Notes. Thoughts. Big Green Ideas.

...Are the Tines 'greener' on the other side of the fence? One of the questions that comes up from time to time is why we changed so much on the More-Fork but left the tine design largely alone (except the tine steel upgrade to 4140.. super glad I did that!) The answer is pretty simple. Because it already worked. Over the years I've spent plenty too much time thinking about broadforks. Probably more time than is healthy or normal. Followed up with hundreds of phone calls to Broadfork users.. hearing their systems, hearing their dreams.. And if there's one thing I've learned, it's that changing something isn't the same as improving it. The original Gundaroo tine design has had a long pressure test. (1980's were the good years.. right?) Not in a laboratory, in market gardens, community gardens, schools... (all places that 'have something to prove' as a common trait, whether we admit that or not..) In clay. In loam. Harvesting carrots, key-lining hills or planting truffle cultures.. In ground that should have been worked a month earlier.... or worse.

I've sometimes wondered if broadforks get tangled up with gardening philosophies more than they should. A gardener might have spent years building permanent beds, getting mulch depths sorted out, figuring out irrigation, making compost and generally developing a system that works for them. Then along comes a broadfork and suddenly it feels like they're being asked to join a different tribe. That's not really the intention. I've never looked at a broadfork as a gardening system. It's always just seemed like another tool in the shed. A useful one, certainly, but still a tool. If you've got permanent beds, keep your permanent beds. If you're growing under a heavy layer of mulch, keep mulching. If you've found a rhythm that works in your garden, I'd be the last person to suggest throwing it away. Productive Gardens are hard won for most of us.. Most of us have arrived at our methods through years of mistakes, observations and occasional moments of luck. oh, and grit. relentless grit. The broadfork doesn't need any of that to change. What it does do is give you another opportunity to renovate the processes that make soil alive!

We Stared at the best Broadfork... And asked what we could improve?! A Folly tale. Steel Tines I stared at the 1065 heat-treated and replaceable tines. Already the choice of steel made this a tough endeavor. That combination made for one of the stiffest and toughest steel tines in a market that tends to use regular, un-tempered plate steels and a prayer that they don't bend... For real! - after 15 years of building the Gundaroo Tiller Broadfork design, I'd only had to replace maybe 15 tines....! And they were usually acase of foul-play, like being driven over by a tractor... Never a case of failure in use... Could I make the tines tougher? (bing-bong...) That's a firm not-really. Could I improve how the tines work? Perhaps? But then they are precision machined and treated. They design was already a banger because it's tapered points shed soil in a tiny surface area, even in sticky soils. Tapered plate steel designs build more work (pressure) as they progress into soil, limiting real penetration.. and then the GT's uneven tine lengths make punching the soil initially, a simple, and reliable process that doesn't overload the user, like expecting to drive in all tines at once on the competitor designs.. It just adds physicality onto the user that isn't really fair.

Another juggernaut 80 page report... and another framework. Pages of graphs and beautifully formatted charts.. plenty of words I'm not sure I can catch the gist of.. Another therapist has dreamt up another abstract simplism to tell themselves when Makos behaviour is "working". And each time, there's a hollow in my chest that gets a little deeper.. Not because the people bringing these behavioural frameworks don't care, they do, but because each one tends to arrive as if it's the only way, and my child is expected to meet us there. He's needed to adapt again. "Just toss the old model aside please kid! - This one is shinier!" I'm living in fear for Mako. For if, to stretch his already limited capacity across yet another attempt to manage his behavioural reality.. another therapist proposing a framework to annex the last framerwork.. and the massive, giant shame here is that they don't quite speak to each other. Mako is being asked to translate himself for the sake of others, depending on who's in the room, with a degree and a day-rate... As a parent, that starts to feel less like supportive movement and more like fragmentation, another version of explaining away Mako's normal - instead perceived against community normal.... and it's hard not to wonder why the responsibility keeps landing on him to adjust instead of us choosing something elegantly coherent and meeting him where he actually is. It raises a quiet question that screams in my chest, underneath all of this: what if the issue isn't which framework is best, but the assumption they all share?

Wade recently undertook further training in ConTact Care, and if I was forced to give you the shortest possible explanation of the method, I'd probably say that it works with the body's protective responses rather than trying to overcome them. Instead of pushing through tension, it listens to it. Instead of trying to force a release, it supports what is already there until the nervous system feels safe enough to let go on its own. During the course, Dale Speedy said something to me that didn't seem particularly important at the time. Looking back, it may have been the most important thing he said all weekend. He looked at me and said, "You know about the sense-abilities of people. You know that a look across a crowded room can be as powerful as a poke in the ribs." To be completely honest, I was mostly surprised that he was talking directly to me. All day we'd been asked to feel things through our hands that I wasn't entirely convinced my old farmer fingers were qualified to feel. There were plenty of moments where I questioned whether I was imagining things, misunderstanding things, or simply too clumsy to appreciate what was being presented.

The Yellow Hat Dilemma .... Just because the idea is nice... The auditorium had that low, restless, sweaty hum it always gets on a sunny December afternoon. Parents packed into rows, shuffling and murmuring, carrying memories from years before whether they wanted to or not. Even as adults, small town schools are always a bully-glance from terror... We were sitting there with them, hearts thumping harder than felt reasonable. Surely no-one could notice..? It was the local primary school's end-of-year concert. One of those events that's meant to be pure celebration. Pride. Smiles. Phones held up too high. And for the most part, it was exactly that. But underneath it, there was a tension I couldn't quite name at first. As the acts rolled on, something felt off. Then the teacher appeared at the side of the stage. Instead of lining the kids up like the others had, she wheeled out a large, bright trampoline. The room paused. You could feel it. A few whispers slipped out as you'd expect... What's happening? Why the trampoline?

Dear clinicians, I want to write this as a kind of apology — or maybe an explanation — Sometimes it looks like I must be totally checked out on you. It's that moment when you're sitting across from a parent like me, sharing what are genuinely good results, and instead of relief or celebration, I go Nicole Kidman on you.. I ought to be lit up with excitement. I might look down, or away, or suddenly very still. Yesterday, that parent was me. I'm still embarrassed. You were legit pointing out improvements in my autistic son — real clear signs of progress. The kind that on paper, absolutely deserve celebration. And I could feel your enthusiasm in the room, doing what it's meant to do: reinforcing progress, building momentum, reminding us that the work pays out. And yet, I felt myself withdraw. Not because I disagreed, or felt hopeless, or wasn't quietly excited.. I went quiet because I was guarding myself. Parents like me often look flat in those moments, but inside there's a very active calculation happening. We're weighing how many times we've felt this feeling before. How often early gains turned out to be fragile. How many times we celebrated too soon and then had to carry not just disappointment, but the emotional fallout of having believed too hard. There's a knife in the heart and many in the back of parents who represent a kid this much..

-On premature encouragement, awkward pauses, and the exits we take too early It usually happens in places that aren't meant to hold weight. A corridor outside a clinic. Or One-to-One in the park.. Nearly always sitting opposite each other. Close enough to be polite. Far enough to escape if needed. Places like a school gate with chalk dust on the concrete. A kitchen bench where coffee mugs cool untouched… One too many? The furniture is neutral. The lighting is kind. Nothing in the room suggests that anything difficult is allowed to happen here. The parent's body is angled slightly away, not defensively, just habitually. One foot hooked around the leg of the chair. Fingers worrying the seam of a sleeve that's been washed too many times. Their eyes stay present, but not wide. They've learned what wide eyes invite. Across from the parent, they sits upright. Shoulders back. Hands folded neatly in their lap like they're waiting for instructions. Their breathing is shallow, quickening just enough to register if you know what to look for.