Reading in progress
Saturday 29 August 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.
Pick the pear that feels nearly ready and set it on the windowsill. It will tell you when.
241 of 365Tempelhofer Feld is ringed with community gardens, some tended for decades, and it sits at the centre of fights over soil, development and land sealing. For four days in early July it hosted the Kompost Festival, a gathering of gardeners, compost practitioners, artists, scientists and activists around one question: what can compost teach us? There were garden tours at the Feld Food Forest, demonstrations of community composting, a miso and microscopy workshop led by Ayumi Matsuzaka, and an Aerocene solar balloon.
The festival's two organisers arrived by different doors. Severin Halder came through geography: a childhood interest in plants, a thesis written in the community gardens and favelas of Rio de Janeiro, then years of work with urban agriculture across Europe, Latin America and Africa. In Berlin he co-founded the Allmende-Kontor gardens and spent over a decade inside the city's community-garden movement. He started the Kompost Festival in Münster in 2021, as part of his academic work at StadtLabor, and ran it there for four years.
Julian Chollet came through the microscope. Trained as a molecular biologist, he drifted out of academia, tried growing vegetables and found he knew almost nothing about it. Looking at his own soil and compost samples under a lens became, by his account, an obsession - one that produced mikroBIOMIK, a participatory soil science project, and HUMUS sapiens, a collaboration with the Hackteria network. Their small retreats in 2018 and 2019 generated the guides and workshops that later fed into the festival.
The move from Münster to Berlin was deliberate in its method. Halder and Chollet chose to work with what was already on the ground - the gardens and green-commons networks that have grown up around the Feld - and to connect those local practitioners to an international circle of soil projects, rather than import a ready-made programme. On a site where the fate of the land is contested, compost was never only compost.
Before starting anything new, ask the nearest community garden what they already do with their green waste - the answer will tell you where a shared compost bay should go and who will turn it. The bins can be built from reclaimed timber and wire mesh; the garden supplies the knowledge for free.
Makery · Read the source
Nothing in today's harvest touches machine learning directly, so this is one of the days the column accounts for itself. The readings above this piece, including the one about the compost festival, were drafted by a language model from harvested summaries, then checked by a person. That arrangement is worth describing plainly rather than hiding, because it is the same arrangement a lot of small organisations are quietly reaching for: a machine doing the typing nobody has hours for, a human deciding whether the typing is true.
The honest version of what the tool does here is narrow. It reads a paragraph of somebody else's summary, finds the thing worth saying, and writes three hundred words in a consistent voice. It does not know whether the compost festival happened. It does not know whether the dates on that permaculture course listing are right, or whether the pastoralists in Mongolia got the recognition they asked for. Every factual claim still has to be checked against the source by someone who can be embarrassed when it is wrong. The saving is in the drafting, not the judgement.
The cost is also worth stating. Each day's draft runs on servers that draw power and water, and the model behind it was trained on text scraped from people who were never asked, including, in all likelihood, people who write for the same publications this one reads. That is not a reason to refuse the tool outright, but it is a reason to keep its use small and specific: drafting, summarising, transcribing, never deciding. The moment the machine's output goes unchecked because checking feels redundant, the arrangement has stopped saving time and started spending trust.
The test we apply is the repairer's one: does this tool let one person do careful work they otherwise could not, or does it just let one person do more work, faster, with less attention? On a good day it is the first. On a day when nobody reads the draft before it goes out, it is the second, and no disclaimer at the bottom of the page fixes that.
The thing to do with a marrow that got away from somebody, which by the end of August is most of them.
Peel the marrow half in stripes, scrape out the seeds and pith with a spoon, salt the hollow and leave it cut-side down while you cook the filling. Soften the onion and garlic slowly in oil in a wide pan, add the tomatoes and cook until they slump, then stir in the rice with 300ml of water, salt well, cover and cook on low until the rice is just tender and has taken the liquid. Stir through the herbs and half the cheese, taste it, and pack it into the marrow hollow. Set the marrow in a baking dish with a finger of water in the bottom, scatter the rest of the cheese over, and bake at 190°C (375°F) for about forty minutes, until a knife slides into the flesh with no argument and the top has browned. Let it sit for ten minutes before cutting; it holds together far better for the wait. The scooped seeds, washed, dried and toasted in a dry pan with salt, eat like pumpkin seeds if yours aren't too woody.
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