Considera

Mice: A Farmer's Best Friend

Rudolf Steiner speaks in passing about mice being a "farmer's best friend" -- a rather surprising statement. Many farmers harvesting and storing grain find mice to be a nuisance. Some historians reason that Egyptians venerated cats for their protective role around their granaries.

If we take a step back and consider the relationship of predators in the garden, we see that ladybugs eat many harmful pests. But when we see a spider's web, we notice that the spider catches not only harmful bugs but also some beneficials. Some people therefore want to exclude spiders from the garden. This is a mistake because spiders tend to catch most whatever is superabundant which tends to be the source of a problem in the garden. Yes, there will be some random beneficials caught, but, on the whole, spiders tend to catch whatever is superabundant, which has a balancing ecological activity.

If we keep that balancing image in mind, mice likewise eat the seeds of whatever is most abundant in the garden. As such, they are eating the seeds of the most prolific weeds.

When we consider Steiner's indications on "pest peppers" (remedies made to combat pests and weeds), you take the weed seed and destroy them either by fire or by rotting. Consider the rodent: the rodent lives primarily off seeds and yet, due to its incredibly inefficient digestive system, the rodent must consume its own feces to extract nourishment. What this really means is that rodents leave behind much of the vital potential of seeds when they eat them. The manure of rodents in the garden are nature's pest peppers.

If you were to wish to make your own weed pest peppers, all you would need is some mice in a suitable living chamber and feed them, say, all your thistle seeds. The thistle manure would be an organic weed "pepper" specialized to your farm. No need for fire, you can use what Nature herself does every year!

The above refers to the below: ...

Pest and Weed 'Peppers' Revisited

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