50 years of deep earth homesteading

searching for divinity in love and the soil

Awareness can move us closer to the Divine, but the problem of worldly materialism remains. To remove the materialistic wedges that separate us from our God-given connections to Creation, we need to set up lots of small social structures that focus on the Divine.

Yesterday while cleaning the goats night pen and using it to deeply mulch all of my winter vegetable crops, it dawned on me that I first began using goat manure in this way over forty years ago - 23 years ago on this particular garden.

on divinity and soil

After plunging my hands into the soil of five different states and four different countries, did I ever find Divinity, or God, in the soil? Honestly… no. But I learned something profoundly important.

In the same way God doesn’t exist in the most elaborate golden alter in the most glorious cathedral on earth, Divinity doesn’t exist in the soil. Divinity is intangible. Divinity is the connection we make when we turn our attention away from mans hubristic material distractions and search for the mystical Divine in Gods Creation.

Although the temptation to write about this Christmas season in the context of the story of the Divine birth of Jesus is justified, I feel that Jesus would approve of this alternative version - to consider what is Divine. In the Gospel of Thomas Jesus said -

(77) "It is I who am the light (that presides) over all. It is I who am the entirety: it is from me that the entirety has come, and to me that the entirety goes. Split a piece of wood: I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me there.”

In other words, it’s the search, not the finding. The journey, not the destination.

There you have it. I’ve just broken a primary rule of writing. I’ve provided you with the moral of the story at the beginning instead of the end. You don’t have to read any further… unless you want to know what love, homesteading and profoundly fecund soil taught me about God and what those things have to do with deep earth philosophy.

onward

As a kid growing up in an extended farming family on the Great Plains of Kansas, performing the kind of extended agricultural practice described above was not what I dreamed about. No, I spent my idle time pondering what the greater world held. I longed to see mountains, oceans, beaches and live in tropical climes where exotic fruit grew. I watched the beach movies of the 1960’s and entertained fantasies of living that lifestyle. None of that involved a life revolving around agriculture.

Like so many kids growing up in rural areas, the materialistic temptations of the city also beckoned. In my case, the nearest one was Kansas City. Surprisingly (not so surprising when I look back on it now), my Bible thumping Baptist family members encouraged me to seek materialistic riches in the city. I complied… for a while.

While working for a small company that was one of the first to offer the benefits of touch tone key pads before they were available on any kind of phone, I was approached by a fellow who tried to recruit me for a position working at a new telecom startup. The starting salary was $60,000 per year. In 1972 that was a lot of money. I consulted with my dad and gave it a lot of thought. For years I had watched my two older brothers move up the corporate ladder with Ma Bell in the KC area. Their corporate lifestyle was too much of a rat race for me, so I declined the job offer. The company that fellow started became MCI, which soon morphed into Sprint. Today the sprawling headquarters of Sprint is located in Overland Park Kansas, a bedroom community of KC. Had I taken that job I would probably have been multi-millionaire by the age of 40. But then I would have missed out on all the priceless life experiences I’ve had since then.

The mid 1970’s proved to be a cathartic time for me. By ’74 I had moved to northern San Diego county California where a series of events led me to become the custodian of a five acre grove of mature avocado trees.

By that time many people my age had become so disillusioned by the assassination of the Kennedy brothers, King, the war in Viet Nam and Watergate that we viewed any participation in modern society as supporting a corrupt system. The buzz among my friends of that time was - create an alternative lifestyle by moving back to the land to live a simple life in a local community. Some of my friends were doing just that. While a life of agriculture was not what I had dreamed about as a kid, I had to admit that I was beginning to see the benefits of homesteading. Unlike my other hippie friends who were taking jobs in the corporate world and becoming yuppies, I had already shunned that lifestyle several years earlier in KC.

Divine intervention seemed to have brought the avocado grove into my life at just the right moment. Little did I know at the time, I was about to become a pioneer in what is now known as the “back to the land movement”.

Full disclosure: Becoming the custodian of this farm was also due to the fact that the rent was cheap. This was because the farm once belonged to a Japanese family that had lost it due to being interred during WWII.

There were dozens, possibly hundreds of such farms scattered around northern San Diego county at that time. I’m not sure if the story is the same with all of them, but this one, along with a number of others in the immediate vicinity, had been purchased by a very wealthy Italian family during the ’50’s and ’60’s. Part of the ludicrous purchase arrangement was: Because the loss of the farm was forced by the government, new owners couldn’t make any kind of profit from the property for thirty years. They could only recoup the cost of property taxes. So I rented this long abandoned farm for $175 per month. Even all the way back in 1974 that was dirt cheap.

The land encompassed a west facing slope up to a hill crest. At the crest sat a small, quaint, Japanese style home of maybe 700 sqft. From the kitchen window I could look out over the avocado trees, down a valley and see a sliver of the Pacific ocean about three miles away. There was a large garage where I set up my wood shop. Literally and figuratively, it was a long ways from the prairies of Kansas.

I soon found myself planting a garden, doing maintenance on the avocado trees, working on the irrigation system, rebuilding a pen that looked like it may have once held chickens and doing repairs on the house.

To my pleasant surprise, I was becoming enamored with this farm. So much so that I asked the owners if they would sell it. Yes. The price was $350,000. In 1974 that was a whole lot of money I didn’t have. And I was savvy enough to not go into debt for it.

At that time I was managing the outdoor section of a retail nursery that was part of a chain of nurseries throughout Southern California. The manager (my boss) was a guy I came to admire. Let’s call him Jake. Jake had graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in horticulture and was a life long student of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self Realization Fellowship. He had inherited a house in the little beach town of Leucadia, a half block from Stone Steps beach. He and his wife were raising their two sons there. Those of you who are old enough to remember the beach movies of the 1960’s starring Annette Funicello, may remember references to Swamis Beach. It was called Swamis because Yogananda had founded an Ashram on the bluff above the beach back in the 1920’s. That was about a half mile down the coast from Stone Steps beach.

Were my childhood fantasies coming to fruition?

Jake decided to have a beach party and invite his employees and those from nearby stores. A brown skinned, Raven haired, gegarious Latina gal from another store caught my eye like no woman had ever done before. It was apparent she was a native Californian because she was completely at ease body surfing. I quickly deduced that she was out of my league and tried to forget her. Try as I might, I couldn’t stop looking at her.

Although I was still learning to surf, I had another skill set that was a popular beach activity, throwing frisbee. I spent a lot of time throwing with pros at Blacks Beach way down the coast (shout out to Rocket Johnson if you’re reading this). I had become good enough at freestyle to contemplate going pro. I could solo with the frisbee by boomeranging it into the wind and keep it in the air with a sharp tap and spin movement. There was a nice onshore breeze which made it ideal to do this down the beach a ways from the party.

I noticed the Latina gal was coming my way. I thought she was probably just going for a walk down the beach. She came up to me and asked if she could throw with me. I froze like a deer in headlights. As I got my wits about me I realized she was much cuter than I first realized. I also quickly deduced that although she was petite, she was also fit. I handed her the frisbee, not sure what to say.

By that point in my life I had thrown frisbee with hundreds of different people, so I backed up to put a short distance between us, thinking that would be about her limit. She waved her hand indicating I needed to move further back. I complied. She then uncorked a blistering throw right at my midsection. I had to use both hands to catch it. I fell in love with her right then and there. We threw and caught that frisbee in every conceivable way until it got dark. Then we sat by the fire and talked until the wee hours of the morning. She had a brother who was a well known surfer in Hermosa Beach. Her dad was Mescalero Apache and her mom was from Guadalajara, Mexico. She was about as native as a Native American can be. Turns out, although she had grown up in Glendale (part of the LA basin) she not only had a love for agriculture, she had a degree in it.

Let’s call her Lupe (short for Guadalupe).

Jake had noticed what was happening between us and the next day at work he asked me about her. I told him I thought I was in love and asked if he could get me transferred to her store. He said he didn’t want to lose me, but he could get me transferred. Within a month I was working at her store. Jake was such a good friend.

Lupe seemed unimpressed to see me at her store. Maybe a month passed before I felt comfortable asking her to lunch. She declined. I was persistent and over the course of another month I asked several more times. She finally accepted. This led to more lunches over the ensuing months. Because I’ve always liked to cook, I finally got the courage to ask her to come over for dinner. She declined. She declined several more invitations over the next month or so.

She finally accepted a dinner invitation and came to the Japanese homestead when we both had a day off together. She was touched by the humble Japanese house and enthralled with the farm. She loved everything I was doing; the garden, the shop and the work in the avocado grove. She suggested I should get some goats.

After many months of trying to woo her she finally seemed to acknowledge that I was worthy of attention. She hadn’t been seeing anyone else since we first met. She was just cautious. I appreciated that about her.

The next time I asked her to come over for dinner she immediately accepted. And every time after that. Soon, we were spending all of our days off together at my place or at Stone Steps. She lived way down in the southern, inland part of the county, nearly a three hour round trip commute to work. My place was about a 40 minute round trip commute so she began to keep a few things at my place. I asked her to move in. True to her cautious nature, she was reluctant. But after several more months we had grown so close that it became inevitable.

My unpredictable, undirected, undecided, go-with-the-flow life was heading in a new direction and all the signs were pointing to two things, love and agriculture. Or, maybe they were the same thing. Over the course of not quite two years I had taken a job in an agricultural field, had a boss and a friend with a degree in agriculture, had girl friend with a degree in agriculture and I was enthusiastically gardening and maintaining an avocado grove. And for the first time in my life, I was deeply in love.

Life was good.

After she moved in, goats occasionally came up in our conversations. So, for her next birthday I got her a pair of Nubian doelings. She bubbled over with joy.

That was when I began using goat manure in the garden.

Glimpses of Divinity were beginning to appear.

She had a beautiful alto voice and played guitar very well. We often sang while cooking or working in the garden. We began going to an open mike night at a small tea house in Leucadia where she would sometimes perform. She drew the attention of several other musicians and three of them formed an acoustic folk group that began performing around San Diego County. They did Crosby Stills and Nash three part harmony, The Mamas and Papas, Kenny Loggins (we got invited to a party at his house on the bluff above Stone Steps beach), Jim Messina and songs from her favorite album at the time, Twin Sons of Different Mothers by Dan Fogelberg and Tim Weisberg. She also wrote and performed some of her own music.

Our House by CSN was our song. Graham Nash wrote it for Joni Mitchel while they were living in her house in Laurel Canyon. It was on CSN’s 1970 Déjà Vu album.

Because Lupe was fluent in Spanish we took several trips to a secret wild cove way down the coast south of Ensenada in Baja California Norte, Mexico, a place I had found about a year before we met. We camped on the bluffs above the crashing waves. Lupe would gather wild edible, medicinal and dye herbs while I snorkeled in the Pacific to spear fish. Many of our meals consisted of fresh fish from the sea and wild herbs gathered within a few hundred yards of our camp site.

My Spanish began to improve.

Because we knew someone with sheep, Lupe had begun to spin yarn with a drop spindle. For another birthday I got her a spinning wheel. Her knowledge of local dye plants was impressive. She began selling her home spun, naturally dyed yarn at local shops.

We settled into a pattern of band rehearsals at the house, work, gardening, cooking, spending time with the goats, spending time at Stone Steps swimming in the Pacific, throwing frisbee, driving up to LA to see her mom and sister, hiking in the mountains of Southern California, me working in the shop, Lupe working with textiles. We tried to never miss the bluegrass festival at Julian.

We were the quintessential hippie couple.

I had begun to take landscape jobs on the side and soon I was making more money designing and installing new landscapes than I was working at the nursery. So I quit. I found the creative outlet that landscaping provided to be as close to a mystical experience as any ‘job’ I’ve ever had. Gods Creation proved to be the ultimate palate.

Divinity was close.

Although I no longer worked for my former boss, we saw him whenever we went to Stone Steps. Along with being a life-long student of Yoganada, he was also a life-long student of the Biodynamic method Rudolf Steiner put forth before his death in 1924. If regular readers ever wandered how I came to Steiner and why I refer to him so often, now you know.

Jake had become my mentor for all things mystical, including the growing of food, flowers and cannabis. It was his influence that got me to thinking that the way we grow food determines our relationship to earth, which determines who we are and what we become, or do not become, as a society. I credit his insight with my being able to understand, avoid and write about much of what has happened over the past three years.

Many aspects of Biodynamic farming were incorporated by those who, around that time, were beginning to adopt organic principles. When a small but well connected group of people began to advocate for national organic standards, I knew the end result would be the abandonment of much of what Steiner taught. Some of us fought against the corporate push to nationalize organic certification. In the way it was with the globalists behind big pharma and covidcon, so it has been with big ag.

As organic certification was gearing up to go national (and global) with the USDA, we were told that it was going to be too difficult for most farmers to achieve and maintain the high level of respect for food and the earth that Biodynamic practitioners adhered to. Consequently, many Biodynamic attributes were dropped by the early predecessors of USDA organic.

My earlier concerns came to fruition.

Newcomers to the organic movement unfamiliar with the long history of Biodynamics were duped into thinking that early organic standards were strong. In reality, they had been deceived by the ploys of globalist big agriculture to sever us from the connections to the earth we derive when we eat real, locally produced, unprocessed, Biodynamicly grown food. Organic agriculture became a way for globalist big ag to sever Rudolf Steiner’s deep connections to the earth from the production of our food. That gave them more control while giving the phony impression that organic farming was as pure as the driven snow. In reality, the result was that big ag was able to create organic NPK substitutes for chemical ones to maintain their revenue stream. More importantly, it allowed big ag to maintain centralized control of food production.

All of this served to keep us separated from our Divine connection to the soil, the source of our sustenance.

One of the primary aspects of Biodynamics is that the farm itself should generate all the fertility the it needs. Steiner based this on modeling the example that nature provides. Nature requires no fertilizer because everything is recycled, including nitrogen (via animals and leguminous plants), which also happens to make up 78% of the air we breathe. In Steiner’s Biodynamic system, microbial and micronutrient rich manure from ruminant farm animals in conjunction with leguminous crop rotation provides all of the nutrients needed to keep soils fertile. To leave either one of those out of the picture creates a fertility gap. It also creates a disconnection that can be described as a Divinity gap.

Of course today there are many organic farms that have no animals whatsoever. They’re completely dependent on ‘organic’ products being mined and shipped from all over the world to arrive at a particular organic farm. That farm is then granted the right to charge 30% more for its product because it now carries an organic certification. There is nothing organic, let alone Divine, about any of that. What the organic standard has been successful at doing is driving a wedge between us and Gods plan for us to remain connected to the earth.

Am I saying that organic food is no safer than conventional food? The short answer is no. The longer answer lies between the lines of this post.

What happens when the UN and the WEF decide that one of the ways to reduce global warming is to eliminate the nitrogen that big ag globalists have spent generations convincing farmers they need to farm? We get the type of farmer revolts that have been happening in the Netherlands, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

What happens when governments decide to cut green house emissions by cutting diesel subsidies? We get the farmer protests we are now seeing in Germany.

Mark my word, we’ll be seeing them soon in the US.

What will be the result of all this? Crop production will fall. Food choices will falter. Famine will creep in. Chaos will ensue. And the globalists will move in to take advantage.

This is what happens when we lose our Divine right to remain connected to God’s soil.

Another aspect of Biodynamics are the mystical formulas that had been handed down for countless generations from some of Steiner’s Alpine ancestors. One technique involves stuffing cow horns with manure and burying them in the ground over the winter. By spring the contents will have been converted into a microbial treasure chest that’s then used to inoculate farm-generated compost. The compost is then spread on crop areas to revitalize the soil with nutrients and beneficial microbes. For farmers who have learned to farm without machinery, repeating this process year after year results in profoundly fecund soil.

‘Teas’ can be made from this compost as well as from other formulas. One of the most esoteric aspects of Biodynamics is to brew a large vat of compost ‘tea’ and then stir it clockwise vigorously to generate a deep vortex. The direction is then reversed until a new, deep vortex is created. This process is repeated numerous times. While stirring, happy tunes are whistled, which enter the vortex and infuse the water with positive cosmic forces. Whistling mimics the birdsong that enters the vortexes of a mountain steam as the water swirls around rocks and boulders while tumbling down a mountain. The cosmic effects of this water on people and crops are subtle but important. I often vortex my well water before drinking. Dr. Gerald Pollack, author of the Fourth Phase of Water, has pointed to vortexing as a way to enhance the structure of water. Dr. Tom Cowan has also talked about how water acts as a memory storage system, especally the water in our bodies. EMF’s destructure water.

Many years ago I had a bamboo nursery. Bamboo is a heavy feeder. To keep my plants robust I would get up early in the morning to whistle while vortexing some compost tea I had brewing for a few days. I then put the tea into my backpack sprayer and sprayed it on the bamboo plants while whistling. I can hear the groaning. More of Kyle’s nonsense. Actually, I got the idea from The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christoper Bird. (In another one of those cosmic connections, I had a chance meeting with Peter Tompkins in 1992.) This is based on the knowledge that birds often sit in trees (and bamboo plants) to sing in the morning. Of course, while doing so they often relieve themselves. Over the eons trees and bamboo have evolved the ability to become more receptive to absorbing nutrients from bird droppings through somatic tissue on their leaves when they hear birdsong.

As much as I like a lot of what Steiner has put forth, he unfortunately succumbed to the demands of many of the farmers he worked with at the time who said that they couldn’t farm without the plow. There is a lot of ground to cover when considering the plow or any implement that disturbs the soil. This will be better served by another post. A brief overview -

The plow was the most insidious and most destructive invention ever made (a creation of ancient Babylon).

How this type of machinery created the need for planting crops in rows and all the problems that ensue from that.

How plows destroy soil fertility.

How plowing increases pest insects and weeds.

How plows destroys the soil and Divine sacredness.

How plows destroy the rights that God bestowed upon the Earth.

How today plowing the earth serves globalist corporations.

How plowing led to consumerism and complete submission to the powers that shouldn’t be.

Consequently, I’ve learned to farm without any form of tillage. This negates the need for rows which improves all other aspects of food production and nutrition.

Severing connections to mans hubristic food production systems not only provides us with healthier food, it brings us closer to God.

back to landscaping

Landscaping was rewarding. I found a calling in the ability to repair the atrocities that developers do to the earth with their massive bulldozers. In fact, I named my landscape business Earth Repair.

Although the strong Japanese influence in SoCal had been dealt a blow by interring a generation of people of Japanese decent, fortunately, many of them and their offspring came back from the camps to resettle in the area. Because most of them were now landless, many began to do what their parents had done… work with the earth. Only now it was not on their land growing crops, it was landscaping other peoples land. In my last years in California I found myself relating strongly to this dilemma.

The Japanese aesthetic and influence on the nursery and landscape industry in California was, and remains, pervasive. As much as I love that aesthetic, it’s largely based on water loving plants native to Japan. Few realize that Coastal Southern California receives less rain than where I now live in Arizona.

I began having trouble justifying the tens of thousands of thirsty Japanese plants I was planting for clients all over North County. I had some friends who had begun a native California plant nursery and other friends who were growing cactus and succulents. It was always a struggle to convince clients to go with something different from their neighbors, but perseverance began to show results. As water bills continued to climb, I began having ever more luck incorporating native and drought tolerant landscaping.

Around this same time I began thinking about the potential of home landscapes to produce much of the food the family living in the house would need. Edible landscaping became my next phase of landscape evolution. At the time (mid to late ’70's) I didn’t know anyone else who was doing that. Surprisingly, it was even more difficult to convince people to go with edible landscaping than it was drought tolerant landscaping. Much of that had to do with the need for increasingly expensive water.

Having grown up in a region of Kansas that had seen major rain water catchments and earthen soil erosion control projects constructed as part of the Soil Conservation Service work projects programs during the dust bowl years of the 1930’s, I began to incorporate small scale versions of these systems into some of the last landscape jobs I did before leaving SoCal. I saw edible landscaping combined with rain water harvesting techniques as a timely solution to the suburban cancer that was wiping out small farms and the increasingly endangered native Chaparral habitat of the region. All of those houses have enough roof space to capture sufficient rainfall in existing swimming pools or in new tank installations to irrigate edible crops year ‘round.

In Kansas, at the farm where I spent the first several years of my life, we had no electricity, which meant we had no well or pump. Instead, we had a huge underground cistern that caught the rain water from the roof of the house and another nearby building. To get water from it we had to go outside and crank a pulley that ran a chain to which a series of cups were attached that brought water from the cistern to the surface and dumped it into a bucket. Mom would take the bucket inside and use the water to prepare our meals, wash the dishes and heat bathwater.

When I bought my current land in 1998, the first thing I built was a 7,000 gallon concrete tank.

I’ve become so passionate about rain water storage as a near-term solution to suburban blight, food deserts and private water companies that gouge their customers that I’ve helped install a number of tanks for other folks in the area where I now live. I see rain water storage tanks as the most important investment a homeowner can make to protect themselves from whatever dystopian future the UN and the WEF may have in store for us. We can live without electricity but we cannot live without food and water.

I see the overall approach to rainwater harvesting and food production within the confines of the typical suburban front and back yard as suburban homesteading.

back to the avocado farm

When I moved onto the little Japanese farm I was told by the owners secretary that if I lived there long enough there may come a time when the owners restriction on developing the property expires. That when that time came, I would have to move. Sadly, that time coincided with the demise of the relationship between Lupe and I.

There were personal things I’m not going to go into here. Needless to say, the demise of our relationship was one of the most difficult things I’ve gone through. I’m not sure I’m completely over it today. I still dream of her often.

Couple that with what happened to the farm… I was devastated when the bulldozers came and destroyed decades of hard work by a creative Japanese family and what I had done to try and preserve it. It was one of the most blatant examples of disconnection from the Divine I’ve ever experienced. I decided to spend the rest of my life trying to overcome this type of evil.

The mystical forces that brought about the happy little world I was provided in 1974 were, by the early 1980’s, torn asunder by the dark, materialistic forces of modern syphilization. SoCal was becoming a wasteland for the Divine. Regrettably, over the past forty years, that trend has accelerated.

I moved to Hawaii to continue my search for Divinity in the profoundly fertile volcanic soils of the Big Island.