Living the ‘Good Life’ was something that came naturally to us. However, Mother Nature teaches us, each day how to ‘live lightly’ as we work with our plants, insects and animals. Each element of this patch of earth is inter-dependent on the other. We are learning to respect this inter-dependence and try to work within it’s framework.
Nature and animals in particular remind us of parts of ourselves that have somehow been mislaid. We are each involved (separately) in empowering adults to become what they want to be… some call it ‘instructing’, ‘adult education’, ‘mature learning’ etc., etc. We do it because we like to make a difference…
What about our own lives, surely we’d enjoy a pace that is closer to the dictates of nature and more removed from the policies and procedures of administrators in our artificially structured society? This is not always as easy as it would first appear. Nature has a way of demomonstrating to us that she is boss and that we must work to her pace and with the resources she provides.
This can be a very fulfilling and at the same time a very humbling experience. We cannot make decisions and hope the universe will comply, on the contrary we are re-learning the truths of our fathers and grand-fathers. We are learning to occasionally leave the time-piece and the diary behind and allow Mother Nature to manage the seasons and the daylight hours, while we work within them.
We Can’t…
No, we can’t make potatoes grow if the spring is cold and wet. No, we can’t stop the rain from falling in November and flooding the chicken pens. No, we can’t change winter temperatures that dip below freezing and leave us with no water except when we break the ice on the duck pond. We can’t make a hen go broody, nor can we stop a colony of bees from swarming if they are intent on doing so – we are learning to allow nature to take it’s course.
We Can…
We can allow our hens to forage in the garden in the winter time to help eliminate over-wintering pests. We can allow our grass to grow naturally providing a wild-flower garden in which our hens can shelter from stiff breezes and harsh sunshine and our bees gather nectar and pollen to make honey. The seeds add variety to the hens diet as they eat them later in the year.
We can feed kitchen left-overs to the fowl, use the bedding from their housing on the compost heap to accelerate decomposition and in turn to manure the vegetable garden, fruit trees and bushes. We can feed the garden weeds back to the chickens, collect their eggs and return the crushed egg-shells to them in the kitchen waste to add grit, calcium, vitamins and trace elements to their diet.
We can allow the ducks on the lawn over the winter, to clear the moss as they forage for slugs.
We can grow plants, trees and shrubs that will give pollen and nectar for our bees and food for insects, which in turn will provide nutrition for our fowl.
And so it goes…. it is ridiculously satisfying to do something that is right by nature!!!
