Considera

Hello everyone ... Mark!
I am trying to use the "Homeopathy for Farm and Garden" book recommendations and of course Silicea (silica) sounds too good to be true. I however have two farmers that are willing to try it on their orchards. Do you know what the author means when he says, "Silica preparations must be used with caution because, just as Silicea can help green a desert, it can can as quickly to create one with devastating effects. Siliciea is one of the great powers of nature, capable of destruction as well as healing depending on the skill of the practitioner." These people are counting on me to save their orchards, and yet I have no experience ... virtually no one has experience in this area! I don't want to destroy their orchards! How can I get more details ... and FAST!!? I plan to order the remedies tomorrow and apply them soon ... within a week or so.

I greatly appreciate any insite that is available.
Linda

What trees are suffering and what are they suffering from?? What other aspects of the 'case' can you share with us - soil, moisture, symptoms, aggravating aspects, unusual things ....

As for Silicea - I don't think Kaviraj is too much involved on this forum now as I believe he is in India trying to get a production plant set up for work in that country - try it on a small area and watch what happens. K is a great believer in minimum dose and not repeating unless the progress stops.

There is something that didn't make the book and that is the exact means of preparing the remedies. It is a little bit of a sore point for me - but you may do well do see some of K's old forum postings such as this one
http://www.otherhealth.com/archive/inde ... -1905.html

If you want to use the remedies for plants, to be truly effective dissolve five drops of the 6x potency in 500 ml. of water and give 50 (yes, fifty) succussions. Anything less will not work, as i have found to my own detriment (lost a very big nursery client because of it, as I forgot to tell them and the remdies did virtually nothing) So what I do now, is to prepare them that way and all people have to do is mix 5 drops of the preparation in 20 litres of water and spray the plant or water it with it.

So, unless K does get back to you to tell you differently, how about try this on some trees and see what happens. And let us know what does happen.

I also cannot recommend Enzo Nastati's course too highly - when he lectures in January. It is worth the trip to the UK. It is very highly centered in biodynamics and Anthroposophy but if you can handle that then you are in for a real treat.

Enzo and his co-workers have been working on trees since the 80s (and soo much more). They worked with the problem affecting the conker trees in Europe with quite some success. You can see the postings about his course in this forum. Do it - all of you actually!! Glen Atkinson and also Biplantol have been doing similar work more recently with their potentised preparations in Holland German respectively.

The trees are hazelnuts. Many planted just after the turn of the last century (1910-1920). They have the Eastern Hazelnut Blight. It is bacterial in origin, enters the tree through new growth, and grows down through the cambium. There is no evidence of the diease until lesions begin to form on the bark. The lesions look like small slits. Even these are not detrimental to the plant until there are so many that they girdle a stem or branch. So the dieback can be small or large ... it just depends upon the level of lesions formed and where. The rest of the tree is perfectly healthy, producing normal levels of nuts.

Farmers have used chemical sprays without success. So now they can only remove damaged limbs to prevent further spread until the point when too many branches are affected, and then they remove the trees and replace them with blight-resistant trees. It takes 10-12 years for the new sapling to be seriously productive again.

We plan to try Silicea at both locations. One farmer will use only it as a foliar spray on one acre of his trees. The other farmer will try several remedies, space them far away from each other, and will try foliar sprays and just putting some on the ground, in both cases involving 4-6 trees for each treatment. Using K's book, besides Silicea, I thought about trying Lapis albis and Ferrum sulphuricum, as well as an isopathic remedy.

Again, I appreciate your help! The alteration to the remedy formulation will be a great help, I am absolutely sure!!!

The "Homeopathy for Home and Garden" book says to use 6X as the starting point, and with your additional instructions, the next dilution is odd and not very precise.  So I looked up as much as I could about "drop sizes" and took some of my own measurements.  The range seems to be 34 to 17 drops per mL depending upon the dropper used.  I decided to use larger drops and went with 20 drops per mL.  The 5 drops equals 0.25 mL.

I am now trying to figure out what percent silica is in the final solution actually given to the plants.  If you have any figures on that, it would be beneficial!!!  I need the active ingredient (which must be the silica since it is structuring the water) and inert percentages for labelling requirements by our government.

I am going through the nasty chains of bureaucracy to get "permission" to apply the remedies.  The farmers can not apply anything that might prevent them from selling their crop.  I have been passed from the state level, to the regional level, and now on to the national level.  

K's decription of silicea seems intense.  Has anyone tried it?  Do you know exactly what the risks might be?  Do you know where you can get a 6X silicea in liquid form?  I can not find one in this country (USA).  Of course it is too late for me to call Britian in order to talk to a real person to see if one can be made special order. No one here will/can do it.  Someone at Homeopathic Labs here says that silica (and lapis alba for that matter) is insoluble at the lower potencies and for them, 6X in a sucrose tablet is the lowest potency available, and 12X in the liquid form.  Since K only had warnings with this remedy, I am not sure what the best procedure might be. Recommendations??

Linda wrote:I am now trying to figure out what percent silica is in the final solution actually given to the plants.  If you have any figures on that, it would be beneficial!!!  I need the active ingredient (which must be the silica since it is structuring the water) and inert percentages for labelling requirements by our government.

You will have to refer to a pharmacopoea for details of how much silicea goes into the first triturations. However, let us take some educated guesses.

Hahnemann says that you triturate your material in milk sugar for three times 20 minutes. Taking a conservative guess we can say that we use equal masses of silica and sac lac - so for argument - 10 grammes of each. So in the first potency we have 50% silica. We take one gramme of this and dilute in 9 ml of water or further sca lac triturations ( I forget which) - so we are down to 5%. We do this four more times which takes us down to 0.0005%.

Kaviraj reckons on on 5 drops in 500 ml. Let us say that the 0.25 ml is right since this is also conservative. 0.25 over 500 is 0.05% solution of our 0.0005% - which is a stock bottle of 0.00000025% which is succussed 5 times.

K reckons then to use 5 drops of this in 20 litres. With your 20 big drops making .25 ml as a conservative guess we can say that we are taking it down to 0.00125% of the stock strength - ie about 3 x 10-14% - a figure technically known as 'not very much' - and not very much of an inert material either. But this is the 'active' ingredient.

So, based on several compounding conservative guesses, for the government let them know that you will be putting 0.00000000000003% of silica in water on the land. The stock bottle though is a whopping 0.00000025% inert material.

Linda wrote:I am going through the nasty chains of bureaucracy to get "permission" to apply the remedies.  The farmers can not apply anything that might prevent them from selling their crop.  I have been passed from the state level, to the regional level, and now on to the national level.

  

Good luck. Their net is cast for creatures of a different gauge than us. Great pioneers in Pakistan, India, Australia and parts of Europe are stuck in this strange net which is meant to catch businessmen selling liquids which will sterilise you at 10 paces. But that is the situation here too. Strangely the Germans seem the most amenable and sensible in this issue.

Linda wrote:K's decription of silicea seems intense.  Has anyone tried it?  Do you know exactly what the risks might be?  Do you know where you can get a 6X silicea in liquid form?

I haven't tried it. K got to thinking I was treading on his toes so I have been waiting for him to get his pre-succussed preparations on the market. However, since he has been public in some places with this part of his preparation technique I do not see why it should not be passed on.

I have a 6x liquid potency in my hand - from Helios pharmacy in the UK.

The risk is that you could provoke a proving of silicea - ie bringing on the problems you are trying to cure.

A couple of final questions. In the Farm and Garden book, it speaks about application rates on p.40. Taking into consideration the new dilutions that you suggest, what should we assume about these further dilutions?

And some of the remedies recommend an antidote. Silicea does not list one, and seems like it needs one the most! Can't have an orchard drink a cup of coffee. So do you have any suggestions?

The application rates in the book are those for the 'new dilutions'. (The information was supposed to be in the book but this was not clear to me from the copyright holder until after publication. This is a sore point for me!)

No, there is no mentioned specific antidote, sp you need to use the antidoting information from the rates page - ie the third application rate mentioned there.

antidotes for sil
as follows
ac.fluor
camph
hep

sorry i know i am a bit late in my reply,just saw it now,by the way what happened with the dosing of sil? Can you post the results?

Thank you

GT (classical Homeopath)