When Should I Spray Biodynamic Preparations
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One question I’ve frequently encountered is: when should we spray out the biodynamic preparations?
I do not think it is in the spirit of biodynamics or anthroposophy to give a rigid time because the spiritual day is a rhythmic phenomenon. Daylight hours expand during the summer and shrink during the winter, so a precise time is not equally applicable to both winter and summer for spraying.
Lili Kolisko affirms in her work that the spiritual beginning of the year is in the autumn. Ehrenfried Pfeiffer mirrors this idea when he says that problems in the orchard arise from things the farmer did wrong last year (or even earlier).
The Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, begins in the autumn just as their Sabbath begins with the sundown on the previous day. Christian liturgical traditions also maintain part of this idea, considering their own Sabbath to begin with sundown the previous day.
Rudolf Steiner himself claims that the original Easter celebration was in autumn, wherein an effigy of Adonis would be submerged for three days, and then “resurrected” as a promise of new life during a season when it seems like everything is dying externally. The celebration of resurrection was eventually transposed to spring.
Kolisko also noted that the “hours” of each day are not fixed but are dynamic. Take all daylight time and divide by twelve; this gives you your daylight hours. Likewise, take night hours and divide them by twelve to find the length of night hours. These “hours” are flexible, not fixed, and these flexible hours are maintained to this day within Jewish liturgical tradition in which an hour in halacha is calculated by dividing daylight time by twelve. These sha'ah zemaniot expand and contract fluidly with the rhythms of the natural year. Much of the world has forgotten this sensitivity, but in biodynamics, we strive to recover this kind of intimate relationship with these natural rhythms.
Some people have suggested that the etheric “inbreathing” time of day is any time after 3pm. This is partially true in a general sense, but with the expanding and contracting length of days, it’s not difficult to see that 3pm on January 6th is not the same as 3pm on August 6th. The earth is still very much exhaling by 3pm in the summer, while the earth is clearly inhaling by 3pm in the winter.