Re: white butterfly peppering experience still unfinished.

[Peter Cotterill]

Dear Peter Bacchus and all,                     Thankyou for your reply about the plants physical / etheric / astral / ego balance . There has been talk on this group about the etheric of the plant being weak and this makes it easy for the insects to attack them.  If the etheric of a plant is weak then is this then an indication that ideally we should not be eating these plants?  Strengthing the physical or etheric or astral side of a plant is a better way to taggle the problem but even lest is known about this than peppering is. To taggle the balance by altering the ego of a plant would be even more difficult because I understand that a ego of a plant resides in the spiritual world completely.  I understand from Steiner's Agriculture Course that when question about the ethics of peppering was asked he implied that in some cases not to pepper was even a worse situation.   I remember a Wanganui Echinacea grower talking at a herb workshop about he and Glen Atkinson used potentised spray on a field.  About an hour later a flock of birds descended on the field and took the insects out. Nobody question him about this marvellous event at the workshop. It was if it fell on deaf ears or nobody wanted to go there. Glen and his potentised preps are probably years ahead of the rest of us hence the reason why we can not always relate to this.   regards Peter Cotterill   your good work. You also asked why do the insects occur in such prolific numbers particularly in hot dry summers?               Steiner refers to some insects haveing a special relationship with certain plants. He also refers to them living in the astral body of the plant. So one can ask if this relates to the balance of the physical / etheric / astral / ego balance of the plant. Is the insect just reflecting to us what this balance or imbalance is? If this were the case then what might we do about it rather than or in addition to peppering? About twenty years ago Glen Atkinson busied himself with this question and came up with a mix. (the ingredients proportions and potencies are commercially sensative) He called it pest protection. In the early '80's I lived in Hastings N.Z. and had a large section with a number of apple trees. The fruit was host and home to a vast population of codlin catipilars. If I was lucky I could havest up to 20% without resident catipilars or their vacant homes. Glen offered me some pest protection to try. I applied it at the beginning of flowering and a second application 3 week later. That year we had not one apple infected with codlin but exchanged it for blackspot, a fungal growth. The following year I tried just one Pest protection spray. The codlin moth layed eggs on the cheeks of the apples and I had these funny little bore holes in the sides of some apples. They didn't go right in and if I cut the apple open to investigate I seldom found anyone home, and I still had some black spot.             A year or two later I tried the same recipy on brasicas. They were sprayed in the seed bed and again after transplanting. The controls with no treatment were eaten to the ribs while the sprayed plants had no catapilars at all. If one took a leaf off and held it up to the light some pinholes could be seen where the eggs had been layed.               Certainly peppering fills a very usefull role but I believe on first of all needs to ask why any organism has become a pest or a disease. Then what can we do about it?    Regards,           Peter.