Field Notes
Letter from the President
In this Michaelmas 2026 letter, JPI president Teresa O’Shaughnessy shares the move of packing and shipping to Perennial Roots Farm and introduces the people carrying the work forward. The update renews JPI’s commitment to accessible preparations while honoring a season of rest for its Floyd...
From the Field Notes archive
Latest writing
You Can't Take the Sky From Me
Biodynamics brings practical work into relationship with imagination, observation, and artistic judgment. Stewart Lundy explores how growers can develop confidence through a carefully tended trial area, thoughtful records, and sustained experience, allowing the garden itself to become an increasingly clear expression of living possibilities.
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Cosmic Journal
Summer harvests and the first preparations for autumn meet in this late-July 2024 Cosmic Journal. Flower gathering, ripe fruit, soil care, and fall successions follow the changing lunar rhythm, with preparation work offering time for gratitude, reflection, and renewed connection to the garden.
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Dead Warmth & Living Warmth
Part three of Dead Warmth and Living Warmth brings planetary language into the everyday garden. Stewart Lundy explores growth and ripening, mineral balance, pruning, and tree orientation as practical expressions of the interplay among soil, moisture, air, light, and warmth.
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Dead Warmth & Living Warmth (part 2 of 5)
Living warmth appears in surprising places: a compost pile, a caring animal, a generous human gesture. In part two of this series, Stewart Lundy moves from the dynamics of warmth in organisms to enthusiasm, inner practice, and the freedom to offer kindness beyond immediate circumstance....
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Cosmic Journal #025
High summer offers a chance to deepen both harvest work and calendar understanding. This July 2024 Cosmic Journal explains the relationship of elemental qualities to crop groups, follows preparation opportunities, and encourages flexible, attentive choices within the demands of a busy growing season.
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Dead Warmth & Living Warmth (Part 1 of 5)
The first installment of Dead Warmth and Living Warmth explores the contrasts that sustain a living garden. Through everyday images of warm and cool air, roots and flowers, and changing seasons, Stewart Lundy considers the plant as a meeting place of Earth and cosmos.
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The Rites of Pan and the Garden
Michael Martin reflects on personal and family encounters with the unseen life of nature and the care of his Michigan farm. Through Pan, seasonal festivals, and biodynamic stewardship, he explores a garden experienced as a place of relationship, hospitality, and spiritual participation.
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Cosmic Journal #024
Summer’s light invites both harvest and reflection in this late-June 2024 Cosmic Journal. Drawing on St. John’s time and the image of Uriel, it connects preparation offerings, crop care, and lunar rhythms with renewed attention to one’s responsibilities to the Earth.
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Devoted to Healing Our Earth
JPI’s spring 2024 workshop celebrated biodynamics’ centenary through shared work, study, and fellowship. Participants unearthed thousands of horns, made preparations, explored chromatography, and visited neighboring Spikenard Honeybee Sanctuary in a gathering devoted to healing the Earth.
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Leveling Up Your Biodynamic Gardening
Regular preparation work can become part of the garden’s everyday rhythm. Stewart Lundy shares his intensive use of barrel compound, composting of weeds, plant ferments, rapid crop succession, and complementary soil and silica sprays, offering practical ways to deepen a biodynamic growing season.
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Cosmic Journal
The Agriculture Course centenary and summer solstice meet in this June 2024 Cosmic Journal. Preparation stirring, transplanting, flowering crops, and midsummer reflection become ways to celebrate the living relationship among soil, plants, people, and the wider rhythms of the cosmos.
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Upside Down Biodynamics
Transformation lies at the heart of biodynamic preparation making. Through valerian, dandelion, manure, and horn silica, Stewart Lundy explores how a substance’s changing qualities can awaken new receptivity in soil and plants, opening a wider meditation on nourishment, imagination, and spiritual freedom.
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