Pest and Weed 'Peppers' Revisited

Originally published 2023-07-14. By Stewart Kahn Lundy.

IPM, Mice, Rotting Seeds, Pathogen Vectors and Microcosmic Images of Eclipses

Anything we try to do in biodynamics already exists as a process in Nature. Likewise, anything that is internalized by any organism through the process of evolution already pre-existed as a possibility in the greater world. When we handle pest "peppers,"1 we should consider what macrocosmic process this might replicate from nature. It may be helpful to begin with Rudolf Steiner’s image of a wet winter and a wet spring in the Agriculture Course.

In winter, the Sun’s effect above ground tends to be relatively muted and the earth has a tendency to refill with water. As the absence of yang suggests an increase of yin energy, the withdrawal of the Sun enhances the opposite qualities, which one might refer to as “lunar” in an alchemical sense.2 But if a wet winter is followed by a wet spring, this one-sided surplus of “moon forces” stimulates all sorts of so-called “fire” diseases (e.g., fire blight and corn smut). Rotten seeds may result.

In Steiner’s words: “[L]et us suppose that the lunar influence, is too strong — that the earth is too powerfully vitalised — then the forces working upwards become too strong, and what should happen in the seed formation occurs earlier.”3 The sort of seed chaos that should occur up in the seed arises down below instead in the form of diseases. The seed itself never reaches its balanced completion. If there is a superabundance of “moon” forces, the seed-forming process is compromised in our mild garden plants and we see abundant growth of weeds. 

Excessively wet conditions are a throwback to an earlier time of earth evolution, where plants thrived in fog and water, and produced primitive precursors of seeds (spores) on their leaves the way primitive plants like ferns still do today.4 This is to say, the seed potential arose on the leaves themselves and had not yet fully differentiated itself as we see in our garden plants today. To mute the effects of this holdover from an earlier watery epoch, we must reach into the future with fire.5

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If we render seeds into ash, this alkaline substance has the tendency to gobble up the excessive vitality of so-called “rank patches” and mute the growth of these weeds. It is like a species-specific quicklime, hungry for the specific character of ethericity inherent to that plant. In alchemy, the aromatic etheric oils of a given plant are distinct to its species, but so too are the mineral salts, which can be exposed by use of fire. The all-pervasive life principle -- alchemically referred to as “mercury” -- is anonymous, but the mineral ash of each plant belongs to the character of each specific plant.

When there is too much of this anonymous vital principle, Steiner indicates that Equisetum arvense, Horsetail, mitigates excessive lunar forces in the opposite direction, raying it out with its silica gesture rather than absorbing it in the soil as might be the case with alkaline ash. In simpler herbalist terms, Equisetum arvense is a plant that thrives in wet water-logged conditions and never suffers from fungus. If this plant is rendered into a herbal tea, the qualities of that plant may be imparted to other plants. By Lili Kolisko’s research, there is some indication that letting this herbal tea ferment makes it more effective.

Likewise, seed peppers, if allowed to putrefy, may be made more effective than just charring the seeds. By contrast, the seed-charring process provides an overabundance in the soil of the same kind of elemental hunger that the weed has, resulting in plants that are “disinclined to absorb lunar influences.” This makes the soil “hungry” (in a chemical way) for the specific qualities the plant in question needs for itself. 

It is useful to see the putrefying seeds as possessing something akin to an individualized expression of a “wet winter followed by a wet spring.” In a wet winter followed by a wet spring, many seeds rot in the soil. When seeds perish in the soil, failing to become plants, this is Nature creating a generalized “pepper.” However, we require an individualized expression of what Nature herself creates only in an indiscriminate manner.

When a plant is reduced to ash, it is as if its unique mineral components retain a wish to become whole again, but since they are now outside a living plant they seek to bind to the same vital potential that that species would normally draw into itself from the soil. 

If a plant reproduces by rhizomes, this means that the reproductive potential is there and this aspect may be targeted for making peppers. Whatever part of the plant possesses the power of reproduction has this seed potential for proliferation.

In cases where the soil is too water-logged and acidic, this individualized ash is quite useful in binding up excessive ethericity. By reducing the ethericity available to these weeds, they do not grow as vigorously. Anyone who has ever been dehydrated has felt something like what the seed ash does to plants. The exposed plants become sluggish and do not grow as vigorously. 

When alkaline ash is made from seeds, this is as if a lunar eclipse has occurred in the sky where the mineral body of the earth blocks the reflective ethericity of the moon.6 In the ash pepper, the physical mineral elements in the ash overwhelm the plant’s elemental hunger by making the soil compete for the same qualities. 

When weed seeds are rotted, we can exacerbate this excessive vitality to such an extent that proper seed formation may be inhibited. The rotted seeds may be effective as a pathogen vector sprayed on the open flowers of the weeds, infecting their seed-forming process. Halfway between these two would be toasting seeds or charring them and sowing the garden with these toasted seeds. 

We must remember that we are always working with processes that happen all the time in Nature whether or not we want them to occur in a particular location. The only difference is that we can direct these processes consciously to bring balance to the garden.

An example of how the corpses of every species are harmful to it is Steiner’s account of a village that drank water from a stream running through a graveyard.7 Everyone there was sick and pale because the water they drank contained the rotted byproducts of other human beings. This example is confirmed by the case of the Brönte sisters, where their entire village drank water from a graveyard. Not only did these sisters exhibit a rather morbid type of imagination, but the entire village had very short life expectancies. “[T]he small town of Haworth, where the Brontës lived, had much higher mortality rates than other nearby towns of similar size. 41.6% of Haworth's inhabitants died before the age of 6. The average age of death was 25.8.”8 If the water the village drank had merely been contaminated with ash from a crematorium, the effects would likely not have been nearly so devastating, though they would still have been harmful. All this is to show how the decomposition byproducts of any given species tend to be harmful to itself over time.

In rotted seed, the tendency to produce life becomes the tendency to proliferate corruption. This rotted seed juice may be sprayed on the open flowers of weeds. While flowers are open, the seed-forming process is particularly vulnerable. Weed flowers treated this way will produce seeds that have a tendency to rot in place, though the soil can be treated as well. An example of this vulnerability in the flowering process can be seen in American Chestnut trees which can grow for many years. Yet when their flowers emerge, they quickly become infected by the American Chestnut blight.

Another natural example of a natural sort of weed pepper is the feces of seed-eating mice. This is not exclusively limited to mice, but it is particularly relevant to any farm. Steiner calls field mice a “farmer’s best friend,” which probably surprised his audience.  

Mice tend to be considered a nuisance, particularly for grain growers. Mice are a farmer's friend because they eat an abundance of seeds throughout the field. Yes, mice can be a pest in your grain bins but, out in the field, they perform quite a significant activity. Some people don't like spiders in their gardens because spiders catch any insect that strays by its web. But this misses a key point: spiders only eat the insects that are most prevalent, meaning they have a tendency to encourage diversity of life forms as they primarily consume what is most prevalent. Similarly, field mice eat seeds, and they eat most of whatever seeds are most abundant.

The fact that field mice eat so many weed seeds means that the manure of field mice is itself a natural sort of weed pepper. One could even imagine feeding weed seeds to mice and collecting their manure to generate pathogens for specific weeds. It is well known that rodents are pathogen vectors for other mammals, but this has a benevolent function on the farm. Field mice help maintain ecological diversity by helping prevent any one species of weed from taking over. When we make a pest pepper, we are really doing little more than copying what a mouse does every day.

In Steiner’s own words, the point of "peppering" is to bring about a sort of “combustion”9in the weed seeds, whether by burning or by rotting.  Steiner suggests that rotting seeds might be even more effective, though collecting the byproducts of decomposition might be more difficult. In alchemy, the slower method is almost always the superior approach.

If you wanted to produce fungus on your corn, such as the delicacy huitlacoche, just try supplying your chickens with scratch corn as feed and then oversupply a crop of corn with that corn-fed chicken manure. You can see here part of how grain-fed manure is not the same quality as grass-fed manure, particularly when concerned with the viability of seeds. 

Steiner indicates there is a four-year cycle in Nature, so the peppers need to be applied for several seasons to see their lasting effect. After the same amount of time, their effect will undoubtedly wane, but a treated soil freed from a weed will have to be "invaded" all over again, one seed at a time. So, even though there is a four-year cycle in nature and the pepper itself wears off after a few years, the effects of these peppers last much longer.

When we make a weed pepper from seeds, we must remember that the seed itself is a kind of chaos, the culmination, and union of all the planetary processes together in one place. The seed is “chaotic” because it is the concentrated unformed potential of all the powers that might express themselves as manifest plant growth forms. When we rot or burn these seeds, we remove all the potential for giving organized plant life and leave behind only a capacity to absorb ethericity. When we make a weed pepper out of seeds, it is as if we are breaking the seven seals on this specialized seed chaos and allowing it to disperse into the world untethered from its organizing principle.

When we char seeds  (which look a bit like black peppercorns), they can no longer germinate, but they still have the power of proliferation. The vitality of the seed is now severed from its star. Growth unconnected to its spiritual source can only be aberrant. 

Any life potential remaining in these charred seeds can now only give rise to a process of breakdown, but a kind of breakdown specific to that distinct plant species. 

One can imagine that if manure "needs" rainwater, as Steiner suggests, it is not only to provide water and cosmic substance but also to dilute the concentration of manure. If manure needs distilled rain in its own way,  then a plant also needs its mineral salts diluted. Supplying the decomposition products of any plant to the same species causes all sorts of problems. This is the external basis of crop rotation. Plants excrete salts in one place and cannot, unlike animals, urinate somewhere other than where they feed. Because of this, crops must be rotated, or plants tend to poison their own soil. If they are not rotated, crop failures will ensure some other crop takes its turn.10

Over time, plants exude waste products that are ultimately deleterious to themselves. All of this is part of the natural cycle and guarantees a dynamic and evolving ecosystem that rarely settles into a monoculture. 

Burnt seeds “sown” do not grow life but now spread destruction. The garden becomes a graveyard of those weed seeds. As negative tendencies are burnt in the fires of concentration and cannot then germinate, so we apply this spiritual principle to weed seeds.

One can glimpse here that the byproducts of rotten fruit would easily be pathogenic against other fruits. This is part of why Pfeiffer recommends that vineyards feed grape skins to hogs, composting their manure, and only then returning it to the plants. In this way, he shows that fruit byproducts should go from plant to animal, and then to the plantlike life of a compost pile before it feeds new plants.

If you find fruits with blossom end rot, for example on tomatoes, and do not remove them from your garden, the seed process itself is perhaps not impaired, but the fruiting process may be harmed. Orchards should regularly have geese or hogs or some other animal cleaning up fallen fruit. A garden greatly benefits even from one penned hog to serve as daily waste disposal. 

Since most orchards are grafted and not dependent on seeds, the seeds that may rot there are of relatively little significance. But in our gardens, fruit, and seed are both quite significant. Wherever possible, we should remove fallen fruit and seeds to be fed to animals, even if it is only an earthworm bin or a black soldier fly larva (BSFL) bioreactor, before composting. 

At this point, it is worth recalling Steiner’s recommended cycle for human nutrition, which passes from human to plant to animal to plant before returning to human again. By this token, plant nutrient cycling only needs to go from plant to animal and then back to plant again. Human beings have incorporated far more complexity (as organs), and that takes considerably longer to work out than the simpler life of plants.

When we provide toasted seeds to the soil or compost, we provide something that can not only rot but is made of the same stuff that viable seeds are made of. By sowing these seeds of destruction, we introduce a sort of soil-borne pathogenic process to that specific species. Though we are copying what a mouse does in the field, we do not need to be timid about it.