20 Years In Development

Dan Carlson is the inventor of the Sonic Bloom system. What motivates Carlson is a horrifying event he witnessed in the early 1960s. In Korea as an enlisted soldier he was obliged to watch, impotently, a starving Korean mother lay the legs of her small child beneath the rear wheel of an army truck: crushed legs created an authentic cripple, entitled to a family-saving food subsidy.

Back home, entitled to the GI Bill of Rights, Carlson spent many hours in the University of Minnesota library, studying plant physiology. Struck by the idea that certain sound frequencies might help a plant breathe better and absorb more nutrients, he experimented with various frequencies until, with the help of an audio engineer, he found one range that was consonant with the early morning bird chirping that helps plants open wider their stomata, or mouth-like pores.

On every leaf there are thousands of such small openings. Each stoma--less that 1/1000 of inch across--allows oxygen and water to pass out of the leaf, or transpire, while other gases, notably carbon dioxide, move in to be transformed by photosynthesis into sugars. During dry conditions, the stomata close to prevent a wilting plant from drying out completely.  

Photomicrographs show plant stomata opening wider to Carlson's frequencies, while a Philips 505 Scanning Electron Microscope shows substantially higher stomata density on a leaf treated with Sonic Bloom; additionally, the individual stomata are more developed and better defined.  

As stomata normally imbibe the morning dew, sucking up nutrients in the form of free flowing trace elements, why not, thought Carlson, develop a special organic spray to apply to the leaves along with the sound that induces stomata to open. Even in poor soil, Carlson reasoned, plants could be well nourished with a foliar spray containing the right combination of elements. To develop such an effective nutrient solution took Carlson 15 years of trial and error, experimenting in labs throughout the country, funded by a caring "angel." Carlson needed to find not only what elements serve to make a plant flourish; he needed to find their proper balance. Just the right amount of Nitrogen, Potassium, and Phosphorus is needed, but not the overdose recommended by the chemical companies that swamp the plant to the exclusion of trace elements vital to its health. Too much of any one element can distort or even kill a plant. To find the proper balance required endless testing with radioactive isotopes and Geiger counters to trace the elements' translocation from leaves to stems to peak to roots. Among the first natural substances used was Gibberilic acid, naturally derived from rice roots, needed by every living plant. Eventually Carlson included sixty-four trace elements derived from natural plant products and from seaweed; he also added chelated amino-acids and growth stimulants, altering the surface tension of the water base to make it more easily absorbed. The end result was Sonic Bloom.