The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - Foliar Feeding w/ Steve Solomon

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

Steve Solomon is back to talk about what's turning his crank in the garden these days: foliar feeding. Steve is the author of numerous gardening books including one of my faves, The Intelligent Gardener.

It's The Ruminant, a podcast about food politics and food security and the cultural and practical aspects of farming. You can find out more at theruminant.ca or email me, editor at theruminant.ca. I'm on Twitter at Ruminant Blog and you can find me on Facebook. All right, let's do a show. All right, let's do a show. Hey folks, it's Jordan. All right, so on today's episode, Steve Solomon. That ought to make lots of you happy. But before we get to that, I want to deal with this podcast tardiness issue.

I'm over two weeks late with this episode. I apologize. I blame tax time and hand in your damn certification, organic certification time and just general farm craziness in April. It seems to be happening again. It always happens. But I want you to know that I have five more episodes in the bank and another three to five that I have planned that I should be able to pull off. So this year's a bit different in that I'm actually acknowledging to myself that this is going to end in the next couple months and then I'll pick it up again next year whereas normally I insist to myself that I'm going to keep the podcast going all through the summer. It's not a reality given how busy the farm gets. But yeah, five to 10 more episodes, some of which I am super excited

to share with you. And then I'll hibernate for a bit and think of new episodes and then be back at you in the fall or winter or whatever. Okay, so on today's show, Steve Solomon. Some of you will know Steve from his writing. His most recent book, The Intelligent Gardener, is a great read and I strongly suggest you take a look. I had Steve on previously to talk about that book and I had him for another two-part episode on making great compost. I get a lot of feedback on those episodes. Some of you really enjoy Steve on the show so I'm glad that he's back. And what happened is I emailed him recently and I asked him what he's back and what happened is I emailed him recently and I asked him what he's really excited about these days in the garden and he said foliar feeding so I said

great why don't you come on and talk about that one thing that happened in our conversation though is that while we were talking Steve started experiencing a very large thunderstorm and at some point the connection got really bad and we kind of had to shut things down. He then contacted me afterward to point out that there was one topic at least that we really didn't get into regarding foliar feeding and that has to do with the frequency of foliar feeding that he does and offered to come back on and I just never made that happen. So you're not going to get to hear Steve's advice for frequency of timing of foliar feeding applications, but you are going to get to hear him talk quite a bit about this. Steve is really convinced that this is making a huge difference in his garden. So Steve Solomon on foliar feeding in just a minute.

But before we get to that, I just want to acknowledge a few people who have made donations at the ruminant.ca slash gift registry. And you know what, for some reason, I don't understand. I've just been using people's last initials as if they're in the farmer protection program which seems dumb so hopefully these people won't mind being the first um people i'm outing with their full names eric barnhorst amy fenn jesus cazaras allison taylor and dana penrice thanks so much for your donations i really appreciate appreciate it. Dana Penrice, I suspect that's the Dana who is special friends with the one and only Ted from Alberta. So if I'm right about that, and I think I am,

Dana and Ted, thank you very much. Everyone else, if you're enjoying the show, please consider supporting it. TheRuminant.ca slash gift registry, where until recently, you could choose to purchase for me a salmon fillet pillow. But you're too late. Eric Barnhorst nabbed that one, for which I'm very grateful, as I said. But there's plenty of other great stuff on there that you can buy for your podcast host.

Some of them are real. Some of them are fake. The fake one in the, with the fake ones, I just keep the money. Let me be clear. Okay. Time for Steve Solomon. Talk to you at the end. Steve Solomon, welcome back to the Ruminant Podcast. Thank you. It's always a pleasure to talk to you, Jordan.

Steve, Steve. Where are are we gonna go today well i i think we're gonna go to we're gonna start with foliar feeding i uh i'm um steve you've been a popular guest on the show i get i get some good uh positive feedback about your the past episodes you've done with me and uh so what's happened i reached out a couple weeks ago and asked you what you're interested in these days. And you mentioned you've been doing a lot of foliar feeding in the garden. So I thought we'd talk about that. How does that sound? That sounds like a really good topic.

Okay. I'm happy to talk about that. Okay, great. I'm just going to let you frame it. talk about that. Okay, great. I'm just going to let you frame it. The guy who put this the best way I've ever heard it is a man named John Knopf. K-N-O-P-F. And I want to make sure that the listeners go out and check John

Knopf's website, which is advancingechoag.com. All one word, advancingechoag. And John is a crop advisor and farmer who grew up on a vegetable farm in Ohio. I think his family raised tomatoes, among other things. And he is a natural genius. I think he has an ag school education, but I'm not sure. If he never got a formal one, he certainly has the best informal one anybody could ever have. He's perfectly literate in the subject.

And he has a network of farm advisors now. He has a business with 15, 20 advisors all over the country, and they specialize in consulting people growing high-value horticultural crops. And he's a manufacturer of mostly foliar feed of supplements of various kinds. And his basic principle is that no plant in any soil, it doesn't matter how perfectly you fertilize the soil, it doesn't matter how balanced the soil shows on a soil test, no plant can get all of certain nutrients that it needs at what he calls critical points of influence,

certain periods in the plant's development process, when it can actually use a whole lot more of some elements than it could source out of the soil under normal conditions. And these are the ones that if you fully feed them at the right moment, you can make an enormous difference for the plant with a ratherific writer on gardening. And one of your, a recent book was The Intelligent Gardener, which focuses on the soil and bringing your soil into the right balance of nutrients for optimum plant health. So you've been obsessively focused on that for years. And then in the last few years, sorry, have I got, is that fair? No, I just like that obsessively focused on that for years. And then in the last few years, sorry, is that fair?

No, I just like that obsessively. I think that's fair. Yeah, that is fair, actually. Okay, so then a few years ago, you get talking to your neighbor with these beautiful cherries and discover that part of what he attributes to his success is um is a foliar spraying plan uh and you've also referenced this guy knopf uh who is an advocate for foliar spraying uh so bring us into your garden so as as you're processing all of this what are you seeing in your own garden and your own plants um and and how did you

it's clear you you're interested in increasing your foliar spraying and playing around with it so so how did you start and what were you what what what unsolved problems were you trying to solve yeah very good good question and um let me let me um take this back just a step. So there's this guy, he's got cherry trees, you see. Now, this is, he's got a couple of hectares in one species. It's all on the same cycle. He's just growing a crop. He can do things that I, as a gardener, can't possibly do. Because as a gardener, I've got 25 different species growing at all different stages, and each one of those species is maybe in two or three different stages at the same time. I mean, I might plant carrots once a month through the summer, you see, and I have little carrots, medium-sized carrots, and carrots

with mature, you know, large carrots under them. I've got all that, all side-by-side, more or less. So I can know that for specific species that this species really likes more boron and more zinc, but in a vegetable garden that doesn't work. So as a gardener, what I have to do is that I have to use the multivitamin approach you see and hit them with a bit of everything right and you're you're just getting at how how almost impossible it would be to to spray separate regimens to you know numerous dozens of different crops at different stages you'd be you'd. You'd work yourself into an exhaustion making different sprays and timing it all right. Yeah, and I don't think that mentally you could encompass it all.

Maybe an artificial intelligence could do it. Right. I mean, who knows? Maybe someday we're going to have a little robot that flies on a drone over your field by GPS and knows exactly where everything is and has 17 different elements in little tiny tanks and sprays them out, you know, depending on what this square meter needs. Like an inkjet printer. But we don't have that.

So, yeah, you have to use sort of a broad-spectrum fertilizer. Now, here in Australia, we're very fortunate, and we've got a man working for us named Graham Sait, S-A-I-T, and spelled in the British way, G-R-A-E-M-E. And Graham runs a company called Nutratex Solutions up in Queensland, and he's sort of our John Knopf. He's been in it for longer than John. And Graham manufactures a product that he calls Triple Ten.

And your readers could download the product sheet and analysis of Triple Ten off of Nutratech's website, it's nutra-tech.com. Triple Ten is the most effective foliar fertilizer that I've ever used as a broad spectrum. Maybe I can talk about my soil as a specific example, because you see, in the last year, I've discovered the three main areas where my soil does not deliver adequate plant nutrition. And two of them I can't fix, not very well. One of them I can't fix. Anyway, let me just deal with specifics. I'm sitting on a deposit of basalt. There are.

Okay, folks. So you have a choice here. For about nine minutes after the end of my little monologue here, Steve goes into detail with some examples of some of the deficiencies in his garden after which I summarize what he just went through and we move on from there so if you want to hear these examples and they're kind of interesting he actually talks about certain crops and how they're affected by their deficiencies and then his attempts at foliar feeding then listen to the ensuing nine minutes after I'm done talking here.

But like I say, I summarize it at the end. So it's kind of your choice. And now to make all this timing work, I have to kill some time. So here is my impression of a lion. All right, if you're skipping ahead, go to minute 2250. I have one plant that I've known in my garden has always been a phosphorus problem, and that's my lemon tree. And my lemon tree has got a problem. When it doesn't get enough phosphorus, the skins on the lemon, the white rind around the inside juicy part of the lemon gets thicker.

And I've been spraying that tree two or three times a year with a chemical phosphorus fertilizer. And for the next four or five months after a spray, the lemons are better. But they've never been what I call, you know, lemons from the store. but they've never been what I call, you know, lemons from the store. So reading the NutriTech catalog, I came on a form of phosphorus fertilizer that I'd never thought to try before. It's called micronized guano. And what they do is they take ordinary high-phosphate guano that's mined off, you know, in Peru or Chile,

and grind it in a ball mill until the average particle size is below five microns. So I got some of this micronized guano, and anyway I worked out what seemed like a reasonable dose and sprayed it on the tree. And two days later I saw a miracle. Every younger leaf on that tree, even the ones that were full-sized, but they hadn't been on the tree for eight months or a year or something like that, they were younger. Two days later, they were 25% wider. The leaf size just exploded almost overnight.

And the tree had a kind of sheen to the leaves that i'd never seen before a kind of shining health that we can recognize but you know i don't know how to exactly distinguish it uh and and uh i thought wow that's remarkable well anyway before you before you move on to other problems in your soil, you saw an aesthetic improvement in the potatoes and the lemon tree. What about the crops? How about the other crops? No, no. Just how are the potatoes? How are the lemons?

It's one thing to see the foliage perk up, but what about the actual crop? I can't answer that question because it's not the only thing I did this year that was different. So I did two other things this year to resolve the other two problems that I've had. And there's been an enormous improvement in the taste of my food. Enormous. The bricks went up

on almost everything. Food tastes so good in this garden, I've started gaining weight again. Okay? And the, so let me tell you the other things

that I've fixed. You see, because I'm not a scientist, you know, I'm not trying to prove that phosphorus does anything in particular. I'm just happy to see things get a lot better. I got another problem with my soil, Jordan, and that is that this basalt that was the parent material of my soil has no quartz in it. So my soil has very little silicon in it. And I got interested in using silicon also for another crop, and I wondered what will silicon do? And it makes branches get stiffer and stronger.

It's a core part of the structural material that the plant develops. It also does other things. Hugh Lovell has a theory that silicon and boron work together in the plant to form a ladder that lifts water up through the vascular system, and that the plant is actually able to access a great deal more moisture and the nutrients in that moisture when it has adequate silicon and adequate boron. And these things generally need to be introduced through the roots, especially the silicon, because it's not very mobile on the plant. Neither is the boron. I think boron is slightly more mobile than silicon. Silicon's not very mobile.

And so I got no silicon. Reading Graham Sate's catalog, looking for that phosphorus, he's got another micronized product. It's called dialyph. And what it is is diatomaceous earth that has been ground in a ball mill so that the average particle size is, you know, below five microns, and he's added to it a fairly healthy dose of boron, which is like the cofactor that goes with it. I started mixing this in my spray tank and saw the most remarkable result. Gee.

Let me see, what all the good things that happened. All the beans that I grow in my garden, especially the climbing beans, have had a lot of trouble with wind. So my beans had a tendency to have shredded leaves and be damaged after windy days, and it would cause a lot of losses and greatly reduce production. Now the wind blows after spraying silicon on the leaves a few times, and they don't shred. And better yet, the beans themselves now keep about 10 days in the fridge instead of starting to get soft and go off after four days. There's like a bit more skin on the beans.

So anyhow, that's what silicon does. However, in my enthusiasm with silicon, I ought to warn people that silicon is dangerous. If you overdo it, the plants respond to it in negative ways, and the leaves start getting smaller and wiry strong. And the smaller leaves and the branches get smaller in diameter and much more rigid. And I think, and the productivity of, I'm speaking of a couple of tomato plants now that I did this to. And then one variety in particular responded more strongly to silicon than the other.

And it's become half as productive as it was before I sprayed it with silicon. So, and if you've got sand, if you've got silicon in your soil, it might be that you don't want to have more silicon than you're getting. But it certainly is worth taking a look at. So that's silicon.

And then my soil has another problem. This one I could resolve by fixing the soil. My particular parent rock is rather deficient in molybdenum. So many things started doing better. It's hard to say that it only affects one crop. Every year in the early spring I plant onions. I grow a big patch of onions. I grow all of our onions. I grow the storage onions. I even grow a big patch of salad onions. And I have an undercover area. We put away several hundred kilograms of onions every year. I usually lose half of the seedlings every spring. It's harsh. it's frosty, the soil's cold, it's not releasing a lot of nutrients.

The days are short, and these little seedlings come up, and they disappear. So I always compensated for that by planting a bit more seed and sprinkling a little extra fertilizer along the row right after germination, a complete fertilizer. And I got a stand of onions, but I lost a lot of seedling. After I sprayed molybdenum, they all survived, and they started growing a whole lot faster right from the beginning.

All the cabbage family plants produced broader leaves and grew faster and tasted better. All the legumes started growing a whole lot better. I did a bit of reading and found that molybdenum is key to forming nitrates in the nodules of legumes. And if the soil is short in molybdenum, the roots will nodulate if the bacteria are there, but then they don't turn pink, and they're not really making very much of any nitrogen. So the whole nitrogen formation and protein synthesis of my bean crops improved enormously from this little touch of molybdenum. And by the way, on a garden scale, a generous slight overdose is a half a teaspoon full of sodium molibate on 10 square meters. Okay, well, Steve, I think I want to summarize this last part of the conversation and then move on, broaden out the conversation a bit, okay? So you tell me if I've got it roughly right.

conversation a bit okay so uh you tell me if i've got it roughly right uh at some point you kind of for reasons we've discussed you develop an interest in foliar feeding uh you partly do it to address some um challenges with your soil that are very hard to correct uh you you explain why um you will perennially be challenged with phosphorus deficiency uh you've got a silicon problem um and then also low in molybdenum uh you you find a base product that is available down there uh that gives you a nice kind of general application and then to that regimen you add these products containing silicon molybdenum and you also jack up the phosphorus by adding in this ground up guano and your anecdotal results so far are that you've seen tremendous improvements in the garden and you yourself say you can't directly attribute it to the foliar feeding because there's been other tweaks you've been making but but you believe that this foliar

feeding you've been doing has significantly contributed to better healthier crops yeah well it's not that i can't attribute it to the foliar feeding, Jordan. I can't tell you which of the elements it is doing which. Right. But you're a convert. I mean, you believe that this foliar feeding you're doing is improving your production. Yes. So much so that I'm thinking about giving up putting phosphorus fertilizer into my soil at all. Okay.

So let's put a pin in that. That'll be very interesting to a lot of listeners. But now can we just move on to some of the practicalities of spraying in general? In this case, foliar spraying. Are you using a backpack sprayer, Steve? Yes, I do. Okay. So can you talk about, in your experience,

like best practices in effectively spraying? Because it's easy to run into trouble, isn't it? I mean, either just... Yeah, you can overdo it. You can harm your plants if you're not careful well i mean putting that aside putting aside that you have to be really careful about concentrations um i just mean like i want to start foliar spraying you know what's a good sprayer to get and what mistakes can i make with the sprayer that are going to reduce the impact

do you have anything to say about that oh Oh, yeah, I do. That's a good question. Like everything, it seems like there's two levels of quality. There's the consumer merchandise, and then there's, you'd say, industrial quality. I like to use that term. So with your pump sprayers, it's the same thing. If you go into a garden center or a discount store and you buy an inexpensive pump sprayer, you're getting a device that probably isn't going to last for more than a year or two. And, gosh, I bought one where the brass spray nozzle, the whole brass assembly that was the sprayer, was made out of such brittle copper that it snapped the first time I used it. It came out of China.

Cheap, cheap, cheap. Industrial sprayers will last a long time. And with an industrial sprayer, you can buy parts. So if something goes you can replace it, you can keep the basic thing working indefinitely. With industrial sprayers you can buy nozzles of different sizes and they emit different patterns of spray. And this is extremely valuable when you're doing foliar feeding, especially if you're doing something with micronized mineral suspensions like this guano or these diatoms. Because there will be the odd bit of grit that's a little bit bigger. And if you have a fine nozzle, it gets plugged.

these, I went down to the farm supply and I bought a larger nozzle that had a ceramic jet in the middle of it, because I found that the, I had a larger size plastic nozzle, and after I sprayed five or six tanks full of phosphorus, you know, stuff including this micronized phosphorus, the spray pattern started to break apart. It's like the little particles going out of this hole in the plastic had enlarged the hole. Right, and doesn't that ultimately matter for the plant's ability to absorb what you're spraying? I mean, isn't important the size of the droplets and such that you're spraying? Do you have anything to say about that? Not super important. It might be to a farmer.

There's two basic ways that you can foal your feed. I have two different targets. One way of thinking about it is I want to spray so many kilograms of this material per acre. so many kilograms of this material per acre. So how many liters of water does it take for me to cover an acre? So I get these misting nozzles, nozzles that produce a very fine mist that use not much water, so that I can get coverage over, say, a whole acre with 100 liters of water. And I know that my brig is putting out 100 liters to the acre,

so I put so many kgs of this fertilizer into 100 liters of water and go and spray my acre, and the acre gets that coverage. But every piece of leaf doesn't get covered. You're not getting 100% leaf coverage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So your main concern when you're doing that is what concentration can you use that will not damage the plants? You want to make it pretty strong, but you don't want to overdo it. So that's one approach.

The other approach is the home gardener's approach. The other approach is the home gardener's approach. And you go out with a backpack sprayer or a pump sprayer, and you spray the plants until water drips off of every leaf tip. And when you do that, you're using a great deal more water. And you should probably use a lower concentration than your fertilizer. Yeah. Yeah. So with Triple Ten, for example, this one I mentioned from Nutritech, the bottle says, the 20-liter container says, spray this at 10 parts per thousand. Put in 10 liters and 1,000 liters.

And spray the field, and you're right. But on a home garden scale, if you do that, especially if you do that more than once or twice, you can burn plants. So I found that 7 mils per liter is much more comfortable for this kind of spray. And back to the sprayer, when you say an industrial sprayer, do you have any brand examples? Or types to look for? Yeah, I probably don't have access to as many products as people in North America think.

But one of the ones I've had really good results with is made by a company called Solo. Okay. You know that one? Yeah, I believe that's the brand that I have. I haven't seen it in a while. Yeah, they're German. Real high-quality gear. And there's another company that is sold here in Tazzy called Chapin.

And there's another one called Matabi. Annie had one of those for a whole lot of years. They were pretty good. I've never had a Chapin, but they look pretty good in the shop. And I would suggest people get one of those. I've also got a seven-liter pump sprayer, a hand-carry one that's also made by Solo. And it's useful sometimes if I don't want to spray that much. They all allow you to change the nozzle.

They all allow you to change the nozzle. I think that most of these sprayers use the same nozzle size. So you can pick up nozzles for one sprayer and they'll generally fit in another. Right. Yeah. yeah okay so but a big takeaway point it seems steve is is for people who want to try this to proceed with a little bit of caution in terms of the concentrations that they're they're experimenting with and uh perhaps uh start by in a given they're going to try spraying do it on half the crop and and and be able to compare you know differences between between you region and the unsprayed region. This brings to mind something maybe we should suggest to people, what they actually try

in North America. I moderate a Yahoo conversation group called Soil and Health. And there's 2,000 subscribers. And when I started on this folio route, I asked people, what can I recommend to North America? And we did quite a study of what's the products that are available there. And so I'd like to suggest a couple of products.

Please do. I don't think either one of these are near as good as Nutritex Triple Temp. But they're the best I could find. And frankly, there'd be a good market for somebody in North America to find out what Gram Sate is up to and more or less replicate something like that in that market. Anyway, the easiest one, the easiest way to find out what foliar will do for you is to go to a garden center and buy, and I'm sorry to mention the name of this company, because it's almost as bad as saying Monsanto. But Scott's Miracle Grove, an evil conglomerate which is setting out to gobble up the entire

horticultural industry all by itself, and has been doing that ever since the 1980s, at least. Buying one company after another that has a similar product, and then just putting them out of business. I've seen him do that. Anyway, just the ordinary miracle growth is based upon a formula that I believe was created by Victor Tijens a long time ago. And Tijans is the man who more or less invented hydroponics. And you can buy half a kg of Miracle-Gro for a few dollars in a garden center

and mix it up at the concentration they say on the box and spray it on your plants. at the concentration they say on the box and spray it on your plants. So that's kind of a good entry-level test case for people just to see the results? Yeah, see what it does. And there's one trick that helps a great deal with products like that in that farmers use something called a spreader sticker. This is basically soap, and it lowers the surface tension of the water and allows the droplets to spread out on the leaf surface rather than beating up and running off. That's one of the reasons that I wasn't too concerned about

what size the droplets are or how much leaf coverage you get when you're spraying. Because if you're using a spreader sticker it tends to spread out even if the droplets are kind of large. Anyway, there's no need to buy a spreader sticker. Everybody has one. It's called dishwashing detergent. And you just put two or three drops to the liter of whatever your dishwashing liquid is. And if you put it in the tank first, and if you make any foam by the time the tank is

filled up, you use too much. This greatly increases the effects of the fertilizer. A better fertilizer is made by a company called Dyna-Gro, D-Y-N-A-G-R-O. And they have several different formulations that they make. Two of them are made with the cannabis growing market in mind. So they have like a bloom formulation, which is high in phosphorus and potassium and rather moderate in nitrogen. And they have a growth formulation, which is high in phosphorus and potassium and rather moderate in nitrogen. And they have a Grove formulation, which is high in nitrogen and more moderate

in the other things. And they have a more utility one that's closer to Graham-Sate's triple 10 that they call triple 7, 777. And all of these are heavy with trace elements. They have effective levels of trace elements. In fact, that's another thing I should talk about in a minute. I apologize, I haven't got all this written out in perfectly logical sequence for you. Anyway, I would suggest that you get, people get a liter or so of 777 from Dynagrow. And I think it's a better formula than Miracle-Gro. And Dynagrow's stuff is half the price of what you'll find in a hydro shop. It's actually quite moderately priced.

it's actually quite moderately priced. You can buy 777 by the 200 liters, you know, by huge barrels, by the 1,000 liter shovel tank, I think if you want. Farmers use this sort of stuff. And it's available in Canada. And Steve, what about,

and I'm thinking of the organic growers among us, myself included, what about, there are a lot of products that are kelp-based. And do you have anything to say about those as potential foliar feeds? Look, here's the thing about liquid fish and liquid kelp. Liquid fish contains a lot of nitrogen and very useful form and a little bit of phosphorus and some trace elements but if you ever saw an analysis of the trace

elements on the label and I've never seen it I mean we know they're in there but the quantities are so small that they're not effective The quantities are so small that they're not effective. If you want to see what an effective quantity of trace elements is in a foliar feed, take a look at the Miracle-Gro box or read the analysis on Dyna-Gro 777 and see the concentrations of zinc and copper and manganese and boron and so forth that are in that solution. And then you take a look at some other products where they list them and you'll find that there's a hundredth as much.

It's detectable in the laboratory, but it's not effective. So the same is true of kelp. Liquid kelp has a fair amount of potassium in it, and a little bit of phosphorus, and a little bit of nitrogen, and ineffective levels of trace elements, and low levels of micronutrients. I think it's important to make a distinction between micronutrients and trace elements. The names are sometimes misapplied. Trace elements are copper, zinc, manganese, boron, and iron, and molybdenum. And these

things are generally found in the soil in the ranges of kilograms to the hectare, in terms of available zinc, available copper. It's not unusual to find 20 kilograms of copper available in the soil, for example, in an acre. But micronutrients are going to be available in grams to the acre. Very tiny amounts. Some of them are essential. Some of them we don't know if they're essential or not. Like iodine. Is it essential for the plants to grow? I don't know. But it sure is essential for human

beings to pick up a few molecules over here and there. So you can get the micronutrients out of kiln. And it's probably a good idea to fold your feet kelp. If you're rich, if you've got plenty of money, you can afford to buy kelp meal and put it in your soil. If you don't have that kind of money, you can put a bowl of kelp meal on your table and use it as seasoning.

But are you basically getting at that to get the kind of results that you've seen anecdotally in your garden, you need to go towards these synthetic products? Ah, yes, absolutely. Synthetic. You've just raised a major question here. I didn't know if you planned to go here today. Well, I mean, you and I have actually discussed before. I have a sense from reading your stuff and also talking to you that you, you know, you find it a bit of a false...

Distinction. Yeah, a false distinction between what we consider, you know, synthetic and therefore not allowed in organics and what we consider natural and allowed in organics. So we've kind of, we've been there before. But still, it is a distinction in the sense that those of us who are certified organic have no choice. The certified organic grower is in a peculiar position. The certified organic grower is in a peculiar position. If somebody like me, who pretends to have the qualifications and authorities to tell you what to do, a soil analyst, in other words,

so if I tell a certified grower that their soil needs zinc because of a soil test, then that grower is allowed to spread zinc sulfate. That's true. That's true. But if I tell the grower that their soil might need zinc, copper, boron, and manganese, so I'm going to give you a fertilizer that's got a little zinc, copper, manganese, and boron, you know, sulfates and whatever, you can't use it. You're right.

As long as, you know, I mean, the formalization of that is if I have a soil test that says I need it, then I can use it. That's right. Now, I don't know how that might extend to foliars. If I told you your soil needed zinc, you probably could get the certification rabbi to agree that, yes, well, you could foliar feed it instead of putting it into the soil. That would be okay. But anyway, back to the main point. You really think you really hit kind of effective levels when you move to stuff like the triple 10 or the triple 7, that sort of thing?

Yeah, you could use those as a standard of, you know, the right zone of the concentration to get to like you're dealing with foliars wow can you hear that i sure yeah i can it sounds uh pretty intense wait wait a second i'm sorry yeah it is really bucketing down here okay sorry about that that's okay i think you can do editing annie was worried that something would get damaged out there she came in and said what about this what about that it'll be all right okay well we're we can where are we now well i think i think uh i think i've got what I need of that topic to edit. Well, that ended rather abruptly. So like I said, we didn't quite get to everything that we should have.

And I apologize for that. But that wasn't bad. And that's the end of the episode. So I will try and talk to you in about a week. But as I explained up top, it's going to be a little rough and tumble. But the episodes are coming. Have faith, folks. Who am I kidding? I squandered your faith a long time ago. All right. Talk to you soon. RAAAARGH! We'll run right outside of the city's reaches We'll live off chestnuts, spring water and peaches We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves

And live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country with salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching. And here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong so we'll run right out into the wilds and braces

we'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,