Homeopathy for Plants, don’t Treat the Pest!

Giving remedies to plants is not much different than giving remedies to people, once you understand that you can think of a plant as similar to an upside-down human. The plant’s roots take in nutrients and moisture, much like our mouth. The plant’s leaves act somewhat like our skin. While a plant can absorb remedies through its leaves (similar to how we can absorb remedies through our skin), I always prefer to put a remedy in water and thoroughly water the plant’s roots, if accessible. In this instance, the zucchini didn’t have any leaves left to mist, so watering the roots with my homemade Grasshopper 6c remedy was my only option. I also watered the rest of the zucchini plants with the remedy, giving them a prophylactic dose. Just as Hahnemann treated healthy people with a genus epidemicus remedy when scarlet fever threatened a community, the same principle can be applied to plants. If there is a threat of a pest or a disease in the area, you can treat the healthy plants with a prophylactic dose of a remedy.

I love how the correct homeopathic remedy works so effectively and quickly. By the very next day, the grasshoppers were nowhere to be seen on any of the plants watered with the Grasshopper remedy, though grasshoppers were still plentiful everywhere else in the garden and on the farm. Seeing how I was on to something beneficial to the plants, I proceeded to water the rest of the plants in the garden with the remedy.

Selecting a homeopathic potency is sometimes harder than selecting the rem- edy. Since I (and my garden) had gotten some initial respite from the pests, I sat down with Kaviraj’s book again to study
it in more depth and discovered that he recommends starting with a 6X potency. So going back to my tincture, I remade the grasshopper remedy in a 6X potency. Ten days after the initial watering, I watered the zucchini plants again with the new 6X potency. 

Two weeks later, I again gave the plants in my garden the Grasshopper 6X remedy. One month later in August, I excitedly harvested the first zucchini from that Costata Romanesco plant. It had grown back to its original size and was producing a healthy harvest. Meanwhile, the other zucchini plants that had been prophylactically watered were left untouched by the grasshoppers and were producing a bountiful harvest as well.

The grasshoppers remained plentiful on the farm that summer and did not bother any more plants in my garden. The grasshoppers were not poisoned with chemicals, so they were left in their organic state in the food chain, making for some very happy pastured chickens.
This experience so profoundly solidified my belief in using homeopathic remedies on plants that homeopathy is the only method I use in my gardens. I firmly believe that homeopathy for our plants, and even our soils, holds a big answer for much of our chemically-laden, toxic world.

Agrohomeopathy – think differently

We have become so accustomed to thinking we have to kill the pest or the disease! After all, this is how most of us were trained to think growing up in our Western allopathic culture. Down with the disease that causes all the problems! Stomp out the virus! Exterminate the pest!

What if we’re looking at this all wrong? What if we applied our “homeopathic mindset” to our plant world? What if we strengthened the plant’s immune system so that the pests or diseases didn’t even want to attack that plant?

Let’s first look at some of the reasons pests and diseases attack plants:

• Monocropping: Planting massive quantities of the same plant in large areas is the norm in modern agribusiness. In nature, it is unnatural to plant large areas with the same crop. Nature sees it as an “excess” and something that needs to be eliminated. It does this by allowing pests or disease to come in and wipe out the excess.

• NPKfertilizers: Chemicalfertilizers containing nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) are what we’ve been offered from the chemical companies to treat plant and soil imbalances. But does this really work? Do plants only need three chemicals for healthy growth?Are they able to absorb the man-made synthetic chemicals? What about all the other nutrients that plants need?

• Genetically modified organisms (GMOs): Introduced to strengthen the plant, genetic modification to organisms has failed miserably by creating super weeds. Glysophate herbicides such as Monsanto’s Roundup have been in use for nearly a quarter of a century on the premise that when genetically modified seeds (“Roundup Ready seeds”) are planted, the farmer can spray Roundup on his fields to kill other weeds and not harm the crop. This has not only created weeds that are resistant to Roundup, but we have been left with contaminated soil and drinking water while the human health dangers are surfacing rapidly.

• Microbiome of the plant has been ignored: Plants do not live in a test tube but are influenced by their surroundings – other plants, the soil, air, light, weather, nutrients, microbes, and flora and fauna. Plants provide things for each other in the form of nutrients, shade, or physical support. They are each other’s “best friends.” Companion plants were designed to be together – to attract beneficial insects and pollinators, deter unwanted pests, and offer shelter and food for other critters.

When we ignore these critical components, we succumb to allopathic thinking.