In Florida, at Lake Jem, Murphy had a calendar on the wall of the dining room, “Stella*Natura”, published by the Camphill Community at Kimberton Pennsylvania. No eye candy here or 4-color photos of mountain lakes or wildlife, rather, it was a black-and-white publication with informative articles on Biodynamic gardening, charts on planting in harmony with cosmic events. I didn’t understand the astronomical basis for the calendar’s suggestions, but overall it seemed a fairly sophisticated rendering of lore surrounding planting by the moon. I was only mildly interested in that part, but on the back cover there was a brief mention of an apprenticeship program. That really piqued my attention--the notice that Kimberton Hills accepts a few interns each year as part of a several-year training in Biodynamic agriculture. Here it was, the opportunity I’d wanted. I did write to the place while I was still at Murphy’s, but with all the subsequent moving around, first to Eden, NY, and then to Blacksburg, VA, the first reply might have been lost. Finally, most of a year later, I did receive a note, inviting me to come and present myself.
I arrived at Kimberton on Whitsunday, the seventh Sunday after Easter, in early June…strawberry time. I met Joel Morrow, the head gardener, that first evening and the next morning when I showed up for work at Morningstar Garden my first assignment was to learn the names of all the houses in the community—Springfield, Oberlin, Hyacinth, Kepler, Garden Cottage, Farmhouse, Sancanac, and several others—and to make signs to mark the strawberry rows for picking by the folks in each house. Our garden crews would pick every other fruit and vegetable we grew, but we could count on a U-Pick scheme for strawberries—the house mothers would somehow find the time to come, or send someone, to get those!
Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, founded in 1972, nine years before I arrived, is part of the world wide Camphill movement begun in Scotland in the early years of World War II by Dr. Karl Koenig and other refugees from Nazi oppression, all followers of the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner [1861-1925] is often called simply “an Austrian philosopher,” but he had a devoted following of people dedicated to carrying on with practical applications of his work in education, medicine, agriculture, architecture, religion and other areas of human endeavor. His work was immense in depth and extent, preserved in many books and more than 6,000 lectures during his lifetime.
Steiner, died less than a year after he gave the “Agriculture Course,” the week-long series of lectures that became, in farmers’ hands, the art of Biodynamics. This was what I’d come for, to learn the techniques and lore of Steiner’s agriculture. What I didn’t realize until much later was that much of the learning I was going to absorb would come from retarded people.
Rudolf Steiner’s teachings in education and what came to be called “Social Therapy” coupled with Koenig’s vast compassion and considerable medical expertise as a seasoned pediatrician, inspired the life at the first Camphill which was set up as a school and community for mentally handicapped people. The premise was simple: work with people’s strengths, and immerse them in a community culture that values every individual’s contribution as a vital piece of the whole. Know that if you program for success and let the whole community adapt itself to the best elements of all its people, wondrous things can happen.
Other such schools were developed in Great Britain during the 1940s and 1950s and when it became clear that no place existed for the students after they became adults, Camphill would carry on the compassionate and life-affirming work with them. “Villages” were established as places where they could live and work in healthy environments designed to encourage their fullest potential. Now there are 90 such centers—schools and Villages--in twenty countries embracing some 7,000 people.
The first of these Villages in North America was at Copake, New York, founded in 1961. Kimberton, in 1972, was the second.
The premise was simple but in its execution complex as only a community of human beings can be. Complex, even elegant. Camphill Villages are not institutions. There is none of the architectural or administrative inflexibility that characterize, say, schools or mental institutions. They are truly Villages in their structure and their culture, self-contained and managed by the Co-workers themselves… housemothers, gardeners, grounds keepers, bakers, store keepers, farm workers, maintenance people. There is little or no hierarchy, excepting that in all reason and justice, the judgment of a core member who has been there since the beginning is likely to hold sway over that of a summer intern.
The housemothers are the heart of the place and the household you live in—probably no less than 5 inhabitants, nor more than 10 or 12—is her domain. She is chief nurturer and the special ambiance of the home she creates is carried like a bouquet by the people she sends out into the Village in the morning—well nourished, scrubbed, cared for and cheerful.
The so-called handicapped adults we worked with, the reason-for-being of the place, would have been lost in the society at large, either sheltered at home by aging and anxious [for what would become of their 20- or 30-something autistic or Down’s Syndrome son or daughter when they passed on?], or in a group home and “sheltered workshop” kind of existence, probably medicated into docility and forever infantilized. Here in Camphill however, they led lives of dignity and their sense of self-worth was fostered at every turn. There were about fifty of these folks at Camphill Kimberton, ranging in age from 20 to 60+. For the most part their stay at the Village was open-ended, a lifetime place for almost all, for it would be hard to conceive of a more sustaining life for them. I wrote “so-called” handicapped people, because it became clear to me after a while that they taught as much as they learned, and they cared for us Co-workers as much as we cared for them, though not so self-consciously. For instance, if you were paying attention to what was going on in your relationship with these folks, especially to what it was that most irritated you about someone’s behavior, you found invariably that they were emulating unappealing traits in your own presentation to the world; their special gift was this all-unaware mimicry.
My garden crew were fine wheelbarrow drivers, and berry pickers, carrot pullers, bean harvesters. At a certain point in the mid-morning [we’d been harvesting all of the first part of the day] we would load produce into white plastic buckets, each with the name of a Village house on it, load the buckets into big two-wheeled garden carts, and send teams off to the various houses, in time for the cooks to use it in the main meal of the day, around one o’clock. In a summer, for a Village of 110 souls, uncounted tons of tomatoes, beans, squash, peas, broccoli, cabbage, salad of all kinds, plus potatoes and sweet corn from the farm fields. We all ate like kings, even if we were poverty-stricken from the standpoint of the wider culture. For in Camphill, Co-workers receive only a stipend.
It was during that first summer, walking on a path from Springfield house over the hill to the garden in the middle of the night—going to move irrigation sprinklers from one section to another—that I had an epiphany: My life and my work had merged and I really couldn’t tell the difference. Here I was, just have been awakened from a sound sleep by the alarm, trekking halfway across the Village to drag hundreds of feet of garden hoses around on the soft ground and make sure things got evenly watered. Work, yes…and interrupted sleep, but the balmy farm-scented air and bright stars exalted me too and I was intensely alive and aware and thankful as I’ve never been in a job that paid real money. In a “real” job you work so you can have a life on the weekends and on vacation. In Camphill you love your work or you leave; there’s nothing to blur the tight connection between work and life, money doesn’t matter and neither does social status. It’s not who you know that matters, but rather who you are and what you can do in support of the people, the land, and the life of the community.
My garden mentor was Joel Morrow, who had been the master of Morningstar garden for a year or two. Joel was a high-energy type, not only a superb gardener but also a fine writer and later the editor of the bi-monthly journal of the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association. His articles for that publication were brilliant and provocative. His understanding of how to work with mentally handicapped people was both compassionate and practical. During that first summer Joel challenged me, inspired me and energized me. I had come to here to learn Biodynamic gardening, to immerse myself in it, and Joel was my guide. I lived in Springfield house with him and his wife Julie, their two small children, and two young Villagers.
Mealtimes in Springfield house were a pure delight. Julie was a fine cook and the quality of the Camphill fare—the garden and farm vegetables, the milk and cheese and butter, fresh bread, the farm-butchered meat—was superb. We worked hard and were fed wonderfully, but not before Joel led us in the grace before meals, a Camphill custom from way back. Grace was often sung and there were dozens of them. An example:
Earth who gives to us this food
Sun who makes it ripe and good
Dear Earth, dear Sun
By you we live
Our loving thanks
To you we give
We ate better, I’m convinced, than the richest of the rich.
My mentors in community life were Helen and Hubert Zipperlin, who were among the founding members of Camphill Kimberton. Helen was a prime mover in the Village, a bright and vivacious Scotswoman, the closest thing we had to an executive director. Within an hour of my arrival there Helen was on the scene welcoming me but also with gentle probing seeking to discern my motivations and intentions in coming. Was I going to be an asset to the Village or was I here to escape something? Was I thoroughly unmarried…did I have obligations in that realm? I apparently passed muster. Hubert was maybe 20 years older than Helen, a native of Germany who found himself interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man during WWII. Semi-retired, he was a figure of great respect at Kimberton. For many months early on in my stay there I came to their home, Garden Cottage, on Tuesday evenings for supper and conversation with Helen and Hubert.
The 430-acre property at Kimberton, was half of an estate which had been the home of Alaric and Mabel Pew Myrin. Thirty years before, they had given one half of the property to help found the Kimberton Waldorf School across French Creek. In 1972 Camphill took on the rest, including a mansion, Kepler House, which was the Myrin’s summer home, and a dozen other residences which had housed staff. The land rises from Pughtown Road uphill to the mansion and down the other side to French Creek. It includes the homes, farm fields and farm buildings, woods and gardens, wonderful perennial plantings and ornamental trees. The houses were soon inhabited by Co-workers and Villagers and the work of social therapy began.
When I came to Camphill Kimberton nine years later the Village held about 120 people, roughly 50 “Co-workers,” 20 of their children, and 50 “Villagers,” so-called handicapped folks, adults aged from early 20s to their 60s. The terms are in quotes because in Village life the distinctions got thoroughly blurred. True, there are things I as the head gardener could do that members of my crew couldn’t do—plan the timing of the season’s crops, wrestle the rototiller, read and interpret the indications on the Stella*Natura garden calendar—but then there were plenty of things other Co-workers could do that I couldn’t—bake the fabulous bread, make cheese, keep a home spotless and inviting. In fact there were things Villagers could do that I couldn’t, including being at peace with their lot in life. Certain autistic savants in the Village would ask your birth date and tell you the day of the week you were born, or Roger Maras’ batting average in 1976. Other Villagers had the patience to weed almost endless rows of tiny carrot seedlings and a sense of humility that would make a saint blush.
So, in effect, we were all Villagers and we were all Co-workers.
Joel Morrow was a little younger than I, but vastly more experienced as a Biodynamic gardener and as a community member. He almost single handedly ran Morningstar garden, two and a half acres of a south facing slope just on the left as you entered the driveway and began to climb the hill toward Kepler House. Along with the garden came a 100-foot long glass greenhouse where, from February until late May Joel tended tens of thousands of seedlings to be transplanted to the garden. Joel’s first question to me when I met him was “You’re not one of those marketers, are you?” Which question baffled me until I learned that one of the many visitors passing through that summer was a fellow from New York who was promoting a scheme for the Village to market produce, milk, cheese and bread to health food stores in Philadelphia. Already there was a van going out two days a week with a few hundred dollars worth of such things, coordinated by Andrea, wife of the main farmer, Jim Barauski. Lines had always been drawn between garden and farm at Kimberton, with the farm producing many of the space hogging vegetables like potatoes and sweet corn, which lend themselves to mechanized cultivation, and the gardens growing the crops that required less space and more hand work—salad, tomatoes, onions and such.
I worked with Joel and his crew that first summer in Morningstar garden, gradually taking on more and more responsibility as I went. It took a while to be taken seriously by him and by the community and what counted was just that responsibility-taking and diligence. Kimberton attracted all sorts of visitors: idealists of all kinds, young tourists from many states and all over Europe, newly-minted Biodynamic farmers from training programs in Europe, parents of so-called mentally handicapped folks, and potential community members. Some of these people stayed only for a few hours, some for several days or weeks. Anyone who stayed for more than a day or two was expected to help out with the work, either in the gardens or the houses, perhaps, in high summer, with food processing.
At the center of the Village, near the Kepler House mansion, was a building housing the bakery, walk-in coolers and freezers and a large commercial style kitchen in which housemothers and helpers preserved food for later use, canning or freezing. In July, August and September we sent thousands of pounds of tomatoes, green beans, peas, cucumbers and other produce up the hill from the garden to this processing kitchen. Often enough the slicing, dicing, blanching, water bath boiling, canning and such went on from mid-afternoon until late at night, for we all took Village food security very seriously. With the dairy cows, cheese making, bakery, farm and gardens, very little of the Kimberton budget was spent in grocery stores.
A short walk from Morningstar garden was the greenhouse, a 50-year old was a glass house 100 feet long and 30 feet wide, divided into three roughly square rooms by glass partitions. This structure was connected to a large potting and storage shed by a smaller glasshouse, maybe 20’ x 20’, a tropical house presided over by an older Co-worker. The former owners of the estate had raised flowers to supply the homes and to compete in shows and exhibitions… chrysanthemums, I think.
This elegant structure, almost a relic, was designed and built by Lord & Burnham, a 150-year-old company known for high quality and high prices. It had a very practical function under Joel’s management as a place to grow seedlings for the garden, but I puzzled over the fact that it went unused for three-quarters of the year. It was pretty much empty when I arrived in June and wouldn’t be utilized again until February. This struck me at the time as a shame, for a mighty asset was lying idle much of the year.
Glass has many advantages as a greenhouse covering. It’s permanent and does not deteriorate like fiberglass or plastics. My experience is that it transmits a wider range of sunlight to the sheltered plants. It’s clear and beautiful.
But, of course, it breaks. Once a hapless [and here nameless] farm intern at Kimberton broke 25 or 30 panes on the greenhouse when he neglected to turn the output chute of his tractor-mounted snow blower away from the greenhouse as he cleared snow from the driveway alongside it, sending a cascade of gravel and ice chunks onto and through the glass roof. Glass shards and debris showered down on the plants inside and the mess, including replacing those panes, took a couple of days to clean up.
By late winter I had acquired enough credibility with Joel to be given the entire responsibility for the seedling preparation for the coming season’s garden. The greenhouse growing began in early February when we sowed onions and leeks into freshly composted soil beds up against the south side of the greenhouse where there was the most light. Joel taught me the technique to handle the tiny black seeds—“You have to watch every seed drop…”—taking a pinch of seeds between the tips of thumb and forefinger and releasing the seeds by sliding the fingertips, while slowly moving your hand along the soil furrow. With practice you can pick up a consistent number of seeds from the pile in your left palm, maybe 25, and drop them evenly along the row so you get a reasonably consistent stand of plants a half-inch or so apart. Working with dark, moist, rich soil and black seeds, “watching every seed drop” is a real exercise. I’m grateful to Joel for holding me to the standard on this and proving that it’s possible. The beautifully even stand of allium plants that resulted from his insistence on method proved his point. In a few weeks we had a 20-foot bed of onion [three kinds] and leek seedlings in eight rows three or four inches apart, slender and gloriously green.
Since these alliums are slow to grow to transplant size, they were the first to go in. By mid-April, when the maritime climate in eastern Pennsylvania had settled and the soil had warmed a bit we had thousands of onion seedlings ready to go outside.
I took to that first greenhouse work as if I’d done it all my life, or in a former life. The atmosphere of it was wonderfully familiar. So was the rhythm of it. I felt I had the best job in the Village, working in a T-shirt in spring like, sun-captured warmth when it was in the teens outdoors, sowing seeds, mixing potting soil, filling flats, working out the schedule. For nighttime and cloudy days supplemental heat from the oil furnace is necessary, the warmth rising from the floor where hot water pipes run through in trenches under the beds, a far better system than the propane hot air furnaces blasting away in most commercial greenhouse.
First onions, then brassicas—cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, bok choi—which can go in the garden or farm field about the same time as the alliums but grow to transplant size much more quickly. Parsley, another slow grower, also needed to be seeded very early in the greenhouse for summertime eating. Happily, parsley is perfectly content in a low light situation that would frustrate other crops and cause them to become “leggy,” reaching and reaching for the light. Parsley could be started early when daylight hours were still on late winter schedule and be transplanted into an bed on the north side of the greenhouse where light was minimal.
Meanwhile, thousands of salad seedlings—lettuce and spinach mainly—went into the waist-high soil-filled benches in the first two sections of the greenhouse. These we packed in closely, perhaps four inches apart, for it’s not until the outer leaves of adjacent plants touch each other that we are taking full advantage of the sunlight which is, after all, the object of the game. When this happened, we could cut every other plant—the remaining plants, now growing vigorously, would soon fill in the spaces--for distribution to the Village houses for first salad of the year in early April. From the greenhouse, then from the main garden, and from the greenhouse again in October and November, the aim was to provide fresh, crisp, healthy greens for the folks in the Village for almost nine months. During my second winter in the greenhouse I kept a dozen 5-gallon buckets going with alfalfa sprouts and delivered a quantity of these to each house every few days. That year there were fresh greens at lunchtime every month.
By far the biggest challenge in my first greenhouse spring was starting the tomato seedlings. In Morningstar garden we grew more than 500 tomato plants of many different varieties and at transplant time, the last week of May, we wanted sturdy six- to eight-week old plants with robust root systems. The ideal is a stocky plant at least as wide as it is tall and this requires quick growth and lots of root room; if one plant’s roots touch those of its neighbor, or the walls of its container, growth is checked. Fortunately tomato seedlings love to be transplanted and always show a growth spurt as they settle into fresh soil. When the tomato seeds were sown in flats around the first of April, the plants came up close together in the rows, a half-inch or so apart, so one flat held a hundred or more babies. At about two weeks it was time to transplant them into flats, now about two inches apart, say 35 to the flat. Another week and each plant needed to go into its own four-inch pot, and 10 days later each went into a 6-inch pot, to stay until transplanting time outdoors.
Not only did we have to find room for all these plants in the greenhouse, rapidly filling that time of year, we also had to create potting soil. Joel’s formula for this, which I never found any reason to alter, was one-third Biodynamic compost, one-third garden soil, and one-third sharp sand, to loosen the mix and help it to drain. The mixing of potting soil and filling of flats and pots was a mighty job in April and May, but thoroughly satisfying work. To have this done just in advance of the need for the new, filled containers was tricky, but doable.
Tomatoes were not the only garden plants we were working with in the greenhouse at this time; we also had hundreds of pepper plants to deal with [much slower growing than tomatoes, but every bit as demanding], eggplants, cucumbers—all those warm weather transplants. Meanwhile, at the same time in the garden, I was tilling up beds for peas, early, and, once the soil was warming well, green beans—both staples in the Village food scheme and candidates for blanching and freezing efforts. Also for direct seeded spinach and lots of lettuce transplants. The onion plants started in the greenhouse in February are also ready to go outside in April.
By tomato transplant tine in late May the greenhouse season under Joel’s management would have been coming to a close but this year I had another idea: one house, four thirty-foot ground beds, I filled with double rows of cucumber plants, the old-fashioned “Straight 8” variety. Later, when the plants began to run, I installed fence wire hanging from the greenhouse frame for them to climb on. Within weeks there was a jungle of cucumber curtains, growing up, rather than sprawling on the ground. This was a clever way, by no means original with me, to maximize the limited floor space in the greenhouse. There were about 250 plants bearing fruit instead of perhaps 50 in the traditional sprawling mode. Another couple of weeks, about mid-July, I began to harvest 60 or 80 pounds of cukes twice a week and this went on for six weeks or so. A half a ton of cucumbers, more or less, for salads, pickles and the Philadelphia market.
When I first met Joel that Whitsunday evening he asked, “You’re not one of those marketing guys are you?” It seems that a couple of visitors were in the Village promoting the notion of marketing Kimberton Hills produce in the wider market. Already the Village sold raw milk, bread, cookies and cheese in a few stores in Philadelphia, which was less than an hour’s drive to the East. Since we already had a refrigerated truck making the trip, the theory went, why not grow surplus for sale? Jim Baurausky’s wife Andrea was already overseeing the marketing logistics and by the time I planted all those cucumbers, the greenhouse was already contributing parsley and a bit of salad to the effort. But on that first night with Joel this was still a relatively new idea and he was against it, feeling perhaps that we gardeners had enough to do feeding the Village and sending once-a-week buckets of produce to housemothers at Beaver Run, a Camphill School not far away.
The middle greenhouse section, with four waist-high beds, I filled with eggplants, two or three hundred of them. These were well grown plants with six or eight leaves and a blossom or two and in the congenial greenhouse atmosphere they grew very well indeed.
My rationale for these two plantings, the cukes and the eggplants, was this: Outdoors, cucumbers were sorely beset by the Cucumber Beetle, striped horizontally or lengthwise, or spotted, these guys eat a lot and carry disease. My hope was that cucumbers under glass would escape the problem and in the event that’s just the way it happened. And even in the benign maritime Pennsylvania climate eggplant didn’t seem to thrive outdoors. In the greenhouse that year my little monocrop of eggplant bushes was a true sight to behold, each with a couple of glossy black schmoo-shaped fruits dangling, flourishing in the summertime heat and humidity, extreme in the greenhouse.
I determined early on in my stay at Kimberton that I would not enroll in the apprentice program. I had heard murmurings among the long-term Co-workers and especially housemothers to the effect that the apprentices were in the community all right, they made a true contribution with their work, but they were not of the Village, that is they had little feeling for the true heart of the Village, the work with the so-called handicapped people. I was sure there were some apprentices for whom this criticism was more or less justified, others less so, but out of a longstanding interest in community living and now finding myself in the midst of one that actually seemed to work I wanted to be accepted as a fully fledged participant, not merely a bystander.
I came to discover that there were several routes to being perceived in that way, always with the assumption that you are reasonably competent in your job. I have said that there is very little bureaucracy in Camphill, no entrenched managerial class. Rather, the management of the Village is taken on by committees; the Admissions Group, to which I belonged by my second year there is a good example. The question was put to me whether I would join this group to help decide could come to the Village among all those who applied. Helen Zipperlin was the point person for the group ex officio literally as she, of all the Co-workers, was in the office the most and naturally fielded incoming phone calls from people interested 1) in “placing” a more or less handicapped person in the Village, or 2) in coming to visit/work/stay for a while. From others, letters came. The Village was pretty much always full, but there was a lot of churn…people coming, people leaving, especially among the young Europeans on an American tour of intentional communities, Camphill Villages and Schools, Anthrophosophical initiatives of other sorts like Waldorf Schools, Biodynamic farms and the retirement community in the Hudson Valley. These youngsters came mostly during the summer, stayed a few days or a few weeks, and if they were good workers, as almost all were, and cheerful, as they were, they were sorely missed. Some stayed a year or so, took on real responsibility, and were treasured.
Also coming for usually short visits were Camphill old-timers, equally cherished for having been in on the beginning, or nearly so, of the now worldwide Camphill movement.
We paid special attention to inquiries from mature couples contemplating an extended stay at Kimberton, as these folks might be candidates for houseparents, There were a dozen houses in the Village, from the mansion at the top of the hill, Kepler where two houseparents, a couple of assistants and six or eight handicapped adults; down to Springfield House where I lived at first with Joel and his wife, their two children and two young men, Villagers. [Though we were all actually “Villagers,” in practice the so-called handicapped ones were called Villagers, while the so-called normal adults were “Co-workers,” though I suppose in these more politically correct times the labels might have changed a bit.] The houseparent roles were well-filled by experienced folks, Camphill veterans, in all but two of the dozen Kimberton houses when I arrived. The houseparent situation in these two was seen to be dicey. In one case the role was filled by two sterling Co-workers from abroad, both female, who would be leaving in a matter of months, but who because of their demonstrated maturity and empathy with the Villagers were recruited for the job. The other slot was filled by a new couple whose marriage was faltering. Like the wider culture around it Camphill had the requisite instances of divorces, wandering spouses, mismatched pairs, odd couples and eccentrics among those who came to serve. The core Co-workers—the ones with long experience and who had been at Kimberton since its beginning 10 years before--kept a close eye on such situations, not by inspecting the households directly as that would be intrusive, but rather by assessing in the course of daily life the well-being of the Villagers from those houses. Our handicapped friends do not cover up their miseries well and if the home life is lacking in love, or nutrition, or comfort, the Villagers show that.
So I found that committee work was one avenue of acceptance and my work with the Admissions Group was certainly eye-opening, a window on the need for Camphills in the world.
I was able, halfway through my first year at Kimberton, to gain credibility and acceptance in two other areas: festival work and house parenting.
Almost unique to Camphill life is the lively and cheerful celebration of the Christian holidays and other festivities besides, both the traditional Christmas and Easter, the more obscure ones like Whitsun and Saint Lucy’s Day, and the peasant celebrations like the plowing festival and harvest. The activities surrounding these festivals are a rich source of cultural life in Camphill, with plays, musical events, special meals, land walks, readings and, most touching of all to me, Christmas eve midnight carolling in the cow barn, where the cows stood in their festively decorated stalls and listened attentively and appreciatively.
In peasant lore this is the one moment of the year when the animals are given the gift of speech.
That first Christmas at Kimberton I played Joseph in the Christmas play, an artless performance marked by sincerity, at least, if not by my singing voice, for the Camphill Christmas play is a musical. Happily, my partner Beth, as Mary, was a highly talented musician and her patience and clarity of voice carried the show. This was a presentation in front of the whole Village on Christmas eve.
By spring, that houseparent marriage at Hyacinth House had imploded and the cobbled-together team that replaced those folks the past few months was coming apart. Two of the three members had to return to England as their visa had run out. I was asked to become a houseparent with a more experienced Camphiller, a fellow gardener who’d been in the house with the English couple, and I accepted. I was to remain house father in Hyacinth during the remainder of my time at Kimberton, three years and more.
One credibility-strengthener I failed to comprehend or, comprehending, failed to appreciate, was the ongoing study groups in Rudolf Steiner’s teachings, usually around one or the other of the dozens of books he wrote, or collections of some of his 6,000 lectures. I attended one such study group where participants were expected to read chapters by the week and one designee was supposed to explicate the text for the others at the next session. With little or no experience with Steiner I found his writings dense and impenetrable and the attempts of my fellow sufferers to explain I found an exercise in bewilderment. I soon dropped out of the group.
At one point Helen encouraged me to begin another one of these study groups and I replied that however wonderfully Steiner’s ideas worked out in practice, in Camphill life, in Waldorf schools and in agriculture, I had great resistance to his philosophy, the basis of Anthroposophy, . As a recovering Roman Catholic and a student of Gurdjieff, I was suspicious beyond all reason [I admitted] of anybody’s dogma or ideology. I had great faith in my hands, I was becoming conversant with my emotions, but I didn’t expect to enter heaven on the strength of intellect, particularly as expressed in words…slippery words from another language and a century past.
I know I was a disappointment to Helen and Hubert. If I’d humbled myself to ask about Anthroposophy and explored with them how I could gain access to these teachings, starting from where I was and from the gifts I had…if I had been able to squelch ego and my burgeoning self-confidence as a journeyman gardener and animal tender…I might have learned from them, I might have accepted the grace they offered as my mentors. But even at the age of 40 a certain self-satisfied callowness marked the face I put to the world.
They forgave me, those good people, out of their deep wisdom and compassion, and they accepted me for the energy and competence I brought to my work, but they never again invited me into their world and I believe I blew my chance to become a full member of the Camphill Community.
Meanwhile I was traveling back and forth between Hyacinth House and the greenhouse and Morningstar Garden six or eight or ten times a day. From time to time I had a vehicle, a battered pickup or van, and for one long summer, a moped, but I often walked, over the hill and through the woods and fields, and relished the life I had, demanding as it was. I was in my prime, I felt, productive and creative, and fully appreciative of how the Village, especially for me the farm→garden→household alignment worked, in all its details. Every couple of days one of our Hyacinth people came home from the milk room with a gallon or two of fresh, whole, raw milk; another would return from the bakery daily with fresh bread; I would send garden produce by the basket full to all the houses and the farm would send field crops, including some that I had started for the farmers in the greenhouse. If there was extra produce it went off to market in Philadelphia and brought needed cash into the Village economy. The Village was every farmer’s dream, a captive market where everything is dealt with on the retail level [wholesale to the small proportion that went to market], and value is added on the spot, from wheat field to cleaned grain to flour to baked goods; from garden truck to processing to vegetables for the winter; from milk to cheese, from cream to butter. For all its quirks and personalities this system worked, and worked efficiently.
From Joel I learned to garden on a scale I’d not done before. Morningstar was a two-and-a-half acre plot, with only a few perennial plantings of herbs and berries. All the rest was laid out in rototilled beds and planted to annuals, either direct seeded, as for beans [200-foot rows] and carrots [400-fot double rows] and beets, or transplanted, as for tomatoes [500 plants], brassicas [say, 200 broccoli plants or 500 cabbages]. All weeding and thinning was done by hand and many beds were completely renewed with compost and tilled again in mid-season for a fall crop; beans could be followed by lettuce or spinach, an early spring salad crop could be followed by mid-summer brassicas, cauliflower, say. There was a certain seasonal plan followed, but opportunity for “catch crops” appeared serendipitously. Often enough, by late spring, the garden had gotten away from us with weeds rampant, but this was all fodder for weed-and-soil-based compost piles in the garden. As part of the partnership with the farm we gardeners received all the Biodynamic, cow-manure-based compost we could use, and, for one dubious experiment [Joel was enamored with the idea, I wasn’t] a slurry pit of fresh cow manure mixed with 1,000 gallons of water in a disused septic tank on the edge of the garden. This, the only time I used it, we spread on half-grown onions, but it was a mess and it stunk. I know now that such a manure tea requires aeration we weren’t providing then.
From Joel I learned to try to see the whole garden at once, then sections of it at a time, then beds in a section, then to see every plant in a row…really look at them, one at a time. There are times in the season, different times for different vegetable varieties, when it pays to look at every plant, even a mile of potato plants [not much to an Idaho potato farmer, but a lot in a garden with dozens of other vegetables to tend], say when the potato beetle is due. The first sign of leaf damage, the first beginnings of the second generation [eggs on the underside of leaves—you might have to turn over 500 leaves to find an egg cluster], and becomes not just walking by and having a look, but real scrutiny, coupled with action, smearing the eggs and clusters of just-hatched larvae. Early attention in the first week of a potato bug infestation and you can ward the whole thing off. Miss the timing and you’re screwed.
With the Mexican Bean Beetle, however such “spot ‘em and squish ‘em” techniques will be speedily over come by the bugs’ reproductive exuberance. I did discover, however, a solution to that one in my second Morningstar season. There’s a parasitic pedio wasp that can be introduced to the garden and will extend the harvest from three harvest pickings, say, to five or six.
From Joel I learned that in Biodynamics we cultivate the atmosphere with the horn-crystal spray, enhancing light and air, cosmic forces drawn on by the plant leaves fully as enthusiastically as roots seek out nutrients. No other organic practice ever mentions the atmosphere—that Earth-aura we and the animals walk around within, in service to the plants. Composting, good tillage and mulch for the soil, to be sure, but no thought of the atmosphere until Steiner taught about it and later when the man who brought Agnihotra to the West, Shree Vasant, began to tell about Homa farming. [See the chapter on my work at the B-Bar Ranch.] For the past 15 years all of my gardens have utilized Steiner’s Horn Crystal spray in conjunction with daily practice of Agnihotra fire ceremonies at exactly sunrise and sunset, when the etheric wave of sun energy sweeps through.
From Joel I never did learn to prioritize as we did a walk through the garden, sometimes at speed for that was the way he was. I would note that the beans needed picking in this bed here, but not yet in the bed over there; I heard him when he said we’d better pull those thistles on the edge over there before the seed blew across the garden; there are hundreds of things like this to notice in a garden in high season. Joel was adept at noticing them and I was becoming so, but neither of us was good at making the daily and weekly plan that would address them in a prioritized fashion. The work went on in a catch-as-catch-can manner from day to day, most often with the priorities set by outside forces, the need to harvest for the processing kitchen or the households, or by a clear need to rescue a crop that would be otherwise lost to weeds.
I learned from Joel how to attend to the job at hand in the garden—the hours-long tomato harvest every other day, or the endless rows of beans or peas to pick—while also keeping an eye on my crew in their corners of the garden, or being well aware of them out in the Village with their delivery carts. This is the great, learned skill of a Camphill workmaster, who is under some pressure at least to produce, and greater demands to be responsible for people who are naturally distractible. Joel once shouted across the garden, “Joshua! Use your senses!” and our best wheelbarrow driver, autistically stuck in a repetitive full-body nodding gesture, going nowhere, came out of that trapped place and carried on with his task.
We’re all like that, aren’t we? Our mind wrecks the program at hand, our bodies go slack. When you live day in and day out with autistic or “retarded” people you become clear that it’s all a matter of degree and their symptoms and quirks mirror our own, and the advice, “Use your senses!” can be the quickest way back into our bodies where the action is. The mind, where Joshua was, is full of associations, memories, conjectures and frights, but the body is the place for direct experience.
Oddly, I learned little of Biodynamics from Joel directly. The garden had been under Biodynamic cultivation for nine years when I arrived and had had dressings of Biodynamic compost each of those years. It was thoroughly imbued, I came to understand, with those cosmic energies. On a few occasions Joel had me walk the garden sprinkling BD#500, the Horn Manure preparation, or spraying #501, the Horn Crystal preparation, but never with much instruction and never a word of the theory behind the practice. With Joel, it was all practical and ad hoc.
There was a clear division between the farmers and the gardeners at Kimberton. There were the two gardens, Morningstar, the larger, and Owlring, run by Sherry Swartz [later Wildfeuer], who edited the Stella*Natura calendar and was housemother of Sycamore House, one of the larger households, hard by Morningstar. The gardens were staffed by a head gardener, often a second-in-command gardener, casual help from visitors, and a crew. The farm was organized differently, with two main departments, the dairy [including hay and other feed crops] and all row crops not grown in the gardens—potatoes, sweet corn, storage beets—including row crops specifically for market like broccoli and leeks.
Farmers and their apprentices were machinery-minded. As a gardener I had a Troy-Bilt rototiller and a lawnmower for the edges, that was all. It was the farmers who ran the big stuff, tractors, manure spreaders, combines, hay balers. And I couldn’t help noticing that the best and brightest of apprentice candidates wound up in the dairy barn. It takes an exceptional human being—patient, empathic, quiet, unexcitable--to work with dairy cows. More than once I was disappointed when a young apprentice-to-be would spend a day or two in Morningstar garden and then find that the dairy barn was where she [it was usually a she] wanted to work during her Kimberton stay.
Approaching the end of my own Kimberton experience, always having been pretty much isolated in the garden/greenhouse, I came to realize that I was wholly cut off from the source of fertility of the place, the cows, and that the next step in my Biodynamic training was to connect with them.
As before at Claymont I took care of the chickens, a laying flock of 50 or so hens and, on one occasion, worked with one of the farm apprentices to castrate a couple of dozen piglets. This was all familiar territory, but the cows were a mystery to me.
By the end of my fourth season in Morningstar garden, where I had been in full charge for two years after Joel and his family left the community, the opportunity arose for me and my little family, who had joined me at Kimberton [so much for being “thoroughly unmarried”], to go to the newly-established Camphill Village in Minnesota where a gardener was badly needed and I would have the chance to work in the cow barn.