left on the courses here at OrtoForesta in September and October.

Take a look in particular at the introductory Market Gardening course, because this year it is very different and will cover several approaches to growing: minimum tillage, no-dig, cover crops, natural farming and much more. All the information here.

Among the other courses in the coming months, I would single out the one in Sicily, hosted by my friend Alessandro of Inferno Food Forest. For those of you in the south, we will be talking about the practical importance of agroforestry in buffering the impact on vegetable crops in extremely hot and dry climates. Information and booking.

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 - Aldo Leopold

“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.” (Aldo Leopold) 

The person - Christine Jones

Christine Jones is an Australian soil ecologist, and for years now she has been making a case that has profoundly changed the way many of us look at soil. Thanks to her work we now know that the carbon which stays in the soil is not so much what we bring in with mulches, amendments and assorted fertilisers, but what plants convert from carbon dioxide through their synergy with the microorganisms living on their roots. Christine Jones calls it the liquid carbon pathway. The plant fixes carbon by photosynthesis, releases a substantial share of it from the roots as exudates, and with that currency buys from mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria the minerals and the water it could never reach on its own. That is where stable humus is built, out of exudates, microbial products and bacterial necromass, far more than in a compost heap.

The corollary is this: if we give the plant soluble nitrogen and phosphorus, the plant stops paying, the relationship with the fungi shuts down, and that carbon is no longer released into the soil. Jones works outside academic circles, publishes almost everything for free on her Amazing Carbon site, and insists on something we tend to forget in horticulture: the diversity of the living species in the soil counts for more than the amount of organic matter we put into it.

Another person - Wendell Berry

I cannot not mention Wendell Berry, a few days after his death. He was a poet, a novelist and an essayist, and he was also a farmer: in 1964 he left his teaching post at New York University to go back to the county where he was born, and from the following year he farmed a marginal hillside plot above the Kentucky River, entirely with animal traction and following the pioneering paths of ecological agriculture. From there, for sixty years, he wrote some of the sharpest and most lucid criticism of industrial agriculture there has ever been — The Unsettling of America is from 1977 and has not aged a day — insisting on something we still find hard to swallow: that agriculture is culture, and that in abandoning a slower and more natural way of approaching the land we are not only losing a technique, we are losing what holds a community together.

The text that concerns us most closely, though, is a short essay from 1981, Solving for Pattern, in which Berry distinguishes three kinds of solution: the one that makes worse the problem it was meant to solve, the one that solves it by pushing the cost somewhere else, and the good one, which solves more than one problem at a time and creates no new ones, because it works inside the larger pattern instead of fighting it. That is exactly what we are trying to do when we design an agroforestry row instead of buying yet another input, and it is why I have come to distrust solutions that work brilliantly for one thing only.

Among the enormous number of wonderful things he wrote, I would recommend The Art of the Commonplace, The Unsettling of America and, among the novels, Jayber Crow. And a great deal else besides. Among the curiosities: in 1987 Berry wrote an essay on why he was not going to buy a computer. Reading it today, while we argue about artificial intelligence in agriculture, is quite something.

The book - What Your Food Ate

What Your Food Ate by David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé (2022) connects two conversations that usually travel separately: what we do to the soil, and what ends up on the plate. He is a geologist, she is a biologist, and in their earlier books they had already told the story of soil and the human microbiome as two faces of the same problem. Here they try to close the circle, laying out the evidence for something we say often in our world and demonstrate rarely: that the mineral and above all the biochemical content of a plant — and of the meat, the milk and the eggs that come from it — depends on how it was grown and on what it ate, not only on the species or the variety.

The passage that touches us most closely is the one on plant breeding, where they show how much nutrient density we have traded away over recent decades for yield, size and shelf life. It is a dense book, heavily referenced, and honest about its uncertainties: which is one of the reasons I recommend it.

That is it for today: it has got late, and there is a fair bit to harvest tomorrow for the first autumn veg boxes.

Do get in touch, not least to tell me where you think I have talked nonsense.

Have a good September, and see you soon.

Dario