There is still something magical about receiving parcels or large letters in the post, especially when they contain the fruit of your work.
Nature Notes
Yesterday our postbox was full of excitement, and no speeding fines or bills, to boot. The first parcel was a book arriving from England, and unlike my own book had avoided the Brexit bonus of being detained by Customs, with the additional charges that involves. Nature Notes by Tim Deane has been a long-time coming, and I am very proud to have helped bring it to life. The book consists of a collection of articles that first appeared in each quarterly number of The Organic Grower between 2009 and 2021.
I consider myself privileged to have known Tim for many years, as a fellow organic producer, as a horticultural adviser for the Organic Conversion Information Service, run by the Organic Research Centre – Elm Farm in the 2000’s and then as part of the second coming of the OGA – re-formed as The Organic Growers Alliance in 2006. The original OGA, the Organic Growers Association ran from 1981 until combining with British Organic Farmers in 1991 and later to merge into the Soil Association’s Producer Services Department. The Organic Growers Alliance was set up by a group of organic growers to support and represent growers of all sizes who wish to produce their crops organically.
It was at an early meeting of the new OGA in 2007 that the subject of communications and publications was tabled, and Tim and I volunteered to produce a quarterly journal which was to become The Organic Grower. Approaching 70 issues later, it is still going strong. From the first issue Tim was able to eloquently express what it means to be a grower and ‘the uniqueness of our craft.’ Though Tim stepped back as editor of The Organic Grower in 2011 he has continued to contribute on a regular basis ever since. As a hugely respected pioneer of modern organic growing, and with his wife Jan one of the first to champion the mixed organic vegetable box, Tim’s technical articles are always authoritative and informative. However, Tim’s Nature Notes which first appeared in The Organic Grower in Issue 8, Spring 2009 have also proved enduringly popular, the first columns that many growers turn to when opening the magazine.
Organic growers work with nature and their livelihood depends on it. It is that empathy, observation, and attention to detail that made Tim such a good grower. As Tim wrote in the very first Organic Grower: “The grower has to enter the soil in which (the plants) root as well as to live the weather in which they grow… It is the grower who best preserves that vital link of mankind with the earth and its processes. The sun’s energy, photosynthesis, and the cycling of carbon – this is the basis of all life. In the growing of plants organically lies its truest human expression.”
The perspective of the grower provides a unique window onto the nature of a small Devon farm on the fringes of Dartmoor to its fellow inhabitants and occasional visitors. While the purpose of the book is not to be an instructional book on the practices of organic vegetable production, it will provide some insights into the craft and the potential for organic farms to not just be oases of nature in a degraded agricultural landscape but beacons of hope for the future.
When Tim stopped his Nature Notes column after reaching the landmark of 50 articles I felt that they deserved a wider audience than the OGA could provide. Tim took some persuading (the words 'humility' and 'self-effacement' feature strongly in reviews), but I am happy to have done so, and nurtured the book through it's design and editing phases to its publication through Choir Press and it's imminent release.
Perennial Green manures reports
I also received hard copies of Insights from the Perennial Green Manures project: an innovative approach to fertilising cropland
You can download digital versions below!
An ex colleague of mine from Garden Organic, Clo Ward has been working on the concept of perennial green manures (PGM) for a few years now. PGM are fertilisers made from plant material grown in biodiverse areas of coppice woodland and perennial plantings. Much like the fertility-building clovers and vetches long-used by farmers, nitrogen fixing trees and shrubs such as alder trees and gorse bushes work with bacteria in the soil to convert nitrogen into a form useful to plants. It is an innovative approach, which I think has huge potential, alongside agroforestry, intercropping and the use of living mulches to make better use of our land. I invited Clo to speak at the OGA's Organic Matters Conference in 2022 and she has written an article for The Organic Grower.
For the past few months I have been assisting the project with social media and design and edit of the final reports, so it was great to see the Summary reports in the flesh!
Carabid beetles
While I was following Groundswell vicariously on social media, earlier in the Summer I became aware of this fantastic publication 'Farmland Carabids Identification Guide.'
I got in touch with the author Kelly Jowett, who then wrote a very nice article that I could include in the latest Organic Grower magazine (OG68 Autumn 2024), which is coming out soon, and she sent me this in the post. It looks great. Thanks Kelly!
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