Reading in progress
Thursday 17 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.
Give the courgette that has got away from you to a neighbour before it turns into a marrow, and do not apologise for it.
260 of 365The plan had been to fire the pots on the shore. Malo Legrand, a resident artist at the Ferme de Kerminy in southern Finistère, had dug wild clay from the inland Argoat and built a primitive kiln on the foreshore from materials found on the spot. The rising tide was meant to interrupt the firing and mark the pieces. Then came the summer's fire restrictions, and the performance was postponed; the pots will eventually be scattered in the Bélon river instead, left to take on whatever the water gives them.
Legrand's unfinished kiln was one strand of the Assemblée des sols, a three-day gathering in late August that drew some two hundred people to Kerminy at the tail of an overheated summer. The farm, founded in 2020, describes itself as an artwork and a territory at once: artist-farmers in residence, passing students and researchers, donkeys, an ox, sheep, hedgerows and springs. The programme mixed open assemblies - the morning plenary drew around eighty - with hands-on workshops, film screenings and performances.
Fittingly for a farm twenty kilometres from the sea, inside the watershed of the Aven, the assembly opened and closed with salt water. The opening film followed nori cultivation in Japan, where the oyster farmers of the Ariake Sea still honour an English biologist each year for introducing, in the difficult post-war years, a technique pairing nori with oyster shell that let their ancestors multiply their productivity. The closing session moved to the oyster farm at the Château de Bélon, and to the flat oyster, Ostrea edulis.
That oyster once formed reefs across Europe; a recent historical survey counted 1,196 documented reef locations, many of them French. Since Pacific oysters were introduced in the 1970s, the flat oyster has shrunk to roughly 2 per cent of European production, with Bélon among the few places still raising it - hence the tasting in the château park. The assembly is one node in Soil Assembly, a network running since 2022 that holds one international gathering a year and several local ones, each organised around the questions its own territory is already asking.
A local soil assembly needs a host place with a working question, a date, and a reason for people to handle the ground rather than just discuss it. The Soil Assembly network accepts short-circuit local events alongside its annual international one; two hundred people at a farm is the upper bound, not the entry ticket.
Makery · Read the source
Beside the Chilia branch of the Danube, a short way from the Black Sea, sits a patch of Romania called Ultima Frontiera - more than eight hundred hectares of reedbed, lake, grassland and dune. For the second half of the twentieth century it was a fish farm, its water held and pushed around by dykes, sluices and pumps. The farm gave up roughly twenty years ago, much of that infrastructure has fallen into disrepair since, and the wetland has been quietly reclaiming the pens on its own.
In 2025 Rewilding Europe, backed by its Rewilding Land Facility, took on long-term management rights to the site. The team, led by Alec Bălășescu, began not with bulldozers but with a question: how does water actually move through this place? A Dutch consultancy, Bureau Stroming, spent the first stretch of the project on a hydrological study, finished in 2026, which proposes reconnecting the old fish ponds, taking out barriers and opening better passage to the river. The stated aim is not a pristine wetland but a semi-natural one - livelier water levels, better conditions for fish, aquatic plants and birds.
The site carries a heavier inheritance than broken sluices. The neighbouring Periprava colony was among the most brutal camps in Romania's communist detention system. Political prisoners built the embankments, reclaimed the land and cut the reeds; more than a hundred died there between 1958 and 1963 under the commander Ion Ficior. Rather than flatten the remains, the rewilding team is working with the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile to keep that history visible. The derelict prison buildings are being colonised in the meantime by vegetation, owls and bats.
Some of the work has already started: buildings renovated, rubbish carted away, infrastructure patched. Horses and cattle belonging to local owners graze loose across parts of the site, doing the job wild herds once did. White-tailed eagles and Dalmatian pelicans are already present, and the restored water levels are intended to give the pelicans, and the terns, somewhere new to breed. Bălășescu talks about making it a showcase for the delta, but the truer measure will be whether the water, given its openings, does the rest.
Before touching a single dyke or sluice on a drained wetland, pay for the water to be understood first: a proper hydrological survey that maps where flow is blocked and where reconnection is possible. On a large site that means a consultancy study costing in the tens of thousands of euros; on a small one it can be a season of walking the ditches after rain with someone who remembers how the land used to drain.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source
There is no hedgerow camera trap or parish archive scanner in today's harvest, so this column turns on its own machinery. The two readings above were drafted by a language model from a morning's trawl of feeds, then checked and corrected by a person before you saw them. That arrangement is worth describing plainly once in a while, because it is the same arrangement now sitting inside councils, conservation trusts and seed companies everywhere, usually with less checking.
What the machine did this morning: read roughly four hundred headlines and summaries, discarded most of them, and produced first drafts on a tidal kiln and a delta rewetting. It did this in seconds, at a cost that is real but easy to hide — a query to a data centre drawing power and cooling water that no invoice sent to this publication itemises. What it did not do is notice that the kiln piece needed the tide's height checked against a local chart, or that the delta piece confused hectares with acres in its first pass. A person caught both. That person is the expensive part, and the part that cannot be skipped.
This is the honest shape of the tool at its most useful: not a writer, but a fast, careless assistant whose output a competent editor stands behind. The failure modes are boring rather than dramatic. It flattens voices into a plausible average. It states wrong numbers with the same confidence as right ones. It will happily draft an article about a barn tour it has never seen, in a county it cannot picture, and the draft will read fine until someone who knows the barn reads it.
None of this is an argument for or against the tool. It is an argument for keeping the editor, and for being suspicious of anyone who tells you the editor is optional. The day a publication like this one saves money by removing the person is the day it starts publishing confident nonsense about tides, and the tide, at least, will not care.
Publication's own drafting process
For when the chard has got big and a little tough, which is now.
Warm the oil in a frying pan you trust - wider than you think, because the potato wants to lie flat - and cook the sliced potato and onion with a good pinch of salt over a low heat, turning now and then, until the potato bends rather than snaps, about fifteen minutes. Meanwhile cut the chard stalks into short lengths and the leaves into ribbons, keeping them separate. Add the stalks and the garlic, crushed, to the pan for five minutes, then the leaves, and cook until they collapse. Beat the eggs with salt and pepper, pour them over, and nudge the vegetables so the egg runs underneath. Keep it low and leave it alone; it is ready to turn when the top is still wet but the edges have set, which you will smell before you see. Slide it onto a plate, invert it back into the pan, and give the other side two minutes. Rest it for five - it slices better warm than hot.
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