BIOCHEMICAL SIGNALING TECHNOLOGY
It’s like magic for growing food!
I once had a miracle berry bush. They’re amazing. The berries are small, mostly seed, but when you eat one, everything you eat or drink for the next half an hour to an hour tastes sweet, even sour lemons.
My miracle berry bush had leaf nodes that were compacted. It was growing too tightly. There was not enough air circulation. A little fungal disease showed at the tips of some of the leaves. The bush would produce flower buds, but they would never develop. Over the years, the plant never got taller or produced any berries.
The plant needed to open up. I looked for a plant that had the pattern I was looking for. I wanted my bush to open up, to have more space between nodes and branches. I found some type of vine that had nice long leaf nodes. I used the plant material from the vine with long leaf nodes, the pattern I wanted to add to my miracle berry, and made it into a Fermented Plant Juice (FPJ). I then added that FPJ as the active ingredient in my weekly foliar mist. I used a single application.
Right away, the miracle berry started to open up. The nodes grew longer. The bush then had good airflow, and the fungal tips on the leaves disappeared. Soon after, the flower buds finally developed into fruit and I was enjoying a bountiful harvest of miracle berries. It grew well, started gaining height, and became a highly productive bush. I only did one single treatment to get this result. It never reverted back to its unhealthy, compacted state.
As a biologist, I know that gibberellic acid, a hormone used in the wine and grape industry to lengthen the nodes on grape clusters to prevent fungal disease, was the chemical involved.
However, as a Natural Farmer, I did not need to know that. I only needed to see the pattern and use that pattern to direct growth. It’s like magic for growing food!
Natural Farming is growing food in ways that mimic Nature. Korean Natural Farming, KNF, is a specific Natural Farming technology. In Nature, plants are able to self-fertilize with the help of healthy soil biology. KNF technology mimics this process. This is why the soil foundation, featuring Indigenous Micro-Organisms, IMO, is the foundation of KNF. It’s a complete culture of soil biology installed in extremely high concentrations into planting soil, giving plants the ability to get whatever they need, when they need it, and in the exact amounts they need. This prevents nutrient imbalances and is why pests and disease are reduced and even eliminated.
The second foundational practice of KNF, the weekly misting sprays, are formulas that vary according to the Nutrient Cycle, the stage of life of the plant. They are not designed to be fertilizers, although they may contain some nutrients. The sprays are in such dilute amounts that they would not provide much nutrition. Plants are getting that nutrition from the soil with the help of the soil biology (IMO).
If the sprays are not fertilizers, what are they? They are a Biochemical Signaling Technology. They use hormones, enzymes, cofactors, and other biochemistry to signal the plant what type of growth to focus on. We are using the sprays to direct growth with biochemistry. The Fermented Plant Juice, FPJ, chosen for each formula is the active ingredient that focuses on a stage of life that we are directing the plant into. In the case of my miracle berry, it was to direct the bush to lengthen nodes and open up.
FPJs are the active ingredients in the formulas, but other ingredients are also needed. A movie with the best actor isn't any good unless there is a supporting cast. A tonic (OHN, Oriental Herbal Nutrient) is used in just about every formula, as is the ionic buffer (a very specific type of vinegar, not just any vinegar). Other ingredients, such as LAB (Lactic Acid Bacterial serum), water-soluble calcium, etc., are added according to the stage of life we are directing plants towards.
This is why I don't recommend people start KNF by making ingredients. Most of them can be left out until later. It's more important to learn how and when to use them. In fact, if all you do is install the Soil Foundation, you have done most of the KNF system. Remember, the plants don’t need the sprays for nutrients. The plants take care of that themselves.
While FPJs are poor fertilizers, they are extremely efficient at directing biochemistry. Hormones and enzyme systems work in miniscule amounts, often just a few molecules. There are elegant feedback loops in biology, and when the hormone and enzyme concentrations reach a certain point, the process will shut itself off. This is why less is more.
On the other hand, water-soluble fertilizers that are used by Jadam and other methods are taken up by plants indiscriminately, and plants are unable to filter out what they don't need. This leads to nutrient imbalances, which lead, inevitably to pests and disease. The role of pests and disease are to take out the sick and weak. Plants with nutrient imbalances are sick and weak. They may look fine, just like someone with diabetes may look fine.
Using Jadam and KNF together is like having a patient on a feeding tube and still expecting them to eat solid food. KNF builds the Soil Foundation so that plants self-feed. Jadam and other methods using water-soluble nutrients force-feed plants through water uptake.
If you want to control your plant’s nutrition artificially, please feel free to do so. If you are growing plants indoors in pots, you already are not growing plants Naturally, so Jadam or other water-soluble solutions may be the best management decision for you. But understand the cost for that is inevitable pests and disease because there will always be nutrient imbalances when plants are artificially fed. Taking out unhealthy plants is the job of pests and disease. You can’t get around that.
If you want to be a Nature Farmer and let plants self-fertilize, then KNF and Soil Foundation is a good management decision. Pests and disease are much less common when plants can self-regulate.
What I want is for growers to understand what they are doing. Using the KNF Soil Foundation is Natural Farming. Plants in this system self-regulate their own nutrition. Water-soluble fertilization is useful for some applications, but it is not Natural Farming, and pests and disease will always be a problem.
The weekly sprays in KNF are designed to direct plant growth, not fertilize. They may not fertilize directly, but they are extremely powerful. Besides changing my miracle berry bush with a single application, I got a fruit tree to completely leaf out in two weeks after severe wind damage killed off all the leaves and I thought the tree was dead.
I had a flowering succulent, which normally blooms for four months, shut off all flower production for the year in the first week of blooming with a single slight over-mist of a growth formula. I have had a flower bush shut down flower production (year-round bloomer) on one side of the bush for almost an entire year with a single application containing mature flowers. I had a chili bush change the shape of the chilies every year after a single application of an FPJ.
Some of these experiments were intentional. Others were accidental. The point is using the FPJ inputs and the accompanying biochemistry in the formulas of KNF is nothing short of miraculous.
Growers that use KNF solutions as fertilizers, especially if they are also using fertigation, will not see these effects because they use the system in a way that was not designed to work.
Natural Farming, specifically KNF, lets plants self-fertilize and directs growth by following the Nutritive Cycle and directing plant growth using Natural Biochemistry.
Understand what you are doing so that you can make proper management decisions for yourself and your crops.
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