Spring production from the greenhouse
June 2010
Dear Friend,
As the lengthening days glide from spring equinox to summer solstice, we all delight in the cascade of spring blossoms and burgeoning greenery. Our greenhouse is full to the brim with young plants, and just about every day our gardeners plant another bed of vegetables.
Culture and Agriculture
Under Mac Mead’s direction, the Pfeiffer Center’s orientation has grown steadily more agricultural. The world needs biodynamic agriculture, and the entire biodynamic movement’s training and outreach has grown in response to the need. Of course, for us to teach and practice biodynamic agriculture, we need to do agricultural production, so Garden Assistant Megan Durney worked with Mac over the winter to create an ambitious plan for the 2010 growing season. Check the results for yourself at this summer’s revitalized farm stand; if you don’t feel like cooking, Threefold Café will feature Pfeiffer Center produce all summer long.
Working Crown Field by hand and by horse
Cultivating People
Expanded production also supports the Pfeiffer Center’s educational mission, by creating new settings in which we can share our work with children and adults.
Planting peppers with Neighbor to Neighbor
In recent weeks we’ve had children from Neighbor to Neighbor planting potatoes in Crown Field; local public school children from the Outdoor Lesson meeting the bees and harvesting dandelions in the Pfeiffer Center garden; and 5th graders from Green Meadow Waldorf School raking leaves and amending vegetable beds in the Children’s Garden. The children’s work is so beneficial to them and to us.
An institution grows when its people grow. The Pfeiffer Center and Megan Durney have been growing together for almost five years now. After interning in 2006-7, Megan chose (to our delight) to stay on and eventually assume an important supervisory role, helping make possible Mac’s expansion of our adult education programs and new research initiatives. For Megan, the Pfeiffer Center provides an opportunity to blend work and study that she could find nowhere else.
Facing the Tasks of Our Time
Our work at the Pfeiffer Center is needs-driven. The needs we respond to are the tasks of our time: to consciously find a right relationship between human beings and the earth, one that is guided toward the thriving of agriculture, one that respects and works with nature’s forms and forces. Our guide is the spiritual scientific research of Rudolf Steiner, combined with the work of farmers who have devoted lifetimes to biodynamics. Every day we strive to move a bit further down the path that Rudolf Steiner indicated to us.
Making tree paste with the One-Year Course
Our One-Year Course in biodynamics is now a Participating Classroom Study Program in the North American Biodynamic Apprenticeship Program, and each year we grant thousands of dollars in tuition assistance so aspiring farmers can attend. The Outdoor Lesson provides rich farm and garden experiences to more than 400 public school children (many of them economically disadvantaged) each year. Pfeiffer Center gardeners give their labor and time to Neighbor to Neighbor, a community initiative that pairs local low-income middle school students with student/mentors from Green Meadow Waldorf High School; together, children and gardeners have made significant improvements in the garden, including new cold frames and deer fencing.
We Need Your Help!
Because our work is not shaped by the goals of government, philanthropies, and corporate donors, those entities have historically shown little interest in supporting us. Financially, what keeps us going is fee-paying course attendees and our donors – the vast majority of them individuals – who believe in the pressing need for and overwhelming importance of our work.
Watch for our all-new farm stand this summer!
It is our donors who fill the gap between the fees we collect and the expenses of putting on courses and running a teaching garden. Your care for our work means the world to us; your contribution manifests your care in the sense-perceptible world. It brings the love in your heart out into the world. Every contribution, no matter how small, helps the cause. If you’ve sent checks of less than $50 in the past, please consider donating $50 to the Pfeiffer Center this spring. If you have given less than $100, please consider sending us $100 at this time. Just a small bump up by each of our donors will make a huge difference.
Regardless of your ability to donate, please accept our heartfelt thanks for your continued interest in our work. We wish you a peaceful and flourishing summer.
The Pfeiffer Center is a project of the Threefold Educational Center, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.