Improving vineyards with Reiki

Get your science fix here: research, quackery, activism and all the rest
Post Reply
User avatar
sTeamTraen
After Pie
Posts: 2553
Joined: Mon Nov 11, 2019 4:24 pm
Location: Palma de Mallorca, Spain

Improving vineyards with Reiki

Post by sTeamTraen » Mon Jan 30, 2023 1:11 pm

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/vine ... -h7spcj6cr (no paywall at the moment)

"Originally from Virginia, she has found a receptive audience for her work on the West Coast", well there's a surprise.
Something something hammer something something nail

Chris Preston
Snowbonk
Posts: 529
Joined: Tue Nov 12, 2019 8:05 am

Re: Improving vineyards with Reiki

Post by Chris Preston » Wed Feb 01, 2023 12:51 am

There is a paywall now.

I have worked a lot with grapegrowers over the years and have had to put up with a lot of biodynamics bulldust. This takes that to a whole new level. It is almost like wine makers (because often they ultimately decide what grapegrowers can do) are particularly susceptible to muck, magic and pixie dust.

One of the things I like doing after a biodynamic grower assures me that getting the soil right deters weeds is to ask them how often in a year do they have to till undervine to control weeds and is this more or less often than other growers? It turns out that their impression of how often other growers till undervine is completely out of whack with reality. Four undervine tillage passes is not less than zero.
Here grows much rhubarb.

IvanV
Stummy Beige
Posts: 2660
Joined: Mon May 17, 2021 11:12 am

Re: Improving vineyards with Reiki

Post by IvanV » Wed Feb 01, 2023 10:23 am

Chris Preston wrote:
Wed Feb 01, 2023 12:51 am
It is almost like wine makers (because often they ultimately decide what grapegrowers can do) are particularly susceptible to muck, magic and pixie dust.
Wine is a product which is considerably about mystique and impressions, at least at the upper end. There are famous experiments where professional wine tasters are asked to rate wines at a blind or semi-blind tasting. They give consistently different ratings of the same wine according to what they are or aren't told about it - what they are told may include carefully chosen lies for experimental purposes. These indicate the considerable susceptibility of the customer base to suggestion. So a winemaker with an instinct for pixie dust is maybe better able to spread that pixie dust over their product and get more money out of their pixie-dust susceptible customers.

Meanwhile the government here seems to expect amateur vine-growers to use homeopathy and reiki to keep blights off their grapes. I haven't got any grapes off one of my vines the last 3 years, because the entire crop got destroyed by powdery mildew. It is a supposedly a mildew resistant hybrid, and I got away with it for 15 years. But no longer. And reading about it, now it has set in, it will do the same every year unless I get rid of it. I look what I can get to spray it with, and basically you can't buy the stuff that works any more. I tried some "toy" sprays, but they were both ridiculously expensive and ineffective. My attempt to use sulphur didn't work. I can buy flowers of sulphur cheaply, even in a garden centre. But apparently you need to get it in a colloidal solution, for effective fungicidal use, and I couldn't locate a practical method of kitchen chemistry to achieve that.

It seems basically the only way I'm going to solve this is to do what people have always done, and treat the vine with Bordeaux mix in the winter season. Bordeaux mix is a watery slurry of lime and copper sulphate. I can't buy copper sulphate for garden use, but I can buy copper sulphate for veterinary use, so now I have some copper sulphate. I bought some garden lime, and tried to make my Bordeaux mix with it, and sprayed it. But I now realise that is the wrong kind of lime. Wasted £10 there. It needs to be proper caustic. I have discovered I can buy the right kind of lime for culinary usage (!), and in more suitable small quantities, so I will buy that and try again. A bit more carefully, probably.

Another amateur gardening application where I am seemingly expected to use pixie-dust these days is protecting seedlings from damping off fungus. When I first tried to grow veg from seed, most of the seedlings wilted a few days after emerging. That's damping off, and it is instantly fatal to the seedling. Simply controlled by spraying the potting surface with copper sulphate, which you can't buy for garden use any more. I finally used up my last stocks that I bought a long time ago last year. But now I have some copper sulphate for veterinary use, so fixed that.

Chris Preston
Snowbonk
Posts: 529
Joined: Tue Nov 12, 2019 8:05 am

Re: Improving vineyards with Reiki

Post by Chris Preston » Sat Feb 04, 2023 2:54 am

I have been at a weeds meeting this week and there was an interesting poster on this sort of topic. Apparently a county in Maryland (I can remember which one) has banned the use of synthetic pesticides at least on lawns. A student conducted a trial on the University football fields with organic herbicides to control dandelions*.

Every single organic product resulted in more dandelions and less grass.

*For the home owner there would be mostly no need for a herbicide for dandelion control as they can be controlled (somewhat tediously) by hand weeding. For larger areas of turf, like sporting fields and golf courses, hand weeding is impractical. This also makes it interesting how annual bluegrass will get controlled in turf.
Here grows much rhubarb.

Post Reply