My undergraduate psychology degree was full of studies of group behaviour. Examinations of motives and teams, gambling and trading, perceptions of self and others. A significant amount of human behaviour (that which isn’t devoted to mating and food) is determined by understanding relationships with our community. Who can we trust? Who is a foe? Who is a friend? Who is a foe disguised as a friend? Who are the givers and who are the takers?

Which brings me to giving.

We are not a naturally generous species in the eyes of the wider world. Human beings are generally exploitative and grasping. We mine and we harvest. We profit and we consume. As relationships go, there isn’t much in it for the earth. Except right at the end, when the soil and the worms get the last laugh, but that is a little morbid, even for the existentially aware.

But it is an idea I think about a lot. For every hour I spend thinking about the seeds that I would like to sow and the harvests that I would like to reap, I want to spend a little time considering what I will give in order to receive. What investments I will make to even up this relationship between me and Malus Farm. She cannot give all the time; a one-way trade is no trade at all and, as women have known forever, it is a route only to depletion and resentment.

I can give her kindness and wisdom. I will not poke the innermost parts of her and disturb her soil and her microbial life. I will not dig. I will know that to leave well alone is so often the best choice to make. I will give her compost and comfort. To know that bare soil for her is like an open wound to us. I will cover it gently and carefully with flowers and with the black gold that comes from my compost heaps. She doesn’t want money, although I had to set up a whole flower farming business just to fund my seed and plant habit; money is a particularly human thing. It means everything to us and absolutely nothing to anything else. But maybe she would like the investment of my time.

The biodynamic preparation of The Three Kings is a symbol of giving. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh, so revered and so precious to people, given to the land in a gesture of generosity. One of my biggest problems with it is that, like so many of the other preparations, they need dynamising. This means stirring in rainwater for an hour, the movement made by me in the stirring giving energy, energising, the molecules in the water for this to be given to the ground. The Three Kings preparation is for epiphany, non-negotiably 6 January. This year, that is a Saturday, a flower day, when I had earmarked the day for finally getting the last of the tulips in.

How am I ever going to find an hour to stir a pot?

Which brings me to so much of the trouble. How do we fit in being with our gardens and our ground when life gets so in the way? When structures and timetables and modern life and all the demands seem so contrary to the rhythm of the world beyond our human preoccupations. Once you look, you see it everywhere. The paving over of gardens for parking spaces. The casual spraying of weedkiller in children’s playgrounds. The way pavements go right up to the bark of trees. Strawberries in December.

I hear the invitation of a different way, but I also feel the panic of not being able to do it properly, the perfectionist (capitalist) voice that says that it has to be done the way the experts say, it has to be done right, or it is worthless.

In this fresh page of the new year, this liminal space before the inertia of the familiar re-exerts itself, I am holding onto thr biodynamic way. The way that says the rules are not as important as the intention.

And the intention for my garden is that there is no abundance without investment. There is no taking without first giving.

In amongst the demands and the noise and the tasks of the day, I will find a way.

The application of the Three Kings biodynamic preparation:

Fill a ceramic vessel or pot with clean rainwater.

Warm gently.

Add the preparations.

Stir, preferably by hand, for an hour. Create a vortex by stirring one way and then break it into chaos by stirring immediately the other.

Using a brush or sprayer, throw droplets of the mixture against, through and over the boundaries of your garden or growing space. Or, make a spiral from the middle of your garden, and spray outwards until you meet the edges.