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Ormus and Organic Gardening Class
Organic Gardening with Seacrop & Tracite At Graceful Living, we are committed to exploring and cultivating natural ways of enhancing our organic gardens. We are delighted to share what we have learned with others in the local and global communities, for the benefit of all humankind. Through the ancient art of composting to the "newer" technologies of enriching the soil with minerals and Trace minerals, as well as using "sound therapy" to motivate our crops growth, we believe that our gardens can be made even more abundant, nutritious and resistant to damage from insects and extremes in temperature. With the fall of the old economy upon us, we foresee a shift forward into a more simple and sustainable lifestyle using traditional family gardening and canning practices. These practices support, nourish and ground us during the transitional years of giving birth to a new and enlightened world.one community at a time. In 2008, we used a product called Sea-Crop, (www.sea-crop.com), which has been certified as organic and it has also been certified for use as a mineral supplements for animals. It is totally non-toxic and brings a precious gift to our organic gardening efforts. Please feel free to view Graceful Livings garden photos from 2008, as all of out plants were supplemented with Sea-Crop. This year, we will be doing more scientific testing to see the difference between plants grown with this type of ORMUS and plants that were grown without it. We will also be using Tracite (from www.universalformulas.com) for a similar purpose, as I am convinced it contains naturally occurring ORMUS. Barry Carter, the well-respected expert on ORMUS, is working with a large number of researchers who are exploring the properties of some newly discovered plant and animal nutrients which appear to be essential to the optimum health of plants and animals. They call this group of nutrients ORMUS. We have found that these nutrients can increase the growth of plants in the first year up to sixty percent. Brix readings are also increased. You can read some reports on this at: While the tests above were done using a commercial product, it is quite easy to make your own ORMUS concentrate from sea water using simple kitchen chemistry as described on Berry's web site at: Here is a link to pictures of his kitchen garden last year: Here are some additional plant links for you: Plants
Barry Carter recently spent a month and a half giving ORMUS lectures in Australia during October-November 2008. Here are some plant related reports from his time spent there: These radishes were grown with second generation seeds that he collected from his ORMUS garden last year. He said that his giant radishes were not "woody" and that they tasted very good. This gentleman also had built some ORMUS traps simply by following the instructions on my web site. These traps were quite rewarding to see since I always like to be able to show people traps, which have been built locally, when I give my presentations. You can see two of the traps he built at: Barrys' presentation in Perth happened at a place called the City Farm. See: The "City Farm" is an organic community garden, education and network centre that operates on permaculture principles". Inspired by the opportunity to talk to a good number of farmers in the City Farm network, I moved my Wet Method demo and my ORMUS Plants slide show to Sunday. This worked very well as many people at the Sunday presentation came specifically for this info. All of my time in Australia coincided with some significant global and local changes. The global economic changes and the American presidential elections stimulated my desire to see some evidence that ORMUS might help people get through the tough times that might be coming. The drought that Australia has been enduring for the last few years also stimulated a desire to see some evidence that ORMUS might help plants to make it through severe weather conditions. This desire was also expanded by my hope to eat another salad from my home garden despite the fact that there have been 26 freezes in Baker City since I left on October first. My desire to see some evidence of ORMUS helping out under drought conditions was fulfilled when Alfred Goolsbee showed up at my Melbourne workshop. His new information about plants given ORMUS during drought conditions was so significant that I asked him to give a short talk about it during my Melbourne workshop. Alfred told us about some plants he had that were given some sea water precipitate ORMUS and survived serious drought conditions when accidentally left in a closed greenhouse without water. You can read more about how the ORMUS plants survived this ordeal and the non ORMUS plants did not on Alfred's web site at: and you can read about a controlled experiment with sprouts at: By the time I got to my last weekend presentation in Canberra, I was feeling quite hopeful that ORMUS might help to mitigate all of the world's food problems including drought. Throughout my sojourn in Oz I had regularly encountered people who were interested in using ORMUS in agriculture as well as using it for consciousness expansion and building community. Frankly, I kinda expected my last presentation to be a bit anticlimactic after all the superlative things that happened at the previous presentation gatherings. I am happy to report that some of the best news about ORMUS in Australia came during my Canberra workshop. Rob Gourlay, an environmental scientist and founder of the Environmental Research & Information Consortium (ERIC) told us about how he has been combining Effective Microorganisms (EM) and ORMUS in some of the ERIC products and Australian farmers have started asking him "where is all the water coming from?" after using this product. Sharon Rose, who helped set up this Australian tour, first acquainted me with EM back in 2001 and she has been touting the benefits of mixing EM and ORMUS ever since then. Sharon noticed that magnetic trap ORMUS "liked to hang out" in the carbon filter before going into the trap and she used the Effective Microorganisms to extract the ORMUS from these "clogged" filters. Rob speculates that the increased ORMUS in the soil increases carbon sequestration and that the EM organisms play a major role in this process. He also claims that the carbon, in turn, stores more water and nutrients for later release to the plants. You can read more about this on Rob's web site at: Rob does not mention on his site that sea water ORMUS is the "secret ingredient" in his soil preparations. Following is some info that I sent out on Christmas day: I have a bit to add to the page above and I will be adding more when the results are in next spring. So far, this fall and winter, I have seen significant additional evidence of increased freeze tolerance in my salad green patch that I planted in mid summer. While I was in Australia between October 2 and November 12 there were 26 nights with below freezing temperatures in Baker City. You can see these temperatures charted at: The next day I took the following picture of my salad green patch: And the day after that I made a salad from the greens I picked: I continued to eat an occasional salad using greens picked from this patch well into December: 08-12-8 Salad Greens Between November 12 and December 9 there were another 26 nights of below freezing weather in Baker City as you can see in the temperature chart at: Notice that the night time low temperature on December 16 in the chart above is -14.1 degrees Fahrenheit (about -25 degrees Celsius). The following day I took another picture of my salad green patch: Notice that some of the flowers and leaves seem to have survived unharmed. I did eat one of the better looking leaves right after I took this picture and it felt and tasted like a living leaf. Here is another picture I took right after I ate the leaf: I took some more pictures and ate another leaf today. Here are some pictures from my salad green plot today: Christmass Greens3 Notice that there are a couple of leaves toward the bottom of the second two pictures that look like they may still be alive. I tasted them and they felt mushy like they had been frozen. I wonder if they will spring back in the spring. I also wonder about one of my rose bushes. I took a couple of pictures of it today: Christmass RoseBush1 These leaves are all crisp and live feeling (I did not taste them though). Also, I took another picture of the sage plant that survived last winter unscathed: I know it is close to the house but I also know that the leaf poking out of the snow is indicative of the health of the rest of the sage plants that are still buried under the snow. -- With kindest regards, Barry Carter |
