All the best wishes to all our friends across the whole planet! We wish you a happy, fruitful and fulfilling New Year 2012 and much power for all the challenges lying before you and us all.Yesterday, we celebrated New Year’s eve sitting round the fire under a starry heaven, but we didn't take pictures. So here are some highlights of 2011 instead: The rally to the anti-nuclear-demonstration in Lubmin, the graduation party of our second course of study in music therapy in the "Klanghaus", "Stine", the smaller of our boats with her almost fully restored hull, the brilliant concert of the Atos Trio, the grounds of the new multigenerational house, and not least grandma Else’s 90th and young Sarah’s 14th birthday on November 20th. We look forward to the New Year, and we hope it will bring to all of our four generations good fortune. And of course we look forward to meeting many of you during the course of the year here in Klein Jasedow again.

Worried friends from England had already asked, whether our family-blog might have moved to another site as there have been no news during the past few months. No, we will conitnue with our postings right here and apologize to all our friends for the silence. This autumn we had some troubles which kept us from writing. It all started with another herbicide-accident: end of August with the leaves of various herbs and trees in our gardens turning white. A herbicide called Clomazone, used against weeds in freshly sawn rapeseed, destroyed the chlorophyll of the plants. This happenend regularely to us since 2001 when Clomazone on the fields of the neighbouring conventional farmer destroyed the first harvest of our newly founded herb-growing company »Kräutergarten Pommerland«. And it happend again in 2004 and 2007. Every time we called the authorities, and they promised to help, but nothing happened. Now, after ten years of fruitless efforts, the siutation was even worse. A new formulation of the herbicide made it even more agressive, affecting also the tips of the trees. Fortunately, this time the responsible persons in the ministeries were as upset as we were, and the ministery for food security set up a decree not to use Clomazone any more until further studies will have been carried out. But the big companies producing this stuff like Syngenta and BASF sent a letter of disagreement, and this was enough to blow up the decree. The agent can be used like before. We documented this case on our website www.landwende.de and continue our political work. Clomazone is a global problem but it is seldom recognized, for nobody knows why there are white plants at the border of rapeseed fields or in the private gardens nearby. We need international protest to ban the use of this and other poisons on agricultural fields worldwide. Clomazone stays active between 14 and 60 days, hanging over the rapeseed-field. So the poison can't be prevented from wafting into your private garden. According to our experience after years of sufferig, we can say that it affects the respiratory tract and causes bad headache, nausea and other nice diseases. No scientific research has been done so far about the damage to health of humans who are exposed to low doses over a longer period of time. One only knows how much of the stuff you can feed a rat before it dies, but no study exists about how much an elderly person is allowed to breathe in before she will suffer from a circulatory collapse, which in fact did happen. Truly, this is a scandal. So if in next late summer you happen to detect white leaves in a private garden or elsewhere in the vicinity (up to 500 meters) to a rapeseed-field, this gives reason to immediately contact the local ministery of agriculture and join the international protest against the use of herbicides and pesicides on www.pan-international.org. And, by the way, please du inform us too, as we will keep on to struggle against this mischief.

The first Saturday in October was one of the few days this autumn when we could let aside our work for a bike ride into the nearby woods to go on a mushroom foray. Weeks ago already the weather had been extremly dry so there was not much to find. Only a trip into a more moist corner of the forest brought us a few cepes. Also harvesting our own grapes growing all around our office-building and at the south-facing walls of the Klanghaus was an event we wouldn't leave out. Three of the boys prepared a gallon for wine and so at Christmas we could enjoy our own delicious table wine.

Many of you know the large historic sailing boat »Ernestine«, owned by our Academy, on which Tilmann and Nele are offering trips for children and youth and charter guests during summer. »Ernestine’s« smaller sister »Stine«, a former fishing cutter from Bornholm, was owned by Christine’s father, and Tilmann and Nele have been sailing with her to Norway in 2003, which is a scene in the film »The settlers«. Now her hull has to be restored, and here she is at the wharf, where young boatbuilder Karsten Burwitz is masterly working on her. It is a museum wharf, a self-help project for traditional boats, so we are doing some of the easier work by ourselves. Here you see Tilmann (masked), Bob and Lara after grinding away the old paint from the topsides.

Luckily, there was (almost) no rain from 31 July to 7 August, when the Children's Circus Camp took place. This year, there was a change to an unbroken tradition since 2005: The three women who were central to the Circus Camp, my sister Katharina and our friends Anna and Janana, were all pregnant. During the time of the Camp, on 6 August, Katharina gave birth to her second son, Jan Sören, in her partner Kristian’s house in the Emsland region, and on 13 August, Anna’s second son saw the light of day in Niederfinow. A hearty welcome on planet Earth! Janana’s baby will probably take it’s time until September. It was thanks to our acrobatics instructor Rico’s initiative, that the Camp did not have to be cancelled. Together with Lara he found new instructors for tissue acrobatics, fire juggling, clowning, stilt walking, theatre, and music, while Lara was in charge of organizing the Camp. As every year, the kids had a hell of a good time. The shows at Lassan’s harbour square and the camp ground in Klein Jasedow where a complete success, too.