Biodynamic practices work in concert with a wide array of regenerative and organic gardening and farming methods. In biodynamics, we do not dictate any particular approach to tending a garden. So long as it works for you and is a way of regenerating the soil more than it is depleted, it is likely a method that is compatible with biodynamics. Some of you may not know where to begin, though, so you might consider the work of John Jeavons and the Grow Bio-Intensive approach, which boasts of supplying a complete diet year-round from as little as 1000 sq ft.
How-To: Balancing Biodynamic Soils
During the season, I use a lot of biodynamic preparations in the garden. The preparations I make on the farm — whether horn manure or barrel compound — invariably have sand mixed into them from our soil. I like to imagine this ends up producing silicic acid in tiny doses as I use my preparations across the field.
I spray out barrel compound as often as once a week on the garden. For a one-acre market garden, this would be 52 units of barrel compound a year. I use considerably more than this! So much more that I make my own barrel compound pits with manure from our cows. If you are able to source quality cow manure, I recommend making your own barrel compound.
For those who may feel too busy to spray barrel compound weekly, it can be sprayed together with applications of fish emulsion—accomplishing two tasks in one pass. I always put out soil sprays in the evening when the shadows are growing long. This is not a particular “fixed” time of day but a dynamic sign depending on the time of year.
Imagine the biodynamic preparations as “probiotics” for the soil; we know that a single serving of yogurt in isolation throughout the year is not enough to make a major improvement to gut health — such remedies should be used regularly and rhythmically to see the best possible results. In the case of the biodynamic preparations, these are pre-biotics: they contain the “foods” (forces) necessary to foster the best kind of soil life and the healthiest plants. Especially for gardens seeking to establish themselves rapidly as biodynamic oases of abundance, it is difficult to overuse preparations like barrel compound. I recommend that if barrel compound isn’t used weekly, it should at least be used monthly. In pasture settings, barrel compound is an ideal spray to follow after rotation.
When Should I Spray Biodynamic Preparations?
One biodynamic remedy in particular, first impressed upon me the importance of biodynamics. It wasn’t any of the original set of preparations — though I use all these yearly — but rather the Pfeiffer Field and Garden Spray. I wish I could communicate to you how beautiful this preparation smells. When I first opened what I’d ordered from Hugh Courtney, the aroma from this rich, earthy preparation made me say: “This is what I want my soil to smell like!”
While weeding in your garden, Alan Chadwick recommends taking a bucket with you. Don’t leave the weeds on the ground! Put them in a bucket as you go along, and when the bucket is full, dump them on your compost pile. Those weeds are a precious resource: they grow with such wonderful vigor where, perhaps, your garden plants might not. Save that vitality — don’t just let it bake in the sun. As you do this, you will start to create qualitatively different compost. By collecting the weeds as you go, you transform weeding from a muda activity (necessary but does not directly create value) into a value-creating activity. Rather than just making way for your desirable plants to grow, if you save your weeds and compost them, you are generating abundant fertility for next year.
Another thing I do early in the season is collect tomato trimmings. I only keep the clean, beautiful, vibrant green branches and leaves — no diseased leaves — and I submerge this in water like making sauerkraut. Fill your vessel about halfway with tomato prunings and weigh it down with large slabs of stone. Use ~3.5% sea salt in the water. For a 55-gallon barrel, this is about 16 lbs of sea salt (for a 5-gallon bucket, use about 1.5 lbs of sea salt). It’s not rocket science, so don’t worry about being completely precise. The most important part is to use only clean, healthy plant parts for this process. If you are concerned about sodium levels, consider Sea-Crop (which removes almost all the sodium). To this, I add a set of biodynamic compost preparations to help guide the fermentation in an auspicious direction. Allow this to age all year with the lid sealed (or with an airlock). By the time you’re pruning tomato suckers off next year, you’ll be able to take this fermented tomato juice, dilute it (9 parts water to one part fermented plant juice), and literally give back to the tomatoes the forces you’re taking away from them as you prune. This lactofermentation process of plants from the garden can be done with virtually any plant and is infinitely scaleable. I strongly recommend using a set of compost preparations for each fermentation batch. The concentrated fermented plant juice will store for years. I have batches I make each year and I try to use them up before they are much older than 3 years. In particular, I find using fermented tomatoes helpful for all kinds of nightshades, particularly for eggplant. If you have trouble with flea beetles, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer recommends dropping the pruned branches from tomatoes around your eggplant, claiming that flea beetles hate what’s in healthy tomato leaves. You can experiment with higher concentrations of fermented plant juice to water, but it is safer to start with less and gradually work your way up. In some situations, I’ve used as much as a 1:1 ratio of fermented plant juice-to-water, but this was for large well-established heavy-feeding plants. Remember that Steiner says “if compost heaps could be made of tomato stalks and leaves i.e. of the tomato's own refuse, the result would be quite brilliant.”1 I can personally confirm this. Additionally, Ehrenfriend Pfeiffer reports that tomatoes grow well without rotation in the same spot year after year. Initially, the plants may suffer some issues, but over time they become happier and happier in the same location.2 “The tomato does not wish to go beyond its own boundaries.”3
Every time I pull up a crop, I immediately try to plant (the same day) something else. I may hoe the bed lightly and let the weedy grasses bake in the sun before transplanting in the evening, but at least within 24-48hrs I like to plant each bed again. It is usually not auspicious to leave any bare earth in a biodynamic garden — at least during the growing season. This way, as the extensive root system of the previous crop begins to decompose in the soil, it feeds the next crop directly. But because we’re always taking something away when we harvest, I like to spray barrel compound out over the newly prepared bed.
The original biodynamic recommendations were based on the law of the minimum, which meant that the researchers were trying to find the lowest possible application rate to see a quantifiable effect. As for me, I’m more of a maximalist. My own experiments are trying to find an upper limit for using preparations. I have not found any application rate “too much” for the plants. If anything, I just find my plants and soil become all the healthier every year.4
Rudolf Steiner misunderstands a few questions in the Agriculture Course. This is understandable: the man was extremely busy, traveling by train to Breslau and then leaving town to give another set of lectures (the Karma Lectures) later in the same day. Moreover, Steiner was very sick — so much so that his personal physician had recommended that he not travel to give the Agriculture Course at all. I, for one, am grateful that Steiner did not listen to his doctor, in spite of how much respect I have for Dr. Ita Wegman. One attendee asked Steiner about straining the preparations, which Steiner said shouldn’t be necessary. Upon further explanation, Steiner understood that the person questioning was only asking whether straining would be harmful — since to use a mechanical sprayer the mixed water with preparations must necessarily be strained. Steiner affirmed that such straining would cause no harm.
But then there is another moment where someone asks an interesting question:
“Can the given quantity of cow horn manure diluted with water be used for half the area for which it was intended?
Steiner: In that case, you will get a growth which is luxuriant, i.e. the same result which I mentioned before in another connection. In the case of potatoes, for example, the growth would become rank, the stems would spread too far and the tubers would remain small; there would be what are generally known as ‘rank patches,’ if you apply too much of the substance.”5
On this point, I know of no farmer who has found this claim from Steiner true. How do we save face for Steiner here? I think Steiner simply misheard the question. I have used double, triple, and even quadruple the recommended horn manure — and I’ve never seen “rank patches” develop from such an application. Moreover, Steiner emphasizes it is not substance we are spreading but forces when it comes to the biodynamic preparations. Yet here he says substance.
Additionally, the area Steiner recommended the contents of one horn to be used on was about one-third of an acre: “I have ascertained by repeated observation that an area of about 1500 square yards (near one-third of an acre) can be served with the contents of such a cow horn, diluted in about half a bucket full of water.”6 On average, a cow horn contains three units of horn manure. If Steiner’s indications here are correct, for the full effect of horn manure on a single-acre market garden, one would want three horn’s worth, which is nine units of horn manure.
The threshold effects determined by the research circle aimed at finding how little we can use to see a measurable effect — but we are now habituated to using far less than Steiner indicated, even for small acreages. I suggest we consider using the full-strength application of horn manure, as Steiner indicated, unless we are scaling far beyond a few acres. I myself have only found an increased rate to accelerate the improvement of my soils and further diminish pest and disease pressures. Our plants often need more than we have given them, especially in these times.
I’ve spoken with other biodynamic farmers about higher application rates of horn manure, and they haven’t seen “rank patches” arise. There are several possibilities: 1) the preparations we’re using aren’t potent enough, 2) Steiner was just wrong, or 3) Steiner is speaking to an unasked question. The most charitable take is option #3. My interpretation is this: the exhausted Steiner simply misheard the question. Steiner is answering — quite accurately! — a question that wasn’t asked: “Can the given quantity of raw cow manure diluted with water be used for half the area for which it was intended?” If a normal application of raw or liquid manure were applied to half the area (a double dose), yes rank patches will definitely occur! In fact, I’ve seen “rank patches” far more often where too much compost is used than ever where too much horn manure has been used. Although the compost pile is the heart of any biodynamic farm organism, even the best things can be overused. According to Ehrenfried Pfeiffer’s recommendations, a new biodynamic garden should use ten (10) tons of compost per acre and then one (1) ton of compost per acre per year as maintenance. Perhaps one of you has a different story to tell, but I’ve not yet found there to be an upper limit to the use of the biodynamic preparations.
If you are trying to ripen or sweeten your plants, be sure they are well-rooted. Horn manure plus valerian makes a wonderful soil stimulant. In fact, I challenge you to test a patch where one half is sprayed only with horn manure and the other half is sprayed with horn manure plus valerian. The remarkable results from Alex Podolinsky and Maria Thun, in the interpretation of several biodynamic practitioners, center around this special preparation.
Fanning the Flame of Life with Biodynamics
Once a soil spray has been applied — restoring the fertile chaos to the earth — then the horn silica spray may be used. Those who know how to use this understand that plants should be well-established and have true leaves (after cotyledons). It should be sprayed out before and/or after flowering (but not while flowers are open). The horn silica spray is a foliar application that helps increase photosynthesis and drives up brix levels. Not only does silica help make healthier plants, but it also helps plants resist biotic and abiotic stressors such as pathogens and droughts or floods. You can imagine that this crushed quartz preparation helps make plants more receptive to the cosmos — helps them “crystallize” into healthy upright forms and become permeated by light.
If you can only use one preparation consistently, I would recommend the Pfeiffer Field and Garden Spray because it brings the full force of the biodynamic preparations to bear in a single spray — plus it contains additional enzymes and soil cultures from many wild plants. A single spray, repeatedly applied over the year, quickens the earth to a new life. How do you use biodynamic preparations during the growing season? How do they help you through the year?
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture VIII, (GA327, 16 June 1924, Koberwitz)
This is incompatible with Organic and Demeter requirements for crop rotation, but nonetheless is a recommendation given by Steiner and confirmed by Pfeiffer.
Ibid.
I use 6 pits of Barrel Compound on our 5-acre market garden — per year. Each pit is about 25 gallons of manure, which is about 1200 units of BC each. This is about 7800 units of BC per year. I now try to use BC exclusively as my “compost” portion in my seed starting mix, with nothing but splendid results. Those interested in making their own Barrel Compound may find kits here.
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture IV (GA327, 12 June 1924, Koberwitz)
R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture VIII (GA327, 16 June 1924, Koberwitz)