Today I'm trying a new idea to reduce the effect of drought on poor sandy soil, it won't make a difference this year, but will improve the CEC of the land long term and increase how much water, nutrients and biology can be held. The plan is to crush biochar in a cement mixer with a couple of bricks, then apply to the dry pasture with a seed /fertiliser spreader, and water in with pond water. We already know that pond water has high fertility from experiments in watering plants with just plain well water and pond water, trapping this fertility in the biochar will prolong it's efficacy. When working with micro powders, don't forget to wear a mask.

Around 1440, an English gardening poem attributed to Jon Gardener described how to grow vegetables and herbs, save seed, propagate plants, and graft fruit trees. In The Feate of Gardening, Gardener gives surprisingly practical instructions for grafting. He describes cutting the tree stock with a saw, smoothing it with a knife, preparing the scion, fitting the pieces together, and protecting the graft afterward. For those of us growing grafted pawpaws, apples, pears, or other fruit trees today, the basic idea is familiar. A seed-grown fruit tree is a new genetic individual. If we want to preserve a particular variety, grafting allows us to keep that variety growing by joining living tissue from the plant we want to another compatible plant. Gardener was writing about apples and pears, not pawpaws, but the underlying principle has carried forward for centuries. What interests me just as much is how much observation sits behind a skill like this. Someone had to notice that cut plant tissues could join, learn which combinations worked, determine when the timing was right, and then pass that knowledge forward. The Feate of Gardening did exactly that. It preserved practical gardening knowledge in English at a time when books were still copied by hand. The surviving manuscript is considered the earliest existing English account devoted to gardening. There is much more in this little work that we can come back to. Gardener discusses seed saving, seasonal planting, propagation, and a long list of useful herbs. Even his planting dates raise an interesting question for us today. Rather than simply copying a date from fifteenth-century England, we can ask what seasonal conditions and signs in nature surrounded that date. The calendar changes with place and climate although our relationships between plant growth, season, and timing remain. If you are growing a grafted fruit tree, what are you growing?

This year the tomatoes seem to be very fleshy with a high pulp to seed ratio, as always super tasty, straight from the vine, they make a great lunch time wrap. It's also the best year ever for aubergines, these came from a 39 cents packet of generic unnamed seed I found in a discount shop .

I think yesterday was the last day of craziness, I'm not sure if the madness was internal, external, local,or global. For at least the last month everything has been extreme,not only in the garden, but with work and socially, every one and everything at the limit, and strangely people are coping and adapting with good humour and an attitude that ,we can't do anything else, but deal with it. Not the everything is bad, a large number of things are going well, it's just unusual and unexpected. My intuition is telling me, today there's a change in the air, and hopefully a return to normal events, with the promise of the beginning of new routine. Maybe it's me, and the 15th of August passing by has sent a subliminal massage. (In France this is the date the marks the beginning of autumn/winter planting, and the decline of summer.) Am I the only person who has seen this madness or is it a local, or personal phenomena?

As technology advances our hand eye coordination and dexterity get better and perhaps our upper body strength and stamina reduce , does it matter ? No. Working the land simply with basic tools is almost a thing of the past , petrol equipment is being replaced by battery tools, even larger energy demanding equipment, like tractors can be electric, quite, clean and less emissions. All this help we have to do work ,comes at a price, not only to purchase, but with embodied energy in the manufacturing and delivery. Our practical skills and physical strength is more sustainable, and we should do our best to improve and maintain them, then as we age recount the knowledge and experience that we invested in when we were younger, and pass it on. Our abilities to the new crafter's and grafters. One big problem is that pushing buttons is easier than learning a trade and all the hours of practice, the blisters, cuts and bruises, that it takes to become an expert in a manual skill . Electric secateurs what next?