It’s a very cool thing when you wake up in the middle of the night, with excitement!

It’s not very often that this happens to me, but I’ve recently experienced it again. It transports me back to being a little girl ahead of a long car journey with an exciting destination at the end. I guess it’s a bit like a holiday for the brain. Learning: it’s opening up new neuron pathways and it’s a little addictive.

My new learnings have been around Syntropic Agroforestry, after attending a course in Raglan here with Permadynamics. Syntropic is a way of growing that mimics nature. It uses knowledge of different strata and of succession for plants. It’s about observing the landscape and working out what stage of regeneration it’s in, and working with that, not against that. It’s about harnassing each plant’s natural hormonal cycle and thinking of the energy in the system as a whole. It’s about slashing and stashing, mulches, planting closely, and using pangas… and feels so close to my DNA of South Africa where I saw many pangas being used in the fields. What’s so beautiful about it, is that it has helped me look upon the Californian thistle lands here or the gorse around New Zealand with understanding of what’s really going on there. It gives hope for the future of our lands and our forests!

It’s hard to explain, so I’m hoping I can get it going on my land and then share that all with you. When the boys are out of school, I will be growing flowers in a syntropic system, amidst sugar cane rows. That’s the plan!

It’s the next CROP evolution.

There. I’ve said it. Now I have to do it.