My Trees

I’ve been meaning to write a post about my trees for a while. Growing trees from their seeds takes a certain amount of care and patience.

I was worried about the health of these two Horse chestnut trees. I was sure they’d succumbed to fungus and died. But they’ve come back looking very strong this spring about which I’m delighted. I’d potted them up and put them in my own compost. These were grown from two conkers I found in the street around the corner in the autumn of 2023.

It’s troubling when young deciduous trees lose their leaves in the winter. You think they have come a cropper. This Oak I found as an acorn on Hampstead Heath. I think it’s going to do well this year. I gave its siblings to friends in Wales.

Since I rather optimistically planted a pip in a friend’s back garden in the early seventies when I must have been, ooh, six years old, growing an apple tree from a pip has been an cherished ambition. This was from an organic apple from the supermarket. I currently have a few more pips I’m hoping will sprout – one a particularly delicious variety I got from a farmer’s market, the other from the apple tree by the Caddy’s caravan in Findhorn. I read recently in Mark Ridsdill Smith’s excellent “Vertical Veg” book that apple trees do well in containers on roof gardens – so have redoubled my efforts. It’s all about tree crops, people.

Finally, this Ash tree, a volunteer which I have nurtured has really thrived from what was just a tiny weed. Very proud of it!

JADAM Microorganism Solution

Although the JADAM techniques contain an arsenal of homemade, cheap-to-make, organic pesticides and herbicides possibly the most important JADAM concoction is what is known as JMS, JADAM Microorganism Solution. This might be the easiest of all their recipes to make at home.

You start by finding leaf mold in unspoilt, nearby countryside, at the foot of the largest tree you can find.

You clear away the top leaves which have not decomposed and take some handfuls of the leaf mould beneath. We are all better educated about the importance of the healthy microbiome in our bodies; that natural balance of bacteria in our guts. This leaf mould from the woodland floor has about the best-balanced microbial profile that you could imagine. You’ve heard about fecal microbial transplantation? Well this is the same thing.

Cho, adopting the classical model of Eastern Philosophy, asks his students to not think about good-vs-bad microbes, “this dualistic thought of dividing good and bad is actually unscientific.” Damn straight.

Gather up a bagful of the valuable leaf mould – then, if you are anything like me, furtively cover your tracks!

At home chop up a couple of potatoes.

Boil them and mash them up, skins and all…

This is the resulting gloop to which I added sea salt. Sea salt, and indeed sea water, is a recurring motif within JADAM. The logic being that, in a weak solution, it represents an ideal mineral profile. What was once on the land flowed thence.

You then need a bucket full of either rainwater, or tap water which has been allowed to “de-gas” for 24 hours. You don’t want the chlorine wiping out all those lovely microorganisms.

You add the leaf mould and the potato gloop into a finely meshed bag.

The bag rests, brewing, like a tea bag for 3 days.

You keep a lid on the container so as to prevent animals and bugs getting at it.

This is how it looked after the first 24 hours. A bubbling fermentation builds up.

Here is a close-up after 24 hours. This needs more time. In a warmer climate, like that in South Korea where JADAM comes from, the bubbling is much more intense and you build up something like a thick scum on the surface. In cooler climes like mine it looks more subdued like this.

And this was after 48 hours. I know now that for the UK, at this time of year (even though it’s in the relative warmth of my study), that this is pretty excellent. In fact, I should have used the JMS at this stage. However, thinking I was going to get a scummy froth eventually, I hung around for another day.

This is after 72 hours – well maybe more like 60 hours – and to be honest it looks like I got to it too late. It’s useful to see I suppose… The bubbles have subsidised and a lot of the vitality has ebbed away. It’s still useful as a liquid fertiliser, what’s known as tea by horticulturalists.

Schlep the bucket into your garden.

Decant it as a concentrate into watering cans, and add roughly 20 parts water to 1 of the tea.

And sprinkle it over your plants. In this case my spinach.

It’s a very interesting process. Because I’ve been following No Dig principles in some containers (notably in my raised bed), it must surely help to add some biology back into the soil in this manner.

What I also did was sprinkle the leaf mould on the surface of a number of pots. That’s maybe a simpler thing to do. However, the advantage of the solution is that gets right into the roots.

One more final JADAM experiment to come shortly.

JADAM Slug Control

The spring is a big time for slugs and snails. I found this out to my cost last year. This year I noticed earlier and decided to bring the ruckus sooner. I don’t own ducks (pace Mollison) and therefore need to be the predator myself.

Youngsang Cho is a man after my own heart. Undergoing four NDEs and living with “the realization that my death was always near” Cho, a brilliant chemist, decided to share rather than claim exclusive rights to his knowledge. He writes, “I could have gained enormous wealth through patents, but I gave up for the greater good.” This decision was influenced by his passion for both Jesus Christ and Karl Marx. Cho describes having an apocalyptic vision of a capitalist society and thus embarked “on a long journey to liberate agricultural technology from monopoly capital, by following the spiritual ideals of two great teachers.” He is a bonafide genius.

I’ve been studying Cho’s JADAM Organic Farming Technology and decided to make the assault on the Phylum Mollusca the first part of my investigation into it. Credit must also go to Garden Like A Viking for his adaptation of Cho’s recipe which includes adding garlic.

First blend two cloves of garlic with a jam jar of water.

Let the resulting garlic juice sit for half an hour.

Make JADAM wetting agent. This is a soap. Its application means that there’s no surface tension on what you spray. An application coats leaves evenly.

As tempting as it was to make this JWA myself – it simply wasn’t economical to buy huge catering buckets, a paint-stirrer, gallons of purified water, rapeseed oil, and source Potassium Hydroxide.

If I had a market garden, maybe! But not for my tiny roof garden. So, I bought this wetting agent off Dr Forest on eBay. I needed roughly a cap full of this.

And this is Sodium Hydroxide. Of which I needed only a teaspoon. Now for the contentious part… Mine is not a truly organic garden. I have, for instance, purchased compost which wasn’t organic. It would also be entirely pointless to get it certified. However, I have generally abided by the spirit of organic growing. Up to this point, a few years in, I haven’t used any chemical fertiliser, herbicide, or pesticide.

JADAM is, they claim, made entirely with chemicals which are USDA Organic approved. That’s to say they are supposed to be approved under American Organic regulations.

In the JADAM Organic Farming book one can find tables from the USDA which specify that these two chemicals are “Inerts of Minimal Concern.” Summarising the documents below, you’re only prohibited from using NaOH and KOH to peel fruit and vegetables. KOH you can even use to peel peaches.

JADAM also have on their website a document written to them which clarifies that these chemicals abide by USDA Organic regulations:

However, neither Potassium Hydroxide nor Sodium Hydroxide are chemicals approved by the UK’s Soil Association. Furthermore, it might need to be pointed out that these USDA Organic regulations are the same ones which allow Hydroponic growing and Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) to be certified as organic.

Gotta be straight with you, I don’t think this is what Sir Albert and Lady Eve had in mind. There are also rumblings from American farmers which one can read in the comments box:

Did this stop me? In fact, no. Because I detest snails and slugs, because Potassium Hydroxide is just an ingredient of soap which decays in the process of its manufacture, and Sodium Hydroxide breaks down relatively quickly into salts which are, broadly-speaking, positive amendments to the soil. I don’t need to worry about losing my organic certification, because I’m not certified. JADAM is fascinating and I was very curious to try.

All these ingredients: the garlic, water, JWA, and Caustic Soda I mixed up into roughly 2 litres of juice.

And in the dead of night (because you can’t spray this stuff during the day) I sprayed my plants. This is me spraying the Yarrow I got from Anthroposophy HQ, Emerson College at Forest Row. For some reason the slugs love the Yarrow. Rudolf Steiner will be turning in his grave – preferring, probably, that I would incinerate a single slug and dilute and spray its ashes everywhere. I may yet try that…

I followed this process on the 26th and 27th of March and sprayed for two nights in what has been peak slug era. What did alarm me was that on the first night, being a little gung ho, I got the spray on my hands. I think I was carried away with all the hype of how harmless this stuff was. I ended up getting it on my arms and face.

It was not only very irritating but also slightly painful. Here’s a post by the Okanagan Okanogan blog which goes into a heavy-critique of JADAM and the effects of NaOH. Not deterred I took more precautions the second night, was like really careful, and still managed to get some small amount vapour in one of my eyes. This was sore and, because it was in my eye, also a bit worrying. If I sprayed again, which to be honest is unlikely, I would wear goggles, not just glasses. Even the odour of the garlic has lingered somewhat unpleasantly…

The following night, the 28th of March I found the slugs and snails still very busy. Was their activity less than it would otherwise have been? It’s impossible to tell, but to be honest I was disappointed. I think if one was trying to subdue slugs and snails on a 3 acre market garden this might be an excellent solution – but I don’t think it was appropriate to my situation.

Henceforth I am going to return to my tried-and-tested technique of going out after 10pm, picking the tiny fuckers off with tongs and dumping them in very strong brine. This being my own unpatented method and one most suitable to my twenty square metres.

This, however, is not the end of my JADAM experiments. There are a further two more to come.

The Sun Salutation

Just as I kept running up against the Mani mantra when I was researching “Retreat”, while writing “The Garden” I often encountered the Surya Namaskar, or Sun Salutation, series of yoga asanas. Which, come to think of it, is unusual while working on a book on gardening, growing, and agriculture? Although I suppose there is a special connection between plants and the sun.

Here is a wonderful Sun Salutation image from Jeanne Tetrault and Sherry Thomas’ “Country Women” book.

And here it is in Ramón Sender and Alicia Bay Laurel’s “Being of the Sun.” A beautiful illustration by Bay Laurel.

In fact, I spent quite a lot of time during the writing of “Retreat” in 2018 and 2019 doing the sequence. I don’t think I had the core strength however, and I constantly hurt my back on it.

Here’s a mural depicting the Sun Salutations I found in the Connaught Place subway station in Delhi in 2020.

I always liked this illustration of the Sun Salutations which I have kept on file for years. Today I enlarged it in AI Gigapixel, cleaned it up in Photoshop, and added the tag on the bottom left. I would encourage you to download it. I took a little time trying to research what the correct names are for each of the poses. But the truth is, apart from a few of them, it’s rarely universal. However, as a final attempt before giving up, I thought I ought to check the Wikipedia entry for them. There I read that:

“Elliott Goldberg [Yoga Historian] called Vishnudevananda’s 1960 sequence a “new utilitarian conception of Surya Namaskara”, rejecting his guru Sivananda’s view of it as a health cure.”

Sun Salutation Wiki entry

Then I got pretty excited, because I have Vishnudevanada’s book. A very interesting dude he gave George Harrison a copy on the set of “Help!” where he was working as an extra.

Looking at the book it’s apparent that the illustrations I’ve always liked have been traced from these photographs.

I’m going to be 53 in May this year and quite fancy the idea of living at least another 50 years – though of course every day might be one’s last… So in due course I think I will try and bring the Sun Salutations back into my life and crank them out once a day like a good little guru.

[Update: From personal experience I can't recommend The Sun Salutation.]