Biodynamic farmers aspire to generate their own fertility and plant, spray and harvest crops according to the lunar calendar. It might sound modern, but the practice is two centuries old. Every autumn, Jane Scotter collects fresh manure from a neighbour’s lactating cows, brings it home to her market garden, Fern Verrow in Herefordshire, and ladles it into her collection of cow horns.
The horns are then buried close together in soil and left for six months over winter, after which the contents have composted into a perfectly balanced mix of bacteria and fungi. Mrs Scotter tips the mix into a barrel of water — ‘two or three pinches in 30 litres’ — and stirs it vigorously with a broom handle. This precious potion is then applied to her 16 acres of flower and vegetable beds: ‘I do it in the afternoon, on what is called a root day,’ she tells me, ‘walking up and down with a bucket and a brush flicking it over the soil.
It is a tonic, a spring awakening for the land.’ Later in the season, horns filled with ground quartz silica and buried the previous summer will be excavated, emptied and the contents mixed with water to be sprayed in a fine mist over young plants and crops. ‘It is done on certain days,’ she notes, ‘one day for leaves, one for fruit, another for flowers, according to the calendar.
’ This is biodynamic gardening, dictated by movements of the moon and planets in relation to one another. But how, you might ask, did anyone even think of the horn.
