Two months ago Sabrina & i did a twelve day cleanse at the end of which i wrote a post indicating that i was thinking about continuing the fast for a few more days, after which you didn't hear from me again. Thank you @vincentnijman for your kind message to make sure i was alright! Yes, we are all doing great. I did 13 days without solid food in the end and one of the most unexpected side-effects has been a sudden and complete lack of interest in this computer, so other than reading PDFs and the occasional bit of research it has been used for little else over the past 2 months, giving me more time for nature which continues to delight in so many ways.
I really love the internet and the way it connects me with so many great people & ideas but taking some time off to be alone is important too.
The Master Cleanse
There are many positive things to say about it so will start with the only negative i can think of. My body found it difficult once i stopped drinking daily laxative teas (without which the cleanse is not effective) to begin pooping again and i was constipated for around 4-5 days. No big deal really.
The rather more expected side-effect of the cleanse has been a heightened energy & enthusiasm for life, permitting me to delve ever deeper into that bamboo forest beyond our garden.
Worth mentioning too that i so enjoyed the flavour and effect of the cleansing drink (maple syrup, lemon juice, cayenne pepper & water) that i have since then been drinking it every day for my breakfast and sometimes also for my lunch because it is unquestionably the most effective liquid meal i have ever come across. Even more effective than smoothies & juices due to the balanced mixture of nutrients in the ingredients. Sugar has mostly been replaced in this house by maple syrup because it is packed full of good stuff and of all the 'health foods' i have pushed on the children over the years this has been the easiest to implement.
Looking into it further i have since learned that one can also tap syrup (sugary water in its initial form) from birch and walnut trees in the month of March, both of which we have in abundance here, so will be learning about that in the Spring to offset the cost of store bought syrup. Yesterday we identified our lucky trees and put copper Lakovsky coils around their bases, to give them a boost half a year in advance of tapping them.
The final and most crucial point in relation to the cleanse is that Sabrina & i did not feel hungry at all (thanks to around 6-8 glasses of 'lemonade' every day) and in addition, we did not lose any energy. On the contrary i actually felt myself more energised than normal and somehow i was even stronger than normal, able to do 45 good form press-ups in a row on the final day when normally i am able to do only 35! This increased strength has stayed with me and even now, two months later, i feel my body & mind stronger than usual.
Highly recommend the cleanse to all no matter how healthy you might think you are. Personally i intend to do it twice a year for the rest of my life. Once in the summer, once in the winter.
Read my original post on The Master Cleanse.
My mother's Summer visit to France
Directly after the cleanse my mother and her partner arrived from the UK for their annual weekly visit and I worked hard on the Spiral Garden in advance of their arrival, wanting them to enjoy our first ever party at this location.
Little more than a year ago this was basically an empty piece of land but now it feels like a semi-tropical paradise in places.
Sunflowers and electroculture antenna tower above everything.
While down below we have hyper productive beds growing a wide variety of things. Sweet potatoes, red amaranth, plantain and tomatoes visible in this shot.
Here you can see the long awaited party!
Badminton was played upon arrival that evening and am happy to report Esteban is getting quite good at this sport now.
This and pétanque (balls) which we play in the same area.
He is still working on 'service with a smile' however!
We cooked meat on our stone BBQ/seat for the first time and it worked a treat.
The light of the sun setting through the bamboo forest illuminated the smoke perfectly that evening.
Someone had the great idea to cook the Camembert cheese in the embers of the fire to make it soft in order that we could dip our bread in it.
This was very much enjoyed by all!
After that it was marshmallows. A tradition that the French people at our party were not aware of.
All in all i felt as if everyone there had a really good time and we stayed until it was dark.
I had to relight the fire eventually as people were getting cold but was unable to get any decent photos in this final period due to the low lighting.
It was a great having them here for a week and i have just booked flights for a few days in the UK next month in order that the children & i can attend my mother's 80th birthday.
Giant Sunflowers
I don't post much about electroculture any more but can assure you there is plenty to say. In short i can see the effect loud and clear, though it isn't always consistent.
There are many factors affecting growth, some of which are beyond my currently knowledge but i can say with certainty that in every crop i sow now there are always some plants which are enormous.
Check out the leaf on this castor plant for example.
The plant itself is currently towering over me, producing some incredible looking seeds (which are comprised of 50% castor oil) and i intend to process these at the end of the year.
So it isn't just my sunflowers which are bigger than normal, but i am going to focus on them because they are like a beacon observable from a distance and all the comments i get from people passing by are always in relation to them.
Esteban kindly took this one at sunrise a month ago, just after we finished sungazing together.
The one behind me here we measured at 360cms which isn't breaking any records but still quite impressive.
The interesting thing about these sunflowers is that we didn't even plant them. The birds do that for us by pecking at them when they are ripe, dropping some seeds on the ground around the base so that next year they will sprout without having to do anything at all.
We are collecting the ripe seeds as future chicken food and have been very much enjoying the patterns which reveal themselves after removing the flower buds.
A deeper connection
Now that i spend around 6h per day alone in the garden there is a silent conversation going on between myself and the plants from which i am given guidance to do things i wouldn't normally do. I mention this because two weeks ago i felt guided to pick a few sunflower heads much earlier than normal to see if i could eat the seeds whole, before the shells became hard.
And you know what? They taste amazing! So since then we have been adding handfuls of these seeds to smoothies, breakfast cereals & salads. Have been blown away by how crunchy and nutritious they are but what came next took it to a whole new level.
I was munching on my seeds in silence and felt as if i could hear them 'speaking' to me, telling me how they could be used to make flour. "We will only last a few weeks in the fridge" they said, "but as flour we will last for years".
Okay, either i am going mad or my sunflower seeds just told me clearly what to do with them. I checked on the internet but could find nothing at all about drying whole unripe sunflower seeds to make flour. Surely i am not the first person to think of this?
By chance i had a bunch of chives to dry that night so i chopped up some seeds to increase their surface area...
...and prepared one tray as a test, at 40°C for 8h.
Here are the dry seeds in the morning. Certainly nothing special to look at!
But after a few minutes in the blender they were transformed into something which very much resembled a coarse wholesome flour.
The flavour was sweet and i could immediately feel how this flour would be good for things like biscuits, cakes or pancakes.
So the following night i loaded up the dehydrator again, this time with six trays of seeds and was able to produce half a jar of the flour which is enough for a cooking test.
I will try sun-drying some next as i see now that to get a large quantity of flour one would have to run the dehydrator for many nights.
Not sure what i am going to make with the flour yet but will try and keep this story going in the next post so that you may learn how it turned out. Pancakes and maple syrup with the children does sound very tempting.
What i know about sunflowers is that they grow well here and they have responded positively to all the electroculture techniques i have thrown at them, so if in the future we cannot get our hands on wheat flour for whatever reason, this will make a good substitute. Or at the very least it will supplement our acorn flour which we have been making in small quantities for the past three years. We have forests of oak trees here so that one was a no-brainer.
New land: stirring up the dream pot
Have mentioned many times on hive in the past how we have been planting local fruit & nut trees in pots for years, getting ready for the food forest, now with over 100 small trees distributed around our three allotments & courtyard.
Another collection of baby trees seen here, too many to list. The neem looks the healthiest in this bunch.
I am therefore excited to announce that we have finally found the right land on which all of us (trees included) can put down our roots.
It is a 5000m2 plot with dirt track access for vehicles, a water source and forest valley at one end.
Here we are right at the bottom of the valley, deep within the forest.
It is pure perfection, complete with a little stream.
Some of the trees seem quite old, perhaps 50-100 years.
During our exploration of the forest we came across this enormous dead pig.
The poor guy had been shot recently as his body showed no signs of decomposition.
The bullet wound was on his bum so he likely ran for many days before finally dying here.
Strangely we found a total of four dead pigs, all within meters of each other, in varying states of decay. So i have since then spoken to a local hunter to try and get my head around this and he confirmed that no hunting happens in the forest. But why all the dead hogs then? Well, it seems to me this is something along the lines of an 'elephant graveyard', only with pigs. The local hunter told me he never heard of this before but can think of no other reason why so many of them would die in the same place other than by choice.
These paths you can see are not made by humans but pigs and i see all of this as a good omen.
The presence of these animals (dead or alive) indicates the absence of humans and if they really have chosen this as a good place to die, it must surely be very special to them. Perhaps there is a suitable energy here for making a clean transition back to the non-physical?
Or perhaps it is the opposite and their souls are able to live on in this forest?
We will see...
In this section i can envision an eco-pool fed with some kind of flowform system to keep the algae at bay.
Plus a wall of some kind, to keep the 'forest of souls' separate from our food forest.
There isn't much to show you on the rest of the land. Mostly it is just empty, being fully exposed to the sun.
Shade trees like this acacia will have to be grown alongside many of our babies which won't be completely happy in the full sun till they are more developed.
Knowing we are going to need many shade trees i have been digging them up around the mountain, letting them recover here in our courtyard with lots of electroculture around them.
Getting back to the land it has some fig trees, hazelnuts, oaks & apple trees. Plus an overgrown kiwi plant in need of attention and a floxglove tree.
So while it does have access to water i would still like for it be self-sufficient ultimately, using swales to catch the rain and keep it in the ground where it is needed, while the berms beyond them will grow nitrogen fixing plants to feed the trees.
Swales & berms will follow the contour lines of the entire land at set intervals and the biggest challenge will be creating these. Only when this is done can we begin planting trees.
Specifically i am interested in syntropic agriculture for this food forest and look forward to telling you more about that in the future.
The asking price for the land is €10,000 and although i don't feel ready to fork out that kind of money from our crypto savings i do feel that such details are insignificant when 'stirring up the dream pot'. Having a clearly focused goal with all four family members tuned in to the same frequency is much more important at this stage.
Let's see where we go from here...
Final Thoughts
Humans have never invented anything which wasn't first observed in nature so it seems to me there is no better teacher than nature herself and if one is lucky enough to be able to spend the majority of their time engaged with this teacher they may experience the kind of guidance i mentioned with my sunflower seeds, which was less about mimicking natural processes and more about listening/observing/tasting/feeling/being present to understand the lesson on offer.
After a while one will begin to crave this education system, the original education system no less! Indeed, many times i have tried to leave the garden at the end of my day, with fading light and an empty stomach only to find that i keep getting drawn back to it because i discovered that perfect plant the rabbits like to eat or i saw an unfinished tomato frame and felt like finishing its construction before departure. Once it is done i will go through the same process again with a decision to leave and then a whole bunch of events which seem to gently hold me exactly where i am, because nothing happens in isolation and one job always leads to another, just as one natural process always perfectly facilitates the next, energising and enthusing us through our observations & interactions.
It is in this way that i found the latest piece of land, our fourth 'garden' for food production, because each plot has led me to neatly to the next, without any need for thought or action. Or even money! Not only that, each piece of land has mentally and physically prepared me for that which followed and i am never given more than i can handle at any one time.
With that said i do feel as if i am going to need a bit of help building this food forest and am already cooking up plans in my head to invite people here on an exchange basis. Something like food & board in exchange for help on the land. Hopefully next Summer!
What i intend to build here will i believe be something significant for future generations.
A place to be safe, a place to be free, a place to play, a place to learn.
Ultimately a place to nourish the body and the mind.
Excited to share more on this story as it unfolds.
Love & Light everyone 🌱
