The North American Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar 2009

Maria & Matthias Thun

Softbound booklet - includes new easier-to-read pullout wall chart!

$13.95

This is the planting calendar Bob and I now use and we just love it. Tucked into its modest pages is more pithy gardening informtion than you can shake a trowell at - including results of past years' experiements, times for various kitchen undertakings (bread, sauerkraut, etc.), color photo glimpses of the Thun's farm (very inspiring!). There's also star lore and an introduction to Maria's method of calculating dates. The new pull-out chart is a real help and has been improved over the 2008 chart. You can see six months planting guidelines at a glance (six months are on each side). Do keep your notes in the book, though - the chart is not really set up for notes.

If gardening is one of your passions, this is our pick for your calendar.

Gardening for Health and Nutrition
An Introduction to the Method of Biodynamic Gardening

John and Helen Philbrick

Softbound

$15.95

A simple, down-to-earth introduction to the method of biodynamic gardening especially written for the backyard gardener - this was the first book I ever read about Biodynamics, way back when. Since that time, I have often returned to it, just so that I could remember clearly how simple gardening can be, and how much I love it.

The Philbricks introduce the gardener to an obvious, often forgotten principle: gardening is about living things.

Gardening for Health and Nutrition is a simple and practical guide for the beginning gardener. It deals with planning a vegetable garden: how, when, and where to plant seeds and tools and compost making raised beds crop rotation, mulching, and companion plants harvesting, cooking, and preserving There are also sections on flowers, lawns, and home orchards.

Gardening for Health & Nutrition concludes with a useful chapter on "most frequently asked questions." If you are planning a garden—or need a few tips for the one you have, this is a book you'll want.

What Is Biodynamics?
A Way to Heal and Revitalize the Earth

Rudolf Steiner

Seven Lectures and an introduction by Hugh J. Courtney

Softbound

$18.00

In 1924—in response to questions about the depletion of soils and a general deterioration of crops and livestock—Rudolf Steiner gave eight lectures on “the spiritual foundations for a renewal of agriculture.” Based on his suggestions and spiritual science, generations of farmers, gardeners, viticulturist, and researchers developed biodynamics as a healing, nurturing, holistic, ecological, organic, and spiritual approach to a sustainable care of the Earth.

Biodynamic methods consider the farm or garden to be a self-contained organism, embedded in the living landscape of the Earth, which is in turn part of a living, dynamic cosmos of vital, spiritual energies. The aim is to increase the health and vitality of the whole, including the farmer or gardener. The biodynamic practitioner follows an alchemical, transformative path of working with the Earth through the nine “homeopathic” preparations created by Steiner.

What Is Biodynamics? collects seven seminal lectures—four on developing a spiritual perception of nature and three from his Agriculture Course, dealing with the preparations. Hugh Courtney of the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics contributes an informative, passionate, and visionary introduction.

Whether you are concerned with the quality of agriculture and gardening in particular or have a broader interest in the ecological crises facing us today, this book offers a transformative approach that can truly change the way we live together on Earth.

The Biodynamic Year
Increasing yield, quality and flavour

100 helpful tips for the gardener or smallholder

Maria Thun

Compiled and edited by Angelika Throll-Keller

Hardbound

$32.00

In The Biodynamic Year, Maria Thun invites us all into her garden and takes us on a planter's journey through the year. At each point, she shows us how she thinks about her garden, and what she does to make it the verdent paradise that it is.

The book is organized in a one-tip-at-a-time fashion (thank you, Angelika Throll-Keller!), and in so doing, it is amazing the clarity that has been achieved. Between the hundreds of photos and clear drawings and Maria's text, I found that questions I'd been carrying for years about how or when exactly to do a variety of things were answered fully and completely.

A single reading of The Biodynamic Year has taught me more about gardening than any one book since my first reading of How to Grow More Vegetables way back in the 1970s. Needless to say, I will be going back again and again - it is one of those resources that, now that I have it, I never again want to be without. For that reason, I am also very grateful that the publisher chose to produce the book in a hard binding - I think it might well wear out if softbound.

Clearly, I can't recommend The Biodynamic Year highly enough. Combine it with Maria Thun's planting calendar (below), and your garden will grow as never before.

Results from the Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar

Maria Thun

Filled with beautiful full-color and black-and-white photos

Softbound

$30.00

When Bob owned and operated a Biodynamic truck farm, he made constant reference to this landmark work by Maria Thun (then only in German). He shared what he could of its contents with his friends who could not read German, and always hoped that someday there would be a translation into English, so that Thun's painstaking research could become better know.

This translation exceeds his hopes, for it is beautifully presented with many, many photographs that speak incontestably of the results that are possible when the guidelines in Thun's astronomically-based planting calendars are followed (and the perils that await those who ignore her experience-based advice!).

For those of you who are not yet familiar with Maria Thun's work, you are in for a wonderful surprise. For over forty years, she has been researching optimum days for sowing, pruning, and harvesting various plant crops. In this book are the results from this work, showing the influence of the rhythms of the Sun, Moon, and planets on plant growth.

The unavoidable conclusion from this research is that if farmers and gardeners link their work with these cosmic rhythms, the quality of their produce is markedly increased. Avoiding unsuitable days helps prevent crop damage caused by disease and pests. There are methods of fertilizing and spraying that Thun has developed using the principles of homeopathy. These will further enhance produce, allowing a sustainable and ecologically balanced agriculture.

Included are sections on the stars, the soil, composting, and manuring, weeds and pests, as well as growing cereals, vegetables, herbs, fruit and wine grapes.

Agriculture

Rudolf Steiner

$17.50

This course is the founding impulse of biodynamic agriculture and gardening. In it, Steiner gave instructions and explanations for tending to the needs of the Earth in a way that weaves together the forces of our Living Earth, human beings, and the spiritual world. What can arise from working with these methods is a restored Earth and a bountiful harvest.
Steiner mentions the origins of this course, and to me they speak so eloquently of the role of the individual that I am including his account here:
"I must confess, however, that it was not easy for Count and Countess Keyserlingk to get this course off the ground. It had been promised for a long time, but I did not manage to get there until Count Keyserlingk's nephew came to the Christmas Conference in Dornach with strict instructions not to return home without a firm commitment from me to conduct the course within the next six months. So when this nephew, who has a knack for making the most unlikely things happen, showed up here under those auspices, he was so persuasive that I told him the course would take place at the first possible moment. This turned out to be a Whitsun. And so it was a lovely Whitsun celebration, a truly anthroposophical Whitsun festival."
Sometimes, simple determination can change the world.

Carrots Love Tomatoes
Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening

Louise Riotte

Softbound

$14.95

Louise Riotte first published Carrots Love Tomatoes in 1979 - and thus taught generations of gardeners how to see their gardens and the plants in them in a new way. Since then, Carrots Love Tomatoes has been revised, expanded, updated and has become even more widely known and beloved than ever.

Riotte's understanding of companion planting, and her practical experience with it exceeds anything else we have seen - including Philbrick and Gregg's Companion Plants and How to Use Them (which is prominently featured in her Biblography). Her familiarity with Biodynamics and Philbrick and Gregg's book simply leaps off the page just as her independent, deepened work with companion planting carries this work forward and has made it available and useful to many who have never heard of either of her predecessors.

I should add that we have used companion planting for years with great success and that Louise Riotte's book is both a rigorous resource and a delightful "read": she's warm, funny, and interesting in all kinds of ways. In fact, you may want to read it before you use it - once you put it in your garden shed (where, if you're like us, you'll go back to it time and again as you plant) it's likely that it will take on a patina of soil that will make it less than welcomed in your home.

In Partnership with Nature

Jochen Bockemühl

Softbound with unbound full-color plates

$17.80

This is a fascinating book, one that is as much an artistic presentation of the natural world as it is a considered ecological treatise on the interrelationships and unique attributes of individual species and environments of nature.

Bockemühl's goal is to allow us to experience the unity of beauty with scientific fact, of science and art -- in the process, it is his conviction that we will develop our own sense of how to respond with care to the needs of nature in those instances when our own needs impact the environment. In short, he has composed In Partnership with Nature in the hopes of reuniting beauty, truth and goodness -- for the love of the world.

This is a book that is a treat to have on one's bookshelf -- and to go back to time and time again to discover and rediscover it's gems. Very highly recommended.

Developing Biodynamic Agriculture
Reflections on Early Research

Adalbert Count Keyserlingk

Softbound

$16.00

There is a growing public concern over the safety of the food on our tables. As a result, there is a growing interest in organic farming and gardening. Biodynamic agriculture is an extension of hte organic approach that uses homepathic agricultural preparations to enrich the soil by working in harmony with cosmic and earthly forces.

Biodynamic agriculture was launched by Rudolf Steiner at a conference on the Koberwitz estate in Germany. Adalbert Count Keyserlingk, the son of the hosts, was present, and this book reflects his life-long absorption in biodynamic methods. It presents a wide range ofmaterial, including the count's personal experiences of Steiner at work, his reflections on practical research and experimentaiton, and descriptions of biodynamic preparations. More than anything else, this book conveys the enthusiasm and the power of initiative that arose from Rudolf Steiner's work to develop a method of farming that provides nutritious, safe food for the future.

Biodynamic Agriculture

Willy Schilthuis

$9.95

Biodynamic Agriculture is another outstanding introduction in the excellent "Rudolf Steiner's Ideas in Practice" series. It offers a concise and fully illustrated introduction to the principles and practice of biodynamic agriculture. Biodynamics is an internationally recognized approach to organic agriculture in which the farmer or gardener respects and works with the spiritual dimension of hte earth's environment, enabling the life processes and ecological interconnections of plants and animals to function at their best.

In a world where conventional agricultural methods severely threaten the environment, biodynamic farms and gardens are designed to have a sound ecological balance. Research reveals increasing evidence that biodynamic crops put down deeper roots, show strong resistance to disease and have better keeping qualities than conventionally produced crops.

Outstanding and highly recommended!

The Earth Moved
On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms

Amy Stewart

Softbound

$12.95

The most important lesson that gardening has taught both Bob and myself (separately and at different times and places) is that the only way to create vibrant, healthy soil is to make a good environment for earthworms. Everything else is theory - some of it good, even brilliant theory, but theory nonetheless. Earthworms are fact, and an ever-increasing population of earthworms in your garden is the only sure sign that fertility and vitality are increasing. Amy Stewart's book tells us why this is so as she sings the praises of those simple creatures who are perhaps the most helpful beings on our dear planet.

In witty, offbeat style, Amy Stewart takes us on a subterranean adventure and introduces us to our planet’s most important gatekeeper: the humble earthworm. It’s true that the earthworm is small, spineless, and blind, but its effect on the ecosystem is profound, moving Charles Darwin to devote his last years to studying its remarkable attributes and achievements.

With the august scientist as her inspiration, Stewart investigates the earthworm’s astonishing realm, talks to oligochaetologists who have devoted their lives to unearthing the complex web of life beneath our feet, and observes the thousands of worms in her own garden.

If you don't already love earthworms, after reading The Earth Moved, you'll not only discover a new-found warmth in your heart for these little creatures, but find that every time you see one, a desire to help it along its way will arise. And, as you'll by then know, there's no better way to help the Earth than by helping earthworms get on with their lives.

How to Grow More Vegetables*
*Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine

6th Edition, Revised

John Jeavons

$19.95

About 20 years ago, the first edition of How to Grow More Vegetables became my guide to gardening. John Jeavons' approach, a combination of biodynamic, organic and French intensive techniques, led me to a lifelong love of plants and soil and building compost and harvesting. If you are new to gardening, How to Grow More Vegetables (5th edition) can do the same for you. If you are an old hand at the art, you can learn techniques that can double and triple your harvest while healing the Earth and leaving you with time enough to plan next year's garden as well!

The Sustainable Vegetable Garden
A Backyard Guide to Healthy Soil and Higher Yields

John Jeavons and Carol Cox

Softbound

$11.95

From the author of the widely beloved How to Grow More Vegetables comes this concise and more focused introduction to biointensive gardening that shows it is not only possible but easy to grow astonishing crops of healthful organic vegetables and fruits, while conserving resources and actually helping the soil.

The Sustainable Vegetable Garden presents the basic principles of this gardening classic in concise, easy-to-understand terms accessible to even a beginning backyard gardener. You'll learn to view your garden as its own mini-ecosystem and to foster the soil's life-giving cycles of nourishment and replenishment. By using these Biointensive techniques and working in concert with the cycles of nature, you'll soon produce yields up to four times greater than are possible with conventional methods, and in a fraction of the space! More importantly, you'll be preserving and enriching for future generations one of our most precious resources: the soil itself. With this book at your side, you'll be part of the ecological solution, for sure!

Weeds and What They Tell

Ehrenfried E. Pfeiffer

Softbound

$9.95

One of the most useful books for gardeners, one that has taught me again and again not only what my garden needs, but also how very wise nature herself is.

Pfeiffer's approach begins with the premise that nature really does know what she is doing, and that weeds grow where they are needed. By learning what each weed is offering to the soil, the discerning gardener or farmer can use organic matter and minerals to effect that same balance. The weed, no longer needed, will soon disappear from the cultivated area.

The added bonus of this little book is what you can learn about the nature of plantlife and the wonders of the world.

Earth, Plant and Compost

William F. Brinton

Softbound

$13.95

A great little book! Everything you've ever wanted to know about composting - including HOW to do it! Well illustrated, too!

Topics include:

• General principles of composting
• Source ingredients for composting
• Composting methods
• Sheer or surface composting
• Evaluting compost quality
• Compost uses
• Compost mulching
• Composting for kitchens and family gardens
• Special composts
• Glossary of technical terms for compost and soil
• Compost and related bibliography
• Useful addresses - technical assistance

Compost
What it is - How it is made - What it does

H. H. Koepf

Softbound Booklet

$6.00

An early classic of biodynamic gardening and farming literature, Koepf's booklet is the most concise, jam-packed description of the art of creating soil fertility from refuse. All the information you need to successfully build your own compost piles is included in the 18 pages of Compost. Can't be beat for usefulness and economy!

Note: for those of you who are visual learners, please be aware that there are no pictures in Compost. If illustrations are important to you, you will be much happier with Earth, Plant and Compost, sold above.

Primer of Companion Planting
Herbs - Their Part in Good Gardening

Richard B. Gregg

Softbound Booklet

$5.25

Gregg's article, reprinted in this booklet, is one of the best sources of information on companion planting available. It is dense with lists of which plants do what, including medicinal uses for animals, attracting birds, reducing disease in other plants, attracting useful insects, repeling harmful insects and animals, harming other plants, helping other plants.

While more could be said about any of these topics (and has been said in the book Companion Plants by Helen Philbrick - an extension of Gregg's article), if your primary interest is in using companion plants in your farm or garden, you'll find what you need in this booklet.

Secrets of the Soil
New Solutions for Restoring Our Planet

Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird

$19.95

Secrets of the Soil tells the fascinating story of the innovative, nontraditional, often surprising things that certain scientists, farmers, and mystics are doing to save our planet from self-destruction -- such as using the techniques of Rudolf Steiner's biodynamic agriculture with its reliance on ethereal forces from the planets, Dan Carlson's growth stimulating Sonic Bloom, and rock dust fertilizer to revitalize depleted soils. Secrets of the Soil devotes the bulk of its more than 400 pages to describing the techniques and results of biodynamic agriculture - complete with dozens of photographs. This is a wonderful resource and an ideal place to begin your own hands-on work toward restoring our planet.

Bio-Dynamic Gardening
A How-To Guide (video)

Joe Tooker

Lightfilled Productions - DVD Video

$19.95

This is a most welcome addition to the newly-expanding "how-to" literature on biodynamic gardening. This hour-long video features Joe Tooker, a master biodynamic gardener with over 25 years experience, explaining in at an easy and enjoyable pace how you can transform even the most unpromising setting into a beautiful, living and productive gardening. The biodynmic method rejuvenates the soil as it restores health to our Earth - and results in some of the best-tasting fruits and vegetables that will ever grace your table. This video offers an inspiring introduction to these methods and their results - so inspiring, you'll be inclined to get started the minute the tape comes to an end!

The Metamorphosis of Plants

Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe

Translation revised by Anne E. Marshall and Heinz Grotzke from the British Journal of Botany (1863)

Softbound

$5.95

In a way, this little book is responsible for giving modern agriculture, botany, biology - science in general - a method of observation and understanding which includes living relationships of phenomena.

If you are looking for a way to get to know the plant world more intimately, you couldn't begin with a better guide. Goethe's presentation is really a collection of short observations, insights, thoughts - collected as he observed various aspects of plant life. Each one can be used for your own meditation and observation - a doorway to greater understanding. There is a lifetime's exploration here - one which will leave you richer every time you visit it.

Goethe & Palladio
Goethe's study of the relationship between art and nature, leading through architecture to the discovery of the metamorphosis of plants

David Lowe/Simon Sharp

Softbound

$15.00

The poet, dramatist, novelist, and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to wait many years before he was able to travel south to Italy, "the land where the lemon trees bloom." He had gained success in several fields, but he had a sense of being trapped and confined and felt a need for light. Italy would give this to him in a number of ways.

Taking as their basis Goethe’s Italian Journey, the authors of this fascinating and unusual study explore how Goethe’s experience of Palladio’s architecture influenced his view of the relationship between art and nature in general and, in particular, helped him form his understanding of metamorphosis, leading to his discovery of the “archetypal plant.”

In his carefully written account of his travels, Goethe seems to oscillate between experiences of architecture and experiences of nature. In nature, he searched for the "archetypal plant," the essential form whose metamorphosis through time would produce the plant we see in its cycle from seed to fruit. In the art and architecture of antiquity and in Palladio’s classical reformulation of it, he tried to understand the purpose and function of artistic creation.

Until now, no one has put these two together. David Lowe and Simon Sharp show for the first time how these seemingly unrelated subjects are related—how the living geometries and volumes of harmoniously proportioned buildings, the “great idea” of architecture, can lead to the intuition of similar principles in nature.

David Lowe and Simon Sharp have worked together for twenty-one years. One of their first projects was the recreation of Goethe’s Italian Journey. They have given numerous workshops and presentations on the subject in the U.S. and U.K., including The British Museum, the German Embassy, and the Edinburgh Festival.

This is must-reading for anyone interested in Goethe's ideas on plants and metamorphosis.

Culture and Horticulture
A Philosophy of Gardening

Wolf D. Storl

Softbound

$17.50

This extensive book - over 400 pages long - was written as an introduction to gardening in its wider aspects, linking it to historical, philosophical and cosmological contexts, taking horticulture from the microscope to the wider cosmos. Surely such vistas are involved when one takes a shovel to hand to turn the soil: eons have formed it; life permeates it in manifold forms; cosmic cycles of sun and moon warm it, circulate water through it, lure out of it the season's vegetation; and human beings shape it according to their thinking, feeling and willing. We plant and husband it according to our cultural traditions, and find mental and physical sustenance through it. All this is gardening - and this book is a delicious, engaging way to discover these depths!

The Living World of the Plants
A Book for Children and Students of Nature

Dr. Gerbert Grohmann

Softbound

$16.00

This book can be thought of as a distillation of Grohmann's extensive two-volume study, The Plant (below). Here, the material is presented in a way that will engage both younger students and the adults who teach them. I find that in many ways, The Living World of Plants, is much more powerful in its capacity to evoke awe at the truly amazing world of plants than his more detailed presentation in The Plant. If you are not conversant with the plant world, but would like to be, this is the book for you. An excellent source book for teachers of all grade levels, whether in school or at home. Can be useful as a reader for children grades 5 and up.

The Plant, Volume 1

Gerbert Grohmann

$12.75

The Plant, in two volumes, is a classic, loving study of the plant world, the fruit of a lifetime of patient and detailed observation of nature. Volume 1 begins with the flowering plant, then turns to the living face of the earth before moving on to consider the threefoldness of the plant and the image of the human being.

I think you'll enjoy these books - whether or not you garden or farm. I have found that they offer enormous food for thought and gave me a basis for a renewed and expanded appreciation of the miracle of the natural world.

The Plant, Volume 2

Gerbert Grohmann

Softbound

$12.75

In The Plant, Volume 2, Grohmann adds further plant descriptions and extends the cosmological viewpoint presented in Volume 1.