Spring Biodynamic Preparation Making Workshop

come and get your hands dirty with us at Perennial Roots Farm on Virginia's beautiful Eastern Shore!

There are many reasons to participate in a biodynamic workshop. Perhaps you’re a farmer, and you want to revitalize your land. Or maybe you’re a gardener who wants to participate in making remedies that help heal the earth. Or perhaps your motive force is the wellsprings of anthroposophy. Or maybe you don’t garden at all, but you intuit that biodynamics is a meaningful way to work with other people to make the world a bit better. After all, regardless of where we live and work, none of us are “separate” from Nature by the very fact that we live and move and eat from the same Earth. As a fish cannot live out of water, we cannot live outside the Earth — but like fish belong to the ocean and are a part of it, we too are part of the Earth.

No matter your walk in life, I always like to remind people that the most significant transformation is the change made within one’s own imagination. After all, the imagination is a function of the will. The deliberate practice of making the preparations year after year — none of which would ever happen by accident — disciplines how you imagine things to include new creative pathways. By doing the work with regularity, the imagination is transformed, and, as an aftereffect, concepts are developed.

Biodynamics does not begin with the ideas, it begins with doing the work. As we begin with the sense-perceptible world, then experience feelings evoked from outside, and eventually — if we are attentive — discover spiritual concepts from these experiences. While we arrive last at the spiritual ideas, they were there first. We arrive at living ideas from the wisdom of repeated experience, out of the gentle empiricism of practical life.

As Hugh Courtney liked to say, “Biodynamics is not an intellectual path, it is a path of the will.” But what does this mean? It means that those who go out of their way to do the work, even when it’s inconvenient, are the ones sharing our path. A librarian like JPI’s founder, Hugh Courtney, was obviously a big reader, so he understood the ideas undergirding biodynamics. Nonetheless, he knew it’s not enough to know “about” biodynamics; we must participate with our own two hands. It does not matter how many cookbooks I read if I don’t practice cooking consistently. If we mistake biodynamics for a formulaic recipe, we have already fallen out of the “realm of the living” into fossilized thinking.

Every year for most of our time farming, we have been making biodynamic preparations even when we don’t need them. Maybe it’s because the world needs them that we make more than we can possibly use? It is the practice that makes perfect. Even if I make preparations for another thirty years, that’s only another thirty times I get to practice since most can only be made once a year. How can anyone become an “expert” in something they can only ever do a few dozen times before dying? But it’s the doing that is key. Barring acts of God, the future is my habits today multiplied by time. What I am not actively working on today will not be any better in the future. As Goethe says, “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”

Today I am writing you to extend an invitation to come join me at my farm in Accomac, Virginia from June 13-15 (Friday-Sunday) as we make the biodynamic preparations. This will be a weekend of good food, sourced directly from Perennial Root’s market garden, fellowship, stimulating teaching and conversation, community building, and work! We plan to make a wide variety of biodynamic preparations, including the stinging nettle preparation, yarrow preparation, dandelion preparation, and the chamomile preparation, throughout the weekend with herbs grown and harvested from here on my farm. Folks will also be given a farm tour where you will get to meet the cows that anchor our own farm’s fertility and all of our biodynamic preparations.

In an effort to include as many folks as possible, the fee for the workshop is a sliding scale, with work comp options also available. A work-comp option is available for those who wish to receive a 50% refund from their ticket price after contributing a day of extra labor helping with cleaning up and making/burying preparations after the workshop. Please pay what you can afford — doing so helps keep costs down for others! If you cannot attend, anything you can do to help support our work of making biodynamic preparations is greatly appreciated. Some of our friends and supporters graciously purchase tickets to support this work from afar and ask that they serve as a scholarship for those who wish to attend. We appreciate all your efforts to participate in whatever ways you each can, even if you are not able to join us this weekend to make the biodynamic preparations.

Camping on the farm and local lodging are available.

We are a small farm, so tickets are limited. Please sign up early to guarantee your spot! There will be presentations on the evolution of humanity and consciousness, the development of the cosmos, and the place of biodynamic preparations within this broader spiritual context.

We have been using biodynamic preparations on our farm since 2012 and this workshop is one of gathering together in fellowship and community to make gifts for the earth. One thing that stands out especially at our workshops is the biodynamic food, from the vegetables my wife Natalie grows to the cows and animals we raise here on our farm. All freshly harvested and expertly prepared from our garden. Even if nothing else was accomplished than gathering together, it’s worth the experience alone. For the weekend, you will be joining the beating heart of a working biodynamic farm where all the preparations are not only grown, sourced and made from the soil and cows that reside here but then sprayed out onto the land to nourish the plants and humans that call this place home in a beautiful full circle moment of endless gratitude for the important part that we each play in this beating farm organism.

From everyone here at Perennial Roots Farm, we look forward to seeing you June 13-15th!