Reading in progress
Sunday 6 September 2026
What is working, where, and who made it work. Read the whole turn of the earth in two minutes, then go as deep as you like.
Leave the spider that has appeared in the corner of the ceiling where it is. It is working its way through the last of the flies.
249 of 365Katy Willis is still cutting asparagus from crowns that were in the ground before her children were born. The rhubarb, too, has outlasted the kids' childhoods. Both went into her soil once, as crowns, and neither has needed a packet of seed since. She writes that all twelve of the foods on her list are growing in her garden right now.
The twelve share the same logic: they are perennial vegetables and fruits rather than annuals, so the spring round of digging, sowing and replanting does not apply to them. The full dozen sit behind a continuation link we could not open, but the principle does not need the complete list to be understood. Asparagus and rhubarb are the named examples, and they are the oldest residents in her garden.
The cost of this arrangement comes first, not last. Willis is plain that most of these crops give nothing worth picking for their first year or two in the ground. Once established, though, the relationship inverts: the plants carry on producing for ten years at the low end, twenty, thirty, and in some cases fifty by her reckoning, while asking very little of the gardener in return. The bed stays undisturbed and the April seed order gets shorter.
This is not a grand scheme or a funded project. It is one garden, planted patiently, on the way toward the goal Willis sets out: a garden that feeds you. We should be plain about what we can and cannot vouch for. The fetched text is only the opening of the piece, cut off at a continuation link, so the approach, the waiting period and the two named crowns are verifiable, while the identity and performance of the remaining ten foods are not.
Plant perennial food crops as crowns rather than seed and leave the bed alone. Expect a year or two with no proper harvest while the plants establish - that wait is the whole cost. After it, they crop for a decade or more with almost no digging, no replanting and no annual seed order.
Regeneration International · Read the source
There is a corner of Highbury Park in Birmingham, up against the old Chamberlain estate, where the fruit trees are looked after by whoever turns up. Highbury Community Orchard has run this way since 2010 - a decade and a half of people arriving with secateurs and going home with scratched forearms. A project that lasts that long becomes part of the furniture of a neighbourhood, which is its own kind of success.
The rhythm is fixed and modest. Volunteers meet every Thursday from eleven until two for orchard and garden tasks. On Wednesdays in term time the space fills with children - play sessions, forest school, learning activities - and the orchard works deliberately with families, SEN communities, schools and local groups. Once a month there is something larger: seasonal celebrations, including an apple day, which is the point in the year when a community orchard stops being a gardening project and becomes a calendar.
What is actually on the ground is a working list: a community garden, the orchard itself, a forest garden, compost toilets, and a space that can be hired. The blend is intentional - heritage craft skills alongside permaculture, play alongside pruning. It sits in a busy part of the city, reachable by four bus routes, and asks nothing of anyone except that they come back. Lasting since 2010 means the planting and the people have grown up together.
An orchard survives on a fixed, repeating slot, not on enthusiasm. Pick one three-hour window a week, put it in the same place every time, and hold it through winter - Highbury's is Thursday, 11 to 2. Add one annual celebration (apple day costs little more than a press and a date) and the calendar does your recruiting for you.
Permaculture Association · Read the source
The two readings above were drafted by a language model, and it is worth saying plainly what that involved. Overnight, a small script pulled thirty-odd items from a handful of feeds — seed networks, permaculture noticeboards, a repair wiki, two parish council sites. The model read each one, discarded the duplicates (the roundhouse build camp appeared twice, word for word), and wrote short accounts of the two that seemed most worth your attention: a list of perennial foods, and a Thursday volunteer group in Highbury Park.
What it did not do is worth more attention. It did not visit Highbury Park. It did not check whether the Thursday group still meets, or whether the twelve perennial foods crop in your soil rather than the author's. Everything it wrote is a faithful rearrangement of what somebody else already published, which is a useful service and a limited one. A reader in Kings Heath could have found the orchard listing themselves; the machine saved them perhaps twenty minutes, and cost a few watt-hours of computation plus the water and electricity behind it. That trade is defensible. It is not heroic.
The failure mode to watch is flattery of a different kind: the model writes smoothly about places it has never been, and smooth prose borrows authority it has not earned. When it described the orchard as 'tucked away', it was copying the project's own words, not reporting. If a detail above turns out to be wrong — a date, a gate, a name — the error is ours for publishing it, not the tool's for producing it.
There was no story about AI in the territory today. Rather than invent one, this column notes the tool already in the room, doing the small job it was given, with a person checking its work before you read it. That arrangement — machine drafts, human answers for it — is the only version of this we would defend.
Highbury Orchard, Permaculture Association project listing · Build Camp #1: Reciprocal Roof Roundhouse Build, Permaculture Association course listing
The first leeks are thin and tender now; this is supper when the evening has turned cool.
Split the leeks lengthways, wash the grit out from between the layers, and cut them into lengths a finger long; the dark green tops go in too, sliced finer. Melt the butter in a wide pan, add the leeks with a pinch of salt, cover, and cook them gently for ten minutes until they slump - you want them soft, not coloured. Lift them out with a slotted spoon and keep warm. Stir the flour into the buttery leek liquor left in the pan, cook it a minute, then add the milk a splash at a time, stirring, until you have a sauce that coats the back of the spoon; off the heat, stir in the mustard and most of the cheese. Toast the bread, pile the leeks on top, spoon the sauce over and scatter the last of the cheese, then put them under a hot grill until the sauce blisters at the edges. It is done when the smell turns from milky to something closer to a cheese shop.
Nothing drops off. Today's readings move here tomorrow morning and stay, filed under the entrypoint they came in on. Below is the back-spool already gathered from the network.
The institutions whose public output feeds this reading. Each is watched every morning for what it publishes openly. Individuals are not listed here.
Permaculture Association · Permaculture Magazine · Regeneration International · Seed Savers Exchange · Garden Organic · Navdanya · Biodynamic Association UK · Biodynamic Demeter Alliance · Rodale Institute · Kiss the Ground · Savory Institute · Landworkers Alliance · Sustainable Food Trust · Real Farming Trust · Agroforestry Research Trust · Soil Association · A Growing Culture · Pasture for Life · Farmerama Radio
Ecosystem Restoration Communities · Rewilding Britain · Rewilding Europe · Trees for Life · Knepp Estate · Beaver Trust
The Restart Project · Low-tech Magazine · Makery · Repair Cafe International · Precious Plastic · Library of Things · Wuyong (Ma Ke)
Centre for Alternative Technology · AECB · Passivhaus Trust · Community Energy England
Julie's Bicycle · Dark Mountain Project · Emergence Magazine · Orion Magazine · Resurgence & Ecologist
Shareable · Transition Network · Global Ecovillage Network · Capital Institute
Bioneers · Gaia Education · Schumacher College · Center for Humans and Nature · Findhorn Foundation