When the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989, East Germans crossed into West Berlin. Over the following days, many visited grocery stores, buying bananas and other goods that had been difficult to obtain at home. How did something so ordinary become so meaningful? After World War II, Germany was divided between the Western Allies (US, Europe and France) and the Soviet Union. By 1949, West Germany had become a parliamentary democracy with a market economy, while East Germany became a Socialist state, governed by a Communist Party with a centrally planned economy (sound familiar NY?). West Germans enjoyed greater political freedom and consumer choice. East Germans faced restricted travel, limited political freedoms, and shortages of many goods. In 1961, East Germany built the Berlin Wall to stop its citizens from leaving for the West. Peaceful protests and growing demands for change helped bring about the Wall's opening in 1989. Germany reunited the following year. People weren't risking their lives simply for bananas. They wanted the freedom to travel, speak, and make choices about their own lives. As we observe Veterans Day in the US, this history reminds me that the end of World War II did not end the struggle over freedom. We honor all those who served, including the veterans of World War II and the Cold War, whose service helped shape the world in which these events unfolded. And that an ordinary banana can remind us that the decisions governments make eventually reach into the everyday lives of families. Sometimes history is easier to understand through a grocery bag than through a political speech.

When hay leaves a field on a wagon, some of the nutrients that helped grow it leave with it. If the hay feeds cattle on the same farm, some of those nutrients can return to the fields in manure. Where the hay goes makes a difference to where those nutrients may go next. Rudolf Steiner took up this relationship in his second agricultural lecture at Koberwitz in June 1924. He asked his listeners to think of the farm as an “individuality,” capable of supplying much of what it needed from within. He pictured land growing feed for animals and animals providing manure for the land. He acknowledged that a farm could only approach this ideal and described bringing in manure as a remedy for an ailing farm. That ideal raises a fair question. Can a farm really regenerate itself? No farm creates nutrients from nothing or runs like a perpetual motion machine. Sunlight supplies energy, while nutrients enter through sources such as rainfall, nitrogen fixation, weathering minerals, and materials brought onto the farm. Nutrients also leave in crops, animals, runoff, and other losses. Steiner explained his ideal through a spiritual worldview. We can also examine the movement of materials directly. When a farm feeds its own hay to cattle, some nutrients return in manure. When cattle eat purchased feed, some nutrients in that manure came from elsewhere. Manure can move nutrients around, but it does not make them appear from nowhere. What matters is what enters, what leaves, and where materials end up. I see a smaller version of this in my garden. I move some fallen leaves from the lawn to a bed where I want cover. Excess leaves go to a low spot to decay. I add chicken scratch, and the chickens mix the leaves through winter while leaving manure as they forage around the homestead. These practices move and recycle materials. These cycles still depend on sunlight for energy and on nutrients entering the garden from sources such as rain, soil minerals, and materials brought in from elsewhere. What materials do you move from one part of your garden or farm to another, and what changes where they end up?

If we gathered onions, garlic, leeks, and parsley from our gardens today, we would be bringing together foods named in Mayster Jon Gardener’s instructions preserved from around 1440. The spelling looks different, but several names are recognizable. His opening lines include “leke,” “ownyns,” “garleke,” and “percely.” Across nearly six centuries, these are still familiar garden crops and kitchen ingredients. What interests me is how easily we can picture using them. Onions and garlic might begin a meal in the cooking pot. Leeks could become part of a soup, and parsley could supply leaves for a sauce. Medieval English cooking records also connect these plants with soups, sauces, and other preparations. Mayster Jon gives parsley particular attention. He describes cutting it repeatedly during the season, while leaving plants intended for seed uncut. This was a crop to manage for continued use, with some plants serving the kitchen and others providing seed. That does not mean his parsley or onions were identical to the varieties we buy today. The familiar crop name does not establish the same size, appearance, flavor, or growing behavior. Nor does one gardening text tell us what every household grew or ate. Still, these recognizable foods give us a practical connection with the past. We can begin with something we know, then ask how people grew it, prepared it, and carried it into another season. For our next look at Mayster Jon’s garden, I would like to follow these familiar foods a little further, from the growing bed toward the household table. Which of these four do you grow, and which earns its place most often in your cooking?

A beetroot on the kitchen counter tells us something about the harvest. Understanding how it grew means looking beyond the root itself to the soil, weather, season, and care that helped produce it. Rudolf Steiner used a similar example when he began his agricultural lectures in 1924. Before following those lectures, it helps to know a little about the person behind them. Steiner was an Austrian philosopher and lecturer, born in 1861. He studied science and philosophy and spent years editing the scientific writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German writer who also studied plants and other natural phenomena. Questions about how people observe and understand nature were part of his work long before he addressed agriculture. He also developed anthroposophy, a spiritual worldview through which he sought to understand human life and nature. That background is important because his agricultural lectures combined practical concerns with spiritual and cosmic explanations. In June 1924, Steiner delivered eight agricultural lectures at Koberwitz, in what is now Poland. These became the starting point for the later biodynamic farming movement. In the opening lecture, he argued that describing a beetroot’s appearance and composition did not adequately explain its life. Understanding it also required attention to its relationship with the field, soil, and season. That gives us a useful question to carry into this historical series, what becomes visible when we study the relationships surrounding a plant? We also need to distinguish what Steiner observed, how he interpreted it, and what evidence supports an explanation. His spiritual claims are part of the history we will examine although their presence in a lecture does not establish them as scientific findings. As we follow these lectures, we can consider the questions Steiner raised, the explanations he offered, and how people later tested or developed his ideas. Have you encountered biodynamic gardening before, and what have you wondered about it?

Long before European settlers arrived in North America, Indigenous communities were growing corn, beans, and squash together. Among the Haudenosaunee, these crops became known as the Three Sisters. The corn was different from the sweet corn many of us grow today. These were generally mature, starchy varieties, often called flour or flint corn, that could be dried, stored, and ground into cornmeal to help feed families through the winter. What interests me is how these three plants worked together. Corn grew tall and provided support for climbing beans. Squash spread across the ground, shading the soil and helping retain moisture while reducing some weed growth. Beans formed relationships with soil bacteria that fixed nitrogen, contributing to the longer-term fertility of the growing system. For the Haudenosaunee, the Three Sisters represented more than an efficient planting method. They were part of a cultural tradition built around food, community, and relationships with the land. Planting methods varied among Indigenous communities, and growing these crops together did not eliminate competition for sunlight, water, or nutrients. Today, we might call this polyculture or companion planting, but the underlying lesson goes further. Rather than growing each plant in isolation, people learned to recognize how different plants could share space and contribute to a productive garden. As you look back over your garden this year, which plants worked well together, and where might you try a different combination next season?