Will it continue..?

Lately more questions have been reaching me again about where grove.eco is headed. Of course – it’s the time of year when people start preparing for the season ahead. So let me send a sign of life!

Almost all my energy right now goes into our children and my own recovery. Grief is a hard road, stony and uneven, and I never know what’s waiting for me over the next hill.

But I know I’ll keep working on grove.

I felt it clearly when I did the bed planning for this year. Claudi had switched our big bed last year to row companion planting following the Langerhorst family method. She planned it, I planted it and tended it as best I could. This year I made a few changes to that bed – partly because of poor companion combinations (which our own programme had already flagged last year), partly because I want different quantities of certain vegetables, and also because I want to grow the cucumbers up a slanted trellis again.

In the process I noticed a few more things I still want to fix. As you do when you actually use something yourself. But at heart I don’t feel quite ready to publish it yet – probably also out of fear of extra stress.

Grove was always more than a “product” we wanted to sell, for Claudi and me. It was and is a vision for our future, something we’ve always worked on continuously – sometimes more, sometimes less. It was part of our self-fulfilment and it will remain that for me.

In the coming weeks I’ll finish a few articles we started a long time ago. For example, how to build the cucumber trellis I mentioned. Or what the most fundamental differences are between the Langerhorst family’s approach to companion planting and the original by Gertrud Franck.