Transcription of Ted Carter for the show Maine Home + Design Show, #93
Lisa In the studio with us today we have one of my dear friends, Ted Carter of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes, and also a new friend. This is Bennett Steele of Wheelwright Landscapes. What I love is when we’re able to bring in people that I know and people that I don’t know and just sort of continue to create this interesting integrated world. So, thanks for coming in and talking to us today about, well, what you’re going to talk about, Biodynamics and how we bring this into landscaping and how we start to approach our lawns and our gardens in a more integrated way. Thanks for coming in.
Ted: Thank you so much, Lisa. I met Ben, it was almost like it was choreographed, in a sense, from the invisible world. I was talking to my co-author, Ellen Gunter. I said to Ellen, I said, “Ellen, I need to find somebody who works in Biodynamics. I feel like I’m this lonely soldier out here, no one to help me.” And, low and behold, I get an email in from Ben. It came in at the perfect opportune moment, as so often the invisible world lends that helping hand to us. So, I was thrilled when Bennett came into my life. He’s now building a beautiful Biodynamic garden for me with a great mason of his that he works with, Seth. I’m very, very grateful for that.
Lisa: Your book is “Reunion: How We Heal Our Broken Connection to the Earth”, and it’s actually in the process of being revised. I saw your new cover this morning. It looks beautiful. I can’t wait to read the next copy.
Ted: Thank you very much. The new book is “Earth Calling” and we’re going to republish the book but bring it more up to date. In 3 years time so much has changed about the world, and with Hurricane Sandy, and all of the different climate changes that have taken place, I think it’s a very timely and worthwhile book, but it will actually show people how they can really take charge and do things to make a difference on the planet.
Lisa: So, it’s not just the title of the book that will have changed, it’s also going to be a lot of updating of the materials inside.
Ted: It’s an expanded version of what I started with and Ellen Gunter, who’s a great writer, is really working very hard to make that happen.
Lisa: I do think it’s interesting that you talk about this thing sort of happening at the right time and for the right reasons. It’s this whole when the student is willing the master will appear, sort of thing.
Ted: Right.
Lisa: So, you yourself you said…Now Ben will cross the microphone as reacting as if maybe he’s not sure he’s happy to be called master at this point. You told me you had a barn full of some sort of special Biodynamics, I don’t know, cow manure or something like that that you imported from California or something?
Ted: Well, it was sort of ridiculous. It was through this contact I knew in California. I was out there on vacation. I said, well just ship me…I don’t know how many crates of it. It was several yards on several pallets and it was shipped across country and I’m sure it wasn’t ecologically friendly to do that. It had been in my barn for a couple of years. I had been waiting for the right moment to use it and Ben really opened that door for me. I just have limited time and it’s hard to integrate everything you want to integrate.
Lisa: So, you had a barn full of cow poop and along came Ben and this whole thing just began. So, Ben, what is Biodynamic landscaping? What’s the idea behind Biodynamics?
Bennett: Rudolph Steiner was the father of Biodynamics. He was a very brilliant man. He basically created 9 preparations that serve to enliven the soil and the plants that you’re growing. So, you use the 9 preparations basically to assimilate the cosmic forces into the material, or the soil and the plants.
Basically, you have 9 preparations. You have the horn-manure, the horn silica, the yarrow, the chamomile, the nettle, the oak bark, the dandelion, the Valerian, and the last is the horsetail. Five of them are compost preparations. The compost that we’re using in Ted’s garden is a Biodynamic compost. It’s made in a very specific way. The compost preparations are placed in a very specific part of the compost pile and it works homeopathically. It’s actually really a complicated thing that I don’t fully understand, but I believe that it works and brings the cosmic forces into the material.
Ted: We have to think about the fact that in the Winter time the earth is, in the Northern hemisphere, is inhaling. It’s inhalation, bringing the cosmic forces into the preps that have been buried in the ground. And in the Spring, it’s exhalation. It’s right now, the Northern hemisphere is exhaling and all this flora and fauna is coming to life and this lush growth is happening all around us. We have to look at the earth as really a living organism and it’s an intelligent system. It’s an intelligent system.
One of the things that…Every year I go to Carolyn Mason’s home in Chicago. She actually wrote the forward to my book. She’s become a very dear friend of mine and I said to her, “Nature teaches us abundance. It teaches us regeneration.” She said, “Well, Ted, that’s right.” She said, “But it also teaches us about balance and working with natural forces and not violating natural forces. And man has moved into a period right now where we are in violation of those forces with all of the different things we’re doing with our food, and growing our food, and things like that.” The GMO’s and we are just really going beyond where, I believe, we should be going and I don’t think it will play out well in the long term.
Lisa: Well, it’s interesting. As you’re talking about this idea of cosmic forces and the earth breathing in and out. I mean, this is also something that they talk about…Whether you’re talking about a Chinese approach with the Yin and the Yang, and the Yin time of the year being the Winter, and the Yang being the Summer, and the outward going energy of the Summer, the inward pulling energy of the Winter. I mean, they have this in other…Actually, I think Native Americans have similar ideas about nature.
So, we have this in indigenous populations and cultures all over the world and we’ve become so urbanized that maybe we have thought that we could get beyond what the earth just continues to do naturally, but now we’re having to pull back and just recognize that, yeah, the trees are going to keep growing a certain way, the soil is going to keep needing what it needs, people are going to keep needing what they need. So, if we do over-grow or over-harvest, then we’re going to go too far in one direction and we’re probably going to have to go a little bit further in the other direction to come back to center.
Ted: Well, our soil is starving right now. When you consume the food that we’re producing now…And Steiner predicted this anyway, when we got into industrial agriculture. Basically, the nutrition in the food is derived from the soils and our soils are basically inert at this point. They don’t sustain life without chemical input. Biodynamics is completely opposite from that. It totally, totally…Now, we’re getting into gene splicing and GMO’s and everything like that. These types of things, we’re impregnating human cells in certain types of fruits and vegetables now to experiment with that. That whole thing is so disgusting to me that I can’t even begin to comprehend what they’re trying to do here.
Lisa: So, all of these preps, Ben, that you were talking about. These are all, yarrow and nettle, these are all plants…
Bennett: Correct.
Lisa: The preps that you’re talking about, for people who don’t have very green thumbs. My thumbs are not particularly green, but I did recognize a lot of those because some of them are herbs that we use in medicine, in traditional Chinese medicine. These are plants that they’re using, you’re using, to heal the earth.
Bennett: That is correct. Yarrow, for example, is categorized as a dynamic accumulator because it’s root system is able to pull nutrients from deep in the soil, bring them into the plant, and that plant then used in your compost works to make those nutrients available to the plants you grow to eat. And then, hence, you the human that grows the food will be able to inject that food, or those nutrients through your food. It’s a more complex system that…Basically, the soil that we grow our food in, it needs to be alive. One gram of living soil contains billions of organisms. Those organisms work symbiotically with the plants to produce complex proteins that food grown in more of a mechanical or modern way doesn’t really produce the same quality food.
Lisa: Would this be something like hydroponics where they’re…
Bennett: Well, hydroponics…Plants feed two ways. Really, they should feed through their micro hairs, but when you feed plants a water soluble source of nutrient, they start to feed through their water uptake roots. Plants have two root systems. They have water uptake roots, which are bigger, and then they have finer roots which are micro hairs. When plants feed in humus, they feed more through the micro hairs. When they do that, they can produce more complex proteins which are more healthy for us.
Lisa: So, hydroponics would be more, just in the water, their roots are sort of absorbing some of the things they need, but not all.
Bennett: It’s a good system and it works great in urban environments, especially in areas where we can’t grow in the Winter time. So, I think hydroponics is a great system, but it’s not going to produce as high a quality food as you’re going to produce in the soil.
Lisa: This is something that I think Ted, you’re working with Ben, because I’ve seen on Facebook you’re posting your pictures of the landscaping that you’re doing, and some of this has to do with actually food. You’re actually going to incorporate growing of food into the landscape, which is something that maybe we’ve gotten away with, that everything has to be ornamental and beautiful and pretty, but it can’t be actually functional.
Ted: That’s right. And that’s what’s so exciting. I mean, I spent my life in ornamental horticulture. That is my life. The exciting thing about what Ben’s doing…It all sort of crystallized when we wrote the first book, “Reunion” and about how we are going to need to start to learn how to take care of ourselves and feed ourselves on this planet. With climate change that’s upon us now and things are not as reliable. Things are breaking down to some degree because we are not working in union with nature anymore. We’re working against nature, and against our very nature.
So, what Ben’s providing is educating people on how to grow their own food and it can be beautiful. This garden that we’re building is going to be absolutely a paradise. It’s a sanctuary. You walk inside it, it’s got granite curbing all around through it. It’s really beautifully structured. Ben can talk about it too. The flow forms going in. It’s just very exciting. I’m just very excited about the whole thing.
Lisa: Which is great because you spend all your life making beautiful, functional things for other people, and now you’re having one created for yourself in your own space.
Ted: Well, I’m always the shoemakers children. I always have half finished projects around my place. My fire pit’s half finished, my terrace is half finished.
Bennett: We’re going to finish this one.
Ted: But, I’m going to get my garden finished. Ben’s going to make sure of that. So, I’m very excited. I at least get something that starts from beginning and ends it. It’s very exciting.
Lisa: How can people approach this Biodynamic idea? Ideally, Ben, they would hire you and they would call you up at your company, at Wheelwright, and get you to come in and do their sort of work for them. But, how, if you were just your average person out there trying to do some gardening and incorporate some techniques to create healthier soil, what are some of the things you could suggest to them?
Bennett: I would suggest that they have a compost pile. That they use their scraps or yard waste, food scraps, and they make a compost pile and utilize that waste to add some life back to the soil. You don’t have to do Biodynamics. Biodynamics is really making compost and using compost preparations in a very advanced way. But, just using compost in general is a really good practice for the average urban grower.
Lisa: Are there specific things that people need to think about when composting? I know some people talk about you could use brown paper, possible you could use newspaper, some people say don’t use animal scraps. What are some of the things that people need to think about with composting?
Bennett: They need to have a good balance between carbon rich and nitrogen rich materials. Anything that you wouldn’t want to put in your body, you probably wouldn’t want to compost. Animal byproducts tend to attract critters, so you probably want to stay away from that unless you have an enclosed composting bin. But if you have an enclosed bin, you can definitely compost pretty much any organic material.
Lisa: It is fascinating to me because I just spent some time in a place that had a big golf course. I was at a resort, had a big golf course. Beautiful, green, and I’m thinking to myself, “Well, this is lovely. And I’m wondering what kind of chemical runoff we’re experiencing.” I know there are some golf courses that really do want to make things green. You spent 11 years as a golf instructor working on these types of golf courses. Did this influence your desire to get back to a more natural…
Bennett: Holistic, natural lifestyle? I’ve really enjoyed being in green spaces so that’s why I gravitated towards golf and I also like sports. So, I think that’s why I got into golf. Really, the chemical side of the golf industry, it’s always frustrated me because I know that you don’t really need that. It’s really our desire for perfection that drives that industry. If people were okay with seeing a little brown patch here or there on the golf course, you really could do things more organically and you wouldn’t need those chemical inputs. It really comes down to what the client…What the general population wants. Do they want a lawn that’s perfect or are they okay with something that is more natural? If you’re okay with that, then you can really do things organically and still have a really nice result.
Lisa: Ted, how does this all fit in with the revision of your book? The book that is now titled…
Ted: It’s entitle, “Earth Calling. A Handbook on Climate Change for the 21st Century.” It really is a handbook. In fact, the reason we have the subtitle, a handbook, because we found ourselves using “Reunion”, the first publication, as a handbook. I would go back and reference different pages and I said to Ellen one day, my co-author who is an incredible writer, I said to her, “Ellen, you know, this is a handbook. Even though it’s a text, it’s really a handbook.” And then we started to think about it in terms of climate change and saying people can reference this. There’s a huge, huge section of this book about hundreds of things people an do to help with this global climate change problem we’re in.
Lisa: So, a lot of the things that Ben has been talking about as far as incorporating Biodynamics, you will address in the book that you are now revising.
Ted: It’s part of the book. It’s not certainly the whole thing. And certain people aren’t going to go there in certain ways. I mean, I drive a couple cars and they’re not particularly fuel efficient, but I like them. I’m not going to go there, but I’m going to go there in other areas. So, people will pick and choose. It’s not either, or. It’s and, and both. I’m a product of the 1950’s. I was born in the 50’s. When I look at my nieces and nephews, their worldview…They were born into a completely different era, completely different world3view.
Lisa: Ted, I think your point is a good one and it’s very easy for those of us who are really sensitive to this and really want to do what’s best for the planet, and for our families, our children, ourselves, the future generations. It’s easy for us to start feeling very guilty. If we want to go visit a foreign country we actually have to get on a plane. We can’t paddle across the ocean in a canoe. I think this type of thing can become a bit of a problem if there is this absolute approach to life. If you don’t do this, then you’re bad. If you’re not a extremist foodie who eats only a certain type of food, then you’re somehow not…I don’t know, you’re like an evil plant mongering, I don’t know, villain. But I mean I think that what you’re trying to talk about is, you’re just trying to do the best you can.
Ted: It’s all we can do. Look, everybody’s sensibility is different. My sensibility is different than my brother’s sensibility, is different than my neighbor’s sensibility. We all have to work together as a team. If you do 1 through 5, I do 5 through 10, Ben does 10 through 20. We all work together collectively as a system to make a huge impact on this planet. It’s not about us going and living in a tepee somewhere and starting a fire every morning. That’s not where we’re supposed to be going right now.
Lisa: Ultimately, some of the things that we used to do that seem like they are simpler and maybe they were a better way, they used to get us into trouble. Lighthouse keepers used to make the light appear using mercury and then they would get mercury poisoning and they would go crazy and then they would die. So, there are these things that used to be good because now we use electricity and then we used mercury. It seemed like a good idea, but everything has its consequence. So, if we can just understand that simpler, it wasn’t necessarily better, and it’s not even necessarily better now. Again, just trying to be mindful. Just showing up and doing the best we can trying to be mindful.
Ted: Mindful. I love that word, yet.
Lisa: So, as individuals who are both dealing with what you have called the cosmic energies, there must be some shift in the way that you’ve lived your lives.
Bennett: Yeah. For me, personally, spending time in the Amazon and reading about Biodynamics really changed me. It made me more conscious of my decisions and how they affected me from a health standpoint, and also from a happiness standpoint. I think, for me personally, it’s always been a battle between doing what I love and making enough money to exist in this society. So, I really feel like if you can find that balance it’s a comfortable feeling and I’ve sort of found that balance with doing my landscaping business.
Lisa: I think that’s a balance that a lot of people are attempting to achieve.
Bennett: It’s not an easy balance to achieve because we spend a lot of our waking hours trying to make money and a lot of people are doing things that they don’t enjoy doing and they have to do it because they have a family and they have to feed their children. It’s a difficult balance.
Lisa: But how has it changed you as a person?
Bennett: As a person, it’s really made me more of a happy person and a more content person. For me, when I work in the landscape it provides me with a therapy. When I get in the landscape I’m thinking about nothing other than what I’m doing at the time and it’s enabled me to stay more in the moment and not worried about the future or all the mistakes I made in the past.
Lisa: How would you answer that same question, Ted?
Ted: Well, I think in a nutshell, what Ben’s talking about is very important for everybody. We have job. We start out in the life of a job, we move into a career. In your case, it was working with golf courses and being involved in golf.
Bennett: Mmhmm (affirmative).
Ted: That became a career for you. But you were called on a higher vibrational level to work with this work. This is where…Interestingly, that’s where I am in my life. I’m in the calling part of my life. So, that’s why I like the title, “Earth Calling.”
Lisa: So, this has actually caused you to evaluate what you are actually offering back to the world?
Ted: Yeah. We all know we’re terminal vessels here. At the end of the day, I don’t know many eulogies I’ve attended where they said, well…They listed off all the materials things that they owned and all that kind of thing. It really was, what did they give back? They’re always remembered for their generosity and how they helped one another, helped the planet, gave to a cause, worked for a cause. That’s the summation of a life well lived and that’s definitely where we all need to be on this planet. We are born to work and help people. We are happiest when we’re reaching out and trying to fix a problem or help someone in need or just do the right thing. It’s part of who we are.
Lisa: Ben, did you also find this? You spent three years in Central and South America working, it sound like in private equity…
Bennett: Yeah, I worked in South America. It was actually quite disturbing for me to be there because when you spend any time in Central or South America in the cities, you start to realize how big of an impact you really have on other people’s lives. A lot of the habits that Westerners have, have a direct influence on the lifestyle of people that maybe aren’t so fortunate. So, you start to see that and you start to realize that each one of us can make a big difference, we just have to be that difference. So, for me, it sort of woke me up. Ted’s book is a wonderful book for people that want to get awakened because it gives them the tools and the resources to look deeper.
Lisa: After listening to this, I’m sure that people will want to get in touch with either one of, or both of you, about Biodynamics landscaping or landscaping in general. So, how can people do that?
Bennett: They can do it through my Facebook page, Wheelwright Landscapes, or they could email at bennettwheelwrightlandscapes.com.
Ted: Or just tedcarterinspiredlandscapes.com.
Lisa: Well, it has been a true pleasure to spend time with the two of you today. I always enjoy being with…Well, I enjoy being with all types of individuals, but when like minded individuals who are doing things in slightly different fields, when we all come together I feel like it creates this amazing energy and I give you great credit for continuing to bring life back into the earth and the soil of the state of Maine.
We’ve been talking with Bennett Steele of Wheelwright Landscapes and Ted Carter of Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes. Thank you so much for joining us.
Ted: Thank you very much.
Bennett: Thank you very much, Lisa.