At the heart of Biodynamics is the ideal of the garden as a whole entity. As far as is possible everything within the garden should be recycled, kitchen-waste, lawn-mowings, dead plants, prunings, weeds, etc.

In vegetable gardens, where crops are harvested from the land, their substance which is removed each year. In nature, this would go back into the ground as the dead plant matter decays and be taken back into the soil by worms and other organisms. Grazing animals would defecate on the land and give back the transformed goodness of the plants they had eaten in their manure. In a garden this doesn’t happen.

Even in flower gardens, where plants are grown continuously in herbaceous beds, they take from the soil and are not always able to give back. And gardeners “tidy up”, remove the dead plant matter before it falls to the ground and rots down to return its goodness to the earth.

So, in gardening, we do not work quite as nature does however many wildflower meadows, wild gardens, etc we create.

So we have to have another strategy to put the goodness which the plants expend on giving us beauty back into the soil.

And … it is not only the physical matter which we take in the form of blooming flowers and delicious vegetables but also the vitality which make them so beautiful and/or worth eating. To give back this vitality Biodynamics uses specially made preparations for the soil, the plants and also for the compost and manure.

The central aim of Biodynamics is the regeneration of the soil …

· Through applying the spray preparations that work on soil and plants

· aided by applying compost and/or manure which has been worked with the preparations

When the preparations, and biodynamically treated compost and manure, are applied to the soil the plants become better able to respond to their environment, the rhythms of the day and the seasons.