Springtime breezes and gales on GBI Before our blessed move to New Zealand 19 years ago, spring began with the equinox, three weeks into the month, when daytime and nighttime are about the same length all over Planet Earth. In the Northern Hemisphere, that month wasn’t September, of course, but March. Up north near Montreal, where we were, the old saying was that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Everyone was longing for the final, for-real thaw and balmy days. The autumn equinox, or “fall” as we used to say, was in the third week of September, marking the beginning of the unwelcome cold seasons. Here it’s different. With no “official” or legislated start date for any season, it seems the Kiwi consensus was to ignore the music of the spheres and optimistically begin spring on the first of September. Rather cheeky! Of course the flip side is that summer here ends three weeks earlier! Whatever dates Earthlings designate, the winds blow and temperatures fluctuate in their own good time, and we roll with the punches or revel in calm, beautiful days. Bambusero As part of the Community Arts Trust winter programme, Ro enjoyed the two-day workshop “Working With Bamboo” at the Okiwi Passion market garden, where massive rows of 30-year-old giant subtropical clumping bamboo grow in tough wind-blocking shelter belts around the huge planting blocks. The tutor was Mark Mortimer, an Auckland-based Argentine-trained bambusero – a master bamboo craftsperson. Bamboo is one of the most prolific, sustainable and versatile materials on Earth. Mark’s website https://www.bambusero.co.nz has many dozens of photos of the strikingly beautiful fences, trellises, furniture and other objects and structures he has created. This archway is at Gerald’s parents’ spectacular gardens in Auckland. The group learned about bamboo species for different uses, harvesting and basic construction techniques. They also learned fascinating facts like these: * Bamboo is a grass – the largest on the planet. * Bamboos include some of the fastest-growing plants in the world. Some species can grow 91 cm in a day, which is nearly 4 cm an hour or 1 mm every 90 seconds. * The culms (hollow stems) of each bamboo species emerge from the ground at their full diameter and grow to full height in a single growing season of three to four months. Their heights vary by species, from several centimetres to 30 metres. * Some are clumpers that spread slowly as the root mass of rhizomes (horizontal underground stems) gradually expands. Others are runners whose rihizomes spread rapidly or even rampantly and send up new culms to break through the surface. * All the plants in each of the more than 1,000 species of bamboo, wherever they’re growing in the world, die back to the ground at the same time over a period of months after a precise number of years in their cycle, such as 12 or 100. Left alone they regenerate in a year or two. * Bamboo is strong enough to build scaffolding for 1,000-foot skyscrapers using 1,500-year-old techniques as well as bridges and multistorey buildings of astonishing beauty. A 23-metre bamboo bridge (under construction) and a six-story bamboo home in Bali This grove at Okiwi Passion is an enormous tropical runner that in Asia reaches 25 m tall with a stem diameter of 20 cm. A bamboo burner can be whipped up in a few minutes if you’re caught out in the bush and wanting a cuppa. It’s one example of the infinite number of useful objects that imaginative people can make with bamboo. Ro is putting his new bamboo fever and his gleanings of information, skills and community networking to immediate use. Barrier style, we’ve already collected a HUGE pile of harvested bamboo from a mate in Medlands, no payment wanted but token honey koha given, with which Ro and helpers will make a wind-screening fence, like the one the group made (below), to temper the southwest winds while our new shelter belt of karo trees grows. Ro says, “It was an exquisite sunny Barrier weekend with a motivated, resourceful and compatible group at a perfect venue that had it all. Caity and Gerald were the most generous of hosts.” :-) A biodynamic blessing Long-term biodynamic grower Peter, who lives way up in the hills above Tryphena, turned up one day with a wonderful surprise! He’d spent an hour stirring up a biodynamic field and garden spray blend containing “dynamised” preparations of plants, quartz and manure, and he had some left after treating the Community Gardens. He sprayed it throughout our wee section to give it a big beautiful biodynamic boost! That very special gift prompted a more in-depth look at the fascination of biodynamics beyond my superficial familiarity with planting, harvesting and other garden activities in accord with the moon and planets. In fact, Peter applied the spray on the day of the full moon in July. Biodynamic means life-energising. It dates back to Rudolf Steiner’s first agriculture course in the 1920s in Austria. Demeter, the first international certification for sustainable agriculture, was launched in 1928. Biodynamic practitioners consider it a holistic, ecological, and ethical approach to farming, gardening, food and nutrition. At the heart of biodynamics are nine preparations carrying enlivening forces that work “dynamically” within soil, compost and plants to provide healthier food, people and planet. The preparations are made from fermented herbs, minerals and cow manure. Six are field sprays and three are for compost. Acting in harmony with lunar, solar and cosmic rhythms, they help maintain plant health and transform organic material into rich nutritious humus. For one field spray, the horn of a cow is filled with cow manure and buried deep in the ground to decompose from autumn through spring. For another, a horn is filled with powdered quartz and buried from spring through autumn. The compost preparations get even more interesting! Each of the herbs – yarrow blossoms, chamomile blossoms, stinging nettle plants in bloom, oak bark, dandelion flowers, valerian flowers and horsetail – is prepared in a prescribed way. For example, yarrow is stuffed into bladders of red deer, placed in the sun during summer, buried in earth during winter and retrieved in the spring. Stinging nettle is stuffed together underground and surrounded on all sides by peat for a year. Oak bark is chopped in small pieces, placed inside the skull of a domesticated animal, surrounded by peat and buried in earth in a place where lots of rainwater runs. These preparations are meant to initiate and regulate life processes. It’s thought that the resulting compost is uniquely sensitive to the needs of the plants in each particular farm or garden. The “dynamic” in “biodynamic” also refers to dynamisation – thoroughly combining the preparations with water. To achieve thorough penetration, Steiner wrote: “Stir quickly at the very edge of the pail, so that a crater is formed reaching very nearly to the bottom of the pail and the entire contents are rapidly rotating. Then quickly reverse the direction, so that it now seethes round in the opposite direction. Do this for an hour.” The process adds oxygen and energy to the water as it “links the solid and the subtle”. Nowadays flowforms are also used to dynamise biodynamic preparations. These large structures contain basins with geometries that allow water to swirl in oppposing vortices, as Steiner recommended. Years ago a friend in Golden Bay used flowform-energised water in the liquid fish fertiliser he manufactured on a small scale in Kotinga. The preparations are used in minute doses, like highly diluted “potentised" homeopathic remedies that bring balance to the whole human organism. Biodynamics views each farm or garden as an organism, and the practices bring healing to the earth. For example, 5 grams of silica are used per hectare in 20-50 liters of water, and horn manure is 300 grams per hectare. Each of the preparations catalyzes different elements in the soil or compost – sulfur, potassium, nitrogen, calcium, iron, silica – to increase the uptake, circulation and utilisation of nutrients for growth and disease resistance. Each has its own function and when combined can help bring balance and stability to the soil. Perhaps Peter should have sprayed me! It’s said that the stinging nettle preparation provides intelligence to plants to seek the individual nutrients they need for optimal health and that the dandelion preparation stimulates silica to attract cosmic forces to the soil. So these are the holistic elemental energies Peter brought to our land in a gift of love and well-being. And there’s so much more to it! A wealth of mind-expanding biodynamic information is at https://www.biodynamics.com/ Fun with radio In the car, it’s the Barrier station Aotea FM, or Magic – hits from the 50s, 60s and 70s – “makes you feel good”! At home, it’s the Concert programme on Radio NZ. Lately RNZ Concert has become interactive. Cynthia Morahan seeks suggestions for the morning “Beauty Spot”, Nick Tipping runs a limerick competition, and Rick Young has created a countrywide cohort of addicts to his daily cryptic clues with mostly musical themes. The first ten to text in the answer get their names and locations read out! Rick Young, presenter of Classical Connection on Radio NZ Concert At first it was the quickest six, but Rick increased it because answers came flooding in all at once. Those with smart phones are ready to speak and send, while those with cell phones are entering letters on the old-fashioned three-letters-per-key. By that time the smart-phoners are sitting back waiting to hear their names. Who cares, really?! Ro and I have fun trying to work out the clues. Some are so easy you hardly need to think. Others are so cryptic we have to give up. Give these from a recent week a try: One who will succeed at melody, we hear. (four letters, starts with h) Bach provided notes for this publication. (five letters, starts with o) We've heard “Fill and Albie from Takaka” named as winners and they’ve heard us, and we all had big smiles the day all of our names were read out! Then I got inspired, OK, obsessed, with trying to make up a clue of my own. After much dogged racking of my brains I came up with one and sent it in. When we heard it, again Ro and I were grinning ear to ear. Here it is: Create song mixed with small embellishments. (two words, ten letters, starts with g) All three answers below****. Then, the limerick. One week the topic was “the piano”. It occurred to me that the Maori words for playing music, sky and feast all rhyme. With help from http://maoridictionary.co.nz I put a limerick together, hoping Nick would at least read it out. I wasn’t thinking of the competitive side or the prize, so what a surprise when I was a winner! I’ll be getting a CD of Beethoven’s piano sonatas! Due to limitations of metre, rhyme and language knowledge, it’s not perfect. ****Answers to the cryptic clues heir organ grace notes If you don’t understand any of them, let me know and I’ll explain! Okiwi Passion is crowdfunding! After 11 years of year-round long hours and hard work at their organic market garden, Gerald and Caity are taking a big step forward and reaching out to family, friends and supporters far and wide. They’re crowdfunding to build the infrastructure they need to meet the demand for their salads and seedlings on the island, which are now on the menu at most eateries and sold at the food shops in Claris and Tryphena. Their abundant and varied weekly produce boxes will carry on as before. The boxes have been so successful they decided at last to cap the number of orders they can take during the summer. 120 was just too many! Caity tells their story in her ever-high-spirited manner in a letter sent with a request to share with anyone who may be keen to support their vision. Please send a comment if you'd like to read her letter. Lots of Okiwi Passion info and photos at http://www.okiwipassion.co.nz The drop could not be stopped To the disgust and sorrow of most islanders, all our efforts were in vain and poison rain fell over Rakitu Island, just 3 km from the Barrier. It seems that to DOC all of it – petition, protests, marches, meetings, art, poetry, letters and articles in the Barrier Bulletin, weeks-long encampments at DOC up in Okiwi and on the island itself, engagement with MPs, council and DOC reps and local board members, and the strongly felt and sensibly expressed near-consensus wishes of islanders underlying all the effort – did not exist. The Green Party, which supports the contradiction of poisoning for environmental protection, lost some members along the way. In one final futile protest, several islanders boarded the DOC boat heading out to Rakitu on the morning of the drop. They were removed by some of the twelve policemen had motored over in a police boat to keep order! Environmental lawyer Sue Grey, based in Nelson, had offered guidance and support, even coming to the island for a public talk and strategising. After the drop she said, “I’m not surprised you feel so gutted. DOC’s attitude is unbelievable. The history is appalling. In the end the poisoners can be so determined to do whatever they want they will ignore best practice, their own promises and the law. Most of the time they get away with it.” One of the activists who virtually devoted their lives to the effort since last November wrote, “We did as much as we could humanly do. It’s a big job going up against DOC with all of their resources. Financially, emotionally and physically, it takes a toll.” There is a glimmer of hope, however. Massive anti-poison momentum is mounting throughout New Zealand, and the new government’s coalition agreement requires alternatives to be developed and used wherever possible. Winston Peters’ office is looking for examples where DOC has breached this requirement, and Poison Free Aotea has months of documentation from which key correspondence will be selected and forwarded. It’s all here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vzpb0h1ry92pohk/AABb_jA4n4zHkvMyqYL5GgLia?dl=0 Medlands Waves of Love To conclude on a mellower note, a stirring ode to youth and surfing by longtime islander John Scrimgeour. The Aotea Boardriders Club has mentored, challenged and encouraged young surfers since 2003. Surfing Medlands breakers with courage and hope Etched in glistening spray flung from curling slopes Silhouettes slide down steep into churning caves. Cool exhalations shift from wave to wave Lost then pounded in Medlands’ ocean power. A summer haze floats over warming drifting surfers Spread waiting, bobbing in nature’s foaming mansion The bonds of joy and friendships grow fathomable From the lessons of waves and clubhouse comaraderie Beach and life expansion, a surf club will complete. The seeker, waiting for that great surf breaking Floats calm, feeling, growing peaceful, just being free. Peace is a love story worthy of everyone’s start So surf those breaks of rainbow rollers folding A dream time growing as each wave appears Renewing, joyful, the pulsing heart, the fears. The power of self is honest overcoming all. It may be heads above the waves running A test for young bronzed bodies stunning Surfing with fragrance and sun splash cunning Some-body in freefall, spread in the rainbow of spray What do you learn about power and space? Though some disagree, a wipeout is no disgrace. Days cool and fade, so grab the sky in your arms Look up at sunset and whisper, “Sea your charms.” Don’t be emotional, just accept the fading sky Even great waves roll and froth, to flatten and lie. Medlands’ empty beach is a surfer’s favourite place When playful winds sweep rooster tails high beyond their reach Across the white sands and driftwood on the beach With windblown tales higher than those sandy knolls It’s where they lose their minds and gain their soul. Blue helps Ro plant a (future) shelter belt of 13 karo trees along our southwest border. Sam, teacher-coordinator at The Hub for island correspondence school kids, and one of his students, help plant a lemon and a grapefruit tree. Ro starts a beginner’s kete at a flax weaving workshop. Calving time begins at Winnie and Charlie’s farm. Moonset over Kaitoke Stream (not my photo)
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