Over the last year Finca Sagrada has become much more vibrant and productive. It’s hard to pin it down to any one cause. Here are some reasons:

• We finished our House of Original Thought (in my next blog I will write about our spirit house) last June and everything has flourished since then.
• We have lots more help. Jose Calva (president of the indigenous Palta people) joined us February of 2018. He has spear-headed the expansion of our gardens. To help him we have a great volunteer program and usually have six to eight volunteers at any one time.
• I finally broke down and bought 200 bags of chicken manure and 200 bags of cow manure which we composted and have been using on our vegetable beds.
• I know our on going practice of using the Biodynamic preparations are helping.
• Every morning we practice Agni Hotra ceremony at sunrise.
• I am trying to work with the elemental beings by using the mapping or conning method developed by Machaelle Small Wright who developed Pralandia. In this method, I call in the unseen beings to help with specific problems like insect problems.

From this you can see that a big part of our work is devoted to working with the unseen forces. For me Biodynamic farming is exciting because we work with the formative forces of the universe. This includes not only the homeopathic preparations but also working with the stars and planets and developing a relationship with elemental beings that make the physical world possible. 

Now in our gardens we grow native foods such as yucca, zanahoria blanca (a turnip-like carrot) and camote (sweet potatoes) and also a wide range of temperate vegetables like tomatoes, lettuce, beets, carrots and cabbage. We also have a flourishing “food forest“ where we grow avocados, papayas, bananas, tangerines and coffee. We also milk cows, have chickens for eggs and tend eight beehives.

Apart from food items like rice and wheat which we can’t grow, much of the time we are self-sufficient and can feed ten or twelve people daily.

During the next few weeks I will describe in more detail how we reached one of our goals of being self-sufficient. It is beautiful in that now we find that our lives revolve around growing our food in a respectful non-exploitive way, preparing the food we harvest and then breaking bread in community.