Philosophy – Gallifrey Forest Farm

Fruit Trees from Seed

2018/04/16 Danielle 0

The received wisdom of gardeners and horticulturalists everywhere (I’m generalising, go with it for now) is that it’s pointless to grow fruit trees from seed because they don’t come true to type. (True to type means that the fruit of the daughter plant will be the same, or very nearly the same, as the fruit of the mother plant.) There are exceptions – mangos and mot citrus produce what are called polyembryonic seeds, which means that there are multiple embryos in each seed, and only one is the result of sexual recombination – the others are asexually produced, and will […]

Planting for Pascal’s Wager

2018/03/25 Danielle 0

For those who don’t know, Pascal’s Wager is a philosophical thought experiment about preparing for the worst case scenario even if you don’t think it will turn out to be true. The original argument was made about religion and the existence of the Christian God (and has some fairly serious flaws), but the general idea is more widely applicable. It’s a good shorthand way of talking about risks, and about worst case scenario preparation as a rational response to a low probability but high consequence event or situation. For example, the current global socio-political and ecological situation. I mean, I […]

The Ethical Omnivore

2017/01/27 Danielle 0

Some philosophy to start the day. 🙂 This may be controversial, you have been warned. I disagree with veganism on ethical grounds. Not the veganism which is based on some (incredibly rare, but real) allergies or food intolerances to any sort of animal protein, but the sort which is based on an ethical regard for animal welfare. I have quite a lot of vegan and vegan-tending friends, and I know this’ll touch a nerve for most of them, but – I still think it’s true. This is not about not wanting to eat dead animals. I get that. […]

slow starter

2017/01/16 Danielle 0

New Years has come and gone, and I’m still just starting to settle in to 2017. It feels like a really slow start to the year somehow. The hot weather has arrived, and we just went through a 24 hour power outage because the lines gather dust during dry weather and then a cool spell or a drizzle of rain (water falling from the sky! Weirdly, that does happen sometimes, even in midsummer) can cause fires on the lines or in the transformers. Which seems bizarre to me, but that’s how it is. It’s prioritised our desire to get […]

self sufficiency and community

2016/11/28 Danielle 0

A friend of mine asked yesterday how long it would be before the farm was self sufficient. It’s not as simple a question to answer as you might think. One answer is: never. We aren’t planning to grow grain, and although I do have some tubs of potatoes and a sweet potato patch, and plans to put in chestnut trees, we aren’t really focusing on growing what the biodynamic gardening people call ‘calory crops’. Those are the foods which make up the majority of your diet – the carbohydrates that give you a baseline energy hit and leave you […]