This Spring I had a big breakthrough in nourishing my grape plants. I sprayed a mix designed for foliar feeding on my vines just after the first few leaves emerged. The intent was to increase the vigor of the plants but just as much to reduce the number of leafhoppers on the vines. They have been a perennial problem for years and I have tried every spray to reduce or kill them that I could find.
Two things prompted this action. In his book, Quality Agriculture, John Kempf includes a chapter by Tom Dykstra called Insects: Nature’s Garbage Collectors. The chapter begins:
The higher the Brix reading, the healthier the plant. And when you have a healthy plant, you don’t have to use, for example, all of the pesticides that are being used today; herbicides, fungicides, nematicides etc.
Brix is a measure of liquid density. We winemakers use it to tell how sweet the grapes are so we know when to harvest. It is measured by a refractometer, a simple instrument that projects sunlight coming through a couple drops of liquid on a scale that measures the density of the liquid. This is an elementary form of sap analysis. Most plants register about 5º on the brix scale. All minerals and more can be analyzed with sap analysis.
The second prompt to using a foliar spray is a consistent theme in works and talks by Tom Kempf, a leading light of Regenerative Agriculture. Kempt’s company, Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA.com) is helping farmers transition away from chemicals that are detrimental to plant, soil and ecological health to methods that are beneficial to all those things plus being much more productive and less expensive to apply. Kempf’s experience is that foliar spray has an immediate but long-lasting effect and is much less expensive than typical agrichemical methods.
So, what was the effect of my first foliar application? Within two days my leafhopper problems of 30 years were GONE! It was hard to find a living Virginia Creeper Leafhopper anywhere. Additionally, the vines were healthy. They had vigorous growth and a darker green color. The first question everyone I told about this event had was “What was this stuff?”.
It is a formula provided by my advisor, Craig Madsen, called Lift Brix. The text box has a formula for 50 gallons to cover one acre. I didn’t need nearly that much since hand-spraying is more direct and the young grape vines didn’t have much leaf surface to cover. It would have been a bit more effective if I had sprayed late in the day so that the spray would have stayed liquid on into the night.
I wish I could say “That’s it. Just use this stuff and your troubles will be over.” If I worked for a big agrichemical chemical company, I might say something like that about a product that I was selling. But the story has no end. John Kempf has a lot to say about the 5 stages of plant growth: 1. Bud Initiation, 2. Bloom/Pollination, 3. Cell Division, 4. Fruit Fill, and 5. Ripening. Each stage has activities that are enhanced with the presence of micronutrients, principally: Calcium, Manganese, Boron, Zinc, Copper, Urea and Seaweed. As a plant nears fruit fill, some biological ingredients are helpful beside these minerals.
Other companies offer similar solutions. For example, Wilbur-Ellis sells Pronatural Photo Max Plus. It has Magnesium (Mg), Sulfur (S), Manganese (Mn) and Zinc (Zn). They are derived from Amino Acid Complexes of Mg, S, Mn and Zn plus Sulfates of those same elements. Plants rarely take up elements directly but absorb them as organic compounds like these. Craig Madsen supplied me with a foliar formula that includes Manganese, Boron, Zinc and Magnesium. You can create it as an aerobic tea using fulvic acid to chelate the minerals so the minerals become part of organic molecules.
You probably noticed that we are getting away from nice simple off-the-shelf solutions to pest problems. Reaching further back into agricultural heritage, Korean Natural Farming uses foliar applications created from forest soil, sea salt and other natural and inexpensive elements. For instance a brew made from nettles is suggested for tomato health. A lot of ideas are available in Jadam Organic Farming, The way to Ultra-Low-Cost agriculture by Youngsang Cho. Cho emphasizes that you can create solutions to any pest problem with teas and fermentations from natural ingredients and that it is best to avoid chemical company products.
Philosophically, I view it as holism vs. reductionism or lumpers vs. splitters. Splitters try to take one discovered solution, corner the market on it and get rich promoting their one small and usually temporary fix. Lumpers try to add back all the ingredients that extractive agriculture and geologically unique soils lack. They have a harder time cornering a market. Nature tends to be abundant. Nourish it and it will nourish you.