In our all too busy human lives probably few of us wonder how the sounds of birds and crickets chirping invigorate plant life, and maybe even our own life. I was reintroduced to this awareness as I listened to the taped sounds created by Dan Carlson as part of his growth product presentation of Sonic Bloom. The tape, containing pulsed sound around 3,000 to 6,000 cycles, is best played between 5:30 and 9:00 a.m. for your plants in your house, greenhouse, garden, or over large fields (Vikhanski, 1989). The plants react to the sound by opening their stomata, the breathing pores on their leaves. Plant reaction to this particular rhythmic sound pattern is so intense that the stomata open an average of four times wider than normal. Carlson discovered this phenomenon while doing research on plant growth at the University of Minnesota in 1972. The difference between Carlson’s recorded sounds and birds’ sounds in the hours of dawn is the difference between a flock of sparrows and a bugle sounding reverie. Natural bird sounds encourage opening as they have done for as long as plants and birds have lived in symbiosis. Carlson’s sounds shoot through the dawn, waking up plants to their full stomatic potential.

Why is this discovery of the relationship of certain sounds and stomatic opening important to growers? Growers have known for a long time that feeding plants with liquid nutrient solutions stimulates growth. For centuries, Chinese farmers relied on manure teas ladled over plants in the early dawn or early evening hours to maintain steady, lush growth. In modern times, both conventional chemical nutrients and organic sprays are laid down by grown spray rigs and airplanes in the early morning while the stomata are most open. The stomata are almost exclusively on the leaves of plants. Their function is to allow carbon dioxide to enter the leaves and oxygen to escape, cooling the leaves. Foliar nutrients enter these open pores. Foliar nutrient sprays also penetrate the cuticle waxy surfaces of leaves (Ashmead, 1986). The mechanism by which foliar nutrients move through plant layers to the plant cell wall is complex, but well documented. When the stomata are opened by high frequency chirping sounds, materials sprayed onto plants are easily incorporated into the plant processes.

Part of this process is that cellular-based nutrients do not stay trapped within the plant. Plant root exudates are feeding mineral ions chemically linked with amino acid/peptide complexes to the microorganisms in the root zone. These microbes are breaking down organic and mineral complexes and making them available to pants. This holistic process is temperature, moisture, light, and air sensitive. Some of the variables in nutrient availability are offset by feeding foliar nutrients while the stomata are most open. Several of the many researchers that have studied Sonic Bloom have noted that foliar feeding with the sound mechanism at the proper time of day allows plants to reach their full genetic potential by removing stress from the growing situation (Spillane, 1989). Noticeably, cool temperatures and low light levels and drought are overcome.

So the sound system opens plants to foliar nutrition. The second part of the Sonic Bloom system is a formulated foliar spray. Carlson settled on a spray which is composed of 55 trace minerals, amino acids, and seaweed. Dr. Alan Kapular, owner of Peace Seeds and director of research for Seeds of Change, a researcher in the field of Sonic Bloom, suspects that much of the phenomenal growth of plants and trees attributed to the Sonic Bloom system is a result of seaweed being made available to the cells of plants. The seaweed contains gibberellins (gib as it is known among California grape growers who have relied on it for years), known to enhance fruit set. Kapular also points out that "in recent years, analysis of the fungi that grow as mycorhiza on the roots of plants have shown that more than 95% of the seed plants that grow on this planet have mycorhiza associated with them" (Kapular, 1987). In his germination tests with Sonic Bloom, Kapular is led to suggest that "a major natural germination process is provided by fungi that provide gibberellins for the germination process of seeds and the stimulation of early plant growth. One suspects that many of our crops have been selected by virtue of their seeds being able to germinate in the absence of the natural mycotrophic fungi and hence the growth and germination." Kapular found that some seeds, the Chinese parasol tree and several rare South American Solanum, germinated only in the presence of Sonic Bloom. Gibberellin nutrients are there in our gardens on some level as a result of plant, mineral, and organic matter and microbe interactions. What Carlson makes available through Sonic Bloom is a flush of nutrients in greater than background amounts.

Garbriel Howearth, the main gardener for the seed plots at Seeds of Change, tested Sonic Bloom while running the test gardens at San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico (Howearth, 1985). His test results show plants maturing up to half a month early, with much greater yields from many plants. Carolyn Ormsbee at Gardener’s Supply Company tested Sonic Bloom and compared it with other foliar, seaweed-based sprays, both with and without the sound system (Ormsbee, 1987). The sound system coupled with the Carlson foliar formula gave far greater yields than other foliar formulations. Neither the sound system by itself nor the spray formula by itself was productive of any higher yield than other sea-based foliar.

The quality of the yield is often spoken of by users of the Sonic Bloom system. That is probably the result of trace mineral availability. Good growing practices require that the grower monitor nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. All background mineral nutrients must also be moving within the dynamic growing system. It is known that when minerals are attached to amino acid chelate, as they are in a seaweed-based foliar spray, there is greater penetration of the waxy leaf coating on plants than would be predicted by simple diffusion (Ashmead, 1986). In chelated form, mineral-amino acid ligand have permeability promoting properties. In other words, seaweed sprays can permeate the cells where other compounds might not. Foliar nutrition is a great tool of compensation, offsetting adverse growing conditions.

Many seasons our gardens and trees try to grow in less than optimum conditions, whether it be in sudden cold, lack of light/heat hours, drought, etc. The combination of seaweed spray for remineralization, which affects harvested stability in fruits and vegetables, and the addition of a growth hormone to stimulate maximum fruiting and yield potential is ingenious. That a sound tape helps make all of this potential a reality is a good use of the technology available in our time.

Work by Kapular and Howearth in which they soaked seeds in Sonic Bloom with and without the sound tape showed that treated seeds in many cases grew to plants with double the yield in the field. Germinations were often faster. In the field, spray applications on these crops three to five times during the early growth to bloom stages generally showed yield increases of from 20-100%.

When discussing Carlson’s sound and foliar formula system, some organic gardener friends wonder about the challenges it poses. For one, is it possible to attract enough or the right kind of birds into a garden area so that plants open their stomata without humanly synthesized recordings?

Is it possible to build garden soils that function with superior levels of fertility without foliar applications? Or are gardeners who want the best and the most from the process in which they have involved bound to yet another set of technologies?

For lunar organic gardeners and farmers still other questions are raised by Carlson’s system. What are the effects of spraying during Moon phases? Are there bird cycles that are in sync with planetary and Moon magnetics? Are the right kind of birds and bird sounds a result of attractive crops? (On my farm when I grow millet, amaranth and other small grains, I attract many more and different birds than I do at other times.) If gibberellins are provided by soil fungi, is there a particular time/cycle where these fungi are more active? Is this one of the limiting factors in planting "out of the season," planting at times other than those established as good seeding times in your particular micro climate?

Sonic Bloom is a gift and a challenge. It is a tool which can be utilized by gardeners to bring about a healing in some gardens and orchards. It should also make us think about natural mechanisms that can and should be stimulated to make gardening and life more enjoyable and more abundant.

-- Llewellyn’s 1993 Lunar Organic Gardener

On June 12, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, the Philippine volcano, let go in one of the most devastating natural disasters in our lifetime. Much of the surrounding area, which had the day before been fertile farm land, was converted into a wasteland, many feet deep in sulfur dioxin laden ash.

Farmers who survived the cataclysm looked at their ash-covered land and knew that there would be no way to grow crops for many years using the familiar conventional farming methods. Test plots started since the disaster have proven them right. In their hour of urgent need they turned to Dan Carlson and his Sonic Bloom system. Dan has recently returned from the area. He spent his time there conferring with local farmers, university researchers and the research staff of the International Rice Research Institute. Early results of tests conducted there are very promising. It seems that the Sonic Bloom system will be able to grow respectable crops on land that won’t be able to support conventional agricultural practices for many years. Astonishing to many, it’s just another day on the job for Carlson who has been confounding the conventional for over 15 years now.

The reason Sonic Bloom works so well is still a bit of a mystery. We know that the sound causes the little breathing pores in plants (called stomata) to open. We know that the foliar spray supplies many trace minerals in chelated form as well as amino acids and other necessary compounds. These elements, all organic in form, have been proven by research to be absorbed and translocated by plants at many times the normal rate.

Carlson markets large sound generators and spray in bulk quantities for farm and greenhouse operations as well as a kit for home gardeners. The kit contains a bottle of spray concentrate that will make over 40 gallons of plant spray, a high quality spray bottle, instructions for use, reprints of some newspaper and magazine articles about Sonic loom, and a cassette tape of music and the patented Sonic Bloom sound. "The music, much of which is by composers like Bach and Vivaldi, is mostly for the gardener" relates Carlson, "It’s the other sounds on the tape that really make the plants react." The Sonic Bloom sound has been described as sounding somewhere between the noises made by birds and those made by crickets. Most people find the sounds rather pleasant, especially when combined with the music as it is on the cassette tape in the garden kit.

Arguably the worse place in the world to grow crops is Mongolia. It is like the badlands of New Mexico at five thousand feet. Very little has grown there in the past. Dr. Hou Tian Zhen of the Xinjiang Academy of Forestry has become something of a celebrity there, at least in academic circles, for developing a type of poplar tree that can survive the climate, making the people of the area self-sufficient in firewood for the first time in history. Not one to revel in past accomplishments, Dr. Hou next turned his efforts towards finding a method of feeding the people of the area. As a result of his three years of experimenting, he has come to the Minneapolis/St. Paul area to study with Dan Carlson for a year before returning home to implement the Sonic Bloom system on a wide scale in his homeland. Experiments by Dr. Hou showed the Sonic Bloom system to give a 30 to 90% increase in crop yield over conventional methods.

The sound is thought by many researchers to increase the metabolic rate of the plants, letting them grow faster naturally. The organic spray is formulated in such a way to supply those elements that soils are often lacking. The presence of these trace elements and other compounds in a totally available form reduces the stress that a plant might otherwise experience because of drought or heat or some other situation.

In the desert of Israel at the research center of Kibbutz Ketura, 450 varieties of rare and endangered trees are helped being kept from extinction by a group of dedicated scientists. They have tried many different programs of fertilization and have found the best results come from the use of Sonic Bloom.

Success with Sonic Bloom is not limited to nasty areas of the world. Successes in nicer growing areas are equally impressive.

An established apple orchard in Prescott, Wisconsin, starts using the Sonic Bloom system and sees their apple production triple. The orchard also finds that the number of apples lost to disease and insects is reduced by over 80%. "This is not an unusual situation," states Carlson, "the Sonic Bloom system raises the trace element and complex sugar content of plants. Those changes make the plant much healthier and less susceptible to attack by diseases and insects."

While all plants respond to Sonic Bloom, some seem to have more amazing results than others. Dan has found that plant varieties referred to as "open pollinated" seem to respond the best. Open pollinated is basically the opposite of hybrid. With open pollinated seeds, characteristics breed true from one generation to another. A hybrid variety is one that is the product of the cross breeding of specific varieties to induce certain characteristics, such as size, production, and specific disease resistance. These are the types of seeds that everyone used for many generations. Then the seed companies discovered that there was big money selling seeds that the farmer could not save from one season to the next. Since hybrids do not breed true, the farmers were forced into buying seed every year in order to have these new varieties the seed companies and county extension people told them were better, healthier, and more productive. Not all people fall into this trap. "Hybrid seeds give a predictable response, but much of the genetic potential that the original ancestor varieties may have had has been lost," states Carlson. "Many of those parent varieties had the potential, with proper care, to be far superior to anything that is commonly seen today."

The Indians of the San Juan Pueblo in New Mexico are able to grow phenomenal corn with Sonic Bloom on land that for three hundred years was only sued for making adobe bricks for their houses because it is so hard. Even today, they must dig individual holes to plant each plant. The ground is too hard to be rototilled. The Indians do not use hybrid seed. They use the same seed their grandparents did. At the same San Juan Pueblo, the ancient Indian grain amaranth has been grown using Sonic Bloom for the past two years. The first year, the production of grain was three times the per acre average of all other amaranth growers worldwide, despite the fact that this crop was grown in conditions far below average. The biggest news, however, came the following year when seed from that first crop was replanted. That crop produced twice the grain per acre of the previous crop. "We see this effect all the time," relates Carlson. "Seeds and cuttings from plants grown with Sonic Bloom consistently outproduce their parents by a wide margin." A tomato grower in Arkansas will eagerly attest to that, he has been growing greenhouse tomatoes using Sonic Bloom for two years now. A short time ago he stopped planting new seedlings for each new crop and instead planted cuttings from the plants that were currently in production. Tomato varieties that normally took 90 days to produce ripe fruit are now producing superior fruit in 55 days. The plants he’s using now are third generation Sonic Bloom cuttings. States Carlson, "It’s exciting to think how much better the next generation cuttings will be."

In an area where all the neighbors’ gardens failed, a home gardener in Colorado uses Sonic Bloom and wins the title, "Most Beautiful Garden in Colorado." "The satisfaction of being able to grow a garden when your neighbors can’t is something to be experienced," states Carlson, "and to win a contest like this is the icing on the cake." But this years for the first time Dan Carlson’s Sonic Bloom system gets to compete in the granddaddy contest of them all, the Chelsea Flower Show in England. "A number of the large estates in the UK are now using Sonic Bloom. Their entries in the contest should cause quite a stir," related Carlson with obvious pride.

Growing a garden is a labor of love. Using a system that gives your plants a much more stress free and balanced environment in which to live and grow should make both you and your plants very happy.

-- Llewellyn’s 1993 Lunar Organic Gardener