Homeoplant: the beginning of an adventure

In the year 2008, the homeopath Vaikunthanath Das Kaviraj came to see us at Narayana Publishing house in Kandern. He stayed with us for a month and inspired us with the experiences he had made over the past ten years with the homeopathic treatment of plants. One of his main discoveries was to use potentised benificials, the natural enemies of pests, like the ladybird who feeds on aphids, as a remedy to control these pests.                                                                                                                  

Being very eager to test it ourselves, we started to produce a 6X of Coccinella (ladybird) under the guidance of Kaviraj who used a special way of potentisation to increase the effectiveness of the remedy. Coccinella was then applied to the rose aphids in front of our house and to our surprise they completely disappeared after the treatment. This encouraged us to go ahead with this new method and in 2009, we published Kaviraj´s book “Homeopathy for Farm & Garden”. Many of the beneficial remedies, which he recommended in this book, such as Aphidius (ichneumon fly), Amblyseius (predatory mite), and Chrysoperla (larvae of lacewing fly) were not available for our customers, so we took up the manufacture of these remedies ourselves and the Homeoplant department came into existence. In the following years, many new substances, nosodes, and combinations were produced and tested together with our customers, which led, for example, to the development of an effective combination for the treatment of the box tree moth, which was introduced from Asia some years back and whose caterpillars strip bare whole bushes and hedges within a short time.

In order to register the experiences of the users and to make them available for a wider public, we started the Homeoplant forum on our website in order to disseminate the common knowledge of this new method.[1]

In April 2011, “Homeopathy for Plants” by Christiane Maute followed Kaviraj´s book.

In this book, the homeopathic treatment of plants was offered in a clear, condensed, and easily applicable way for hobby gardeners. With reviews in more than a hundred journals the new method created an enormous interest in the public, and interviews with Christiane Maute on radio and television followed. In one of the TV spots in Bavaria 2, lettuce plots were shown: one of the plots was treated homeopathically with Helix tosta (which is made from the shell of a Roman snail) and one was left untreated. On the untreated plot, the lettuce was completely eaten, whereas the treated one was untouched. As slugs are the worst problem for many gardeners, many wanted to test this new alternative, resulting in hundreds of orders of this remedy. Some weeks later, there was no town or village in Bavaria where not at least one or two had ordered Helix tosta to control the slugs. Later, we could see from the feedback that the treatment was successful in most of the cases. This experience stimulated many to try homeopathy on other problems in the garden, such as aphids, caterpillars, and fungal diseases, like mildew and brown rot. Here too, we got many positive reports. Of course, the applications were not always successful. As in the homeopathic treatment of animals and human beings, one has to choose the right remedy to get a good result, and as plant homeopathy is in its pioneering state, we will need many more experiences and testimonies in order to assess the method and use it effectively. This is particularly the case for monocultures in agriculture, viniculture, and arboriculture, where the first tests have just started on a small scale.

In the light of the successful results obtained so far, we hold great hope for the future.

[1] http://www.narayana-verlag.com/homeoplant/homeoplant_home_en.php

Photos:
Wikimedia Commons: Ladybug with aphids on a weed; Greyson Orlando; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license
Narayana Verlag: Helix tosta remedy