Making inputs Cho Style

Arriving home after the Natural Farming Seminar, well, I was just fired up. I had to make some inputs.

IMO #1, compare, which one are we striving to recreate?

During the seminar we learned the proper way to make them, what a perfectly made input should be. When I first learned several years ago, I didn't have the experience to know a good one from a bad one. Some of my teachers were newly trained and didn't understand many of the nuances themselves. The seminar was hands on. We broke into groups and each group made all of the inputs together. Then during the last days of the seminar all the groups got together to compare their creations. The range in quality between the samples was large regardless of which input we were making. For example, IMO #1, the core of the Cho method where mold is cultured on white rice, ranged from a perfect cottony substance filling the container to no mold at all on the rice, resembling that found on a newly purchased plate lunch.

WSCP  - charred animal bones in brown rice vinegar

Today I made water soluble calcium phosphate (WSCP), a key input for making flowers and fruit development. It is also used to counteract the effects of too much nitrogen, which commonly occurs here in Onomea with our abundant rainfall. Ever wondered why all the plants grow so fast and are so green after a rain? The majority of the Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen and some comes down with the rain water. Nitrogen makes plants grow. WSCP helps counter it's effects. To make WSCP first boil some animal bones to remove everything, leaving just the bone. Then barbecue the bones so that they are black. After barbecuing they should be drastically lighter in weight. Next, place them in a container and pour in brown rice vinager until the vessel is 2/3 full. This leaves a third of the container at the top for air space, an important rule and concept always followed in Korean Natural Farming. The bones will bubble as the vinegar dissolves the calcium and phosphate into a water soluble form.