Courtney Brooke: Here we are in the greenhouse at Full Circle Farm. It’s raining and it’s cold; it’s early spring and here we are planting this brassica bed. Me and Jonathan.
Hey Jonathan!
We’re putting in cabbages and cauliflower and lettuce and broccoli. Jonathan, are you willing to tell us what the plan is here?
Jonathan: Well, this is precious space here that’s protected, and so the soil is a lot warmer. We’ve dug out the turmeric in the middle here and it’s a perfect time to plant these brassicas. They are not quite as hardy as kale so could have done it a little bit earlier but they’re just gonna hit the ground running because the soils all ready and warmed up for them. If you planted them outside they’d probably survive but they go a lot slower. They may get hit by a hard freeze and it stunt their growth.
Courtney Brooke: So we’re going to plant like 120 brassica plants in this space right?
Jonathan: Yeah, actually it might be a little less but, yeah. You can see already the ones that were planted …the kind of spacing… these are squeezed in a little bit more than maybe it’s optimal for a maximum size. But I have extra plants and so you might get smaller individual yields but hopefully the total yield will be great. They’re spaced 18 inches apart but the rows are a little tighter. I’m squeezing in seven, six, or five rows. They would grow a lot bigger…
Courtney Brooke: So the idea is that first the lettuce will come out …and then the cabbage and cauliflower will come out …and then the broccoli will be the last one standing.
Jonathan: Yes.
Part 2
Courtney Brooke: So here we are after it’s planted out. That was just bare soil this morning. We turned it with the forks and then got all these plants in the ground. May they grow.
Courtney Brooke (she/her) is an ancestor who was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work aims to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world aims to address the root cause of today’s overwhelming ecological challenges – that humans are starved of a sense of belonging to the places they live.
Courtney Brooke was raised on a small farm in North Georgia, and has been guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers have been the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. She holds a degree in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, and has 10 years of experience facilitating earth-based education, ecological landscape design, women’s rites of passage, and cultural healing.
Courtney Brooke has taught and facilitated environmental education curriculum, Deep Ecology, Permaculture Design Courses, hands-on craft and farming workshops, and Holistic Management to a wide range of audiences in nine countries from toddlers to adults and everyone in between.
Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke is passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she tends the land, raises food, participates in communal ritual agriculture, swims in wild water, enjoys the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tends her own wild Hearth. She loves cooking home-grown and wild foraged foods, playing her flute to the sunrise, running on mountain trails, making compost piles, crafting from natural materials, and bringing people together to create beauty that feeds the holy.
