Food — Fermented Plant Extract

What is Food?

Food is a fermented liquid made from the most vigorous growing tips of plants in your local environment — the parts of the plant that are working hardest to grow. Packed with hormones, enzymes, and bioavailable nutrition, Food delivers the plant equivalent of a direct blood transfusion from the ecosystem itself.

It is not a synthetic fertilizer. It is not a product you can purchase. It is alive, local, and made by you from whatever is growing most powerfully on or near your land.

What does it do?

Food accelerates growth during the vegetative phase. Applied as a foliar spray or soil drench, it signals plants to push into vigorous nutritional growth — building mass, developing roots, and storing energy. It is most powerful during the childhood stage of plant growth (the first third of the plant's life).

Because Food is made from local plants, it carries the chemistry of your specific ecosystem. That locality is the point.

How is it made?

Gather the top 10–15cm of actively growing plant material, ideally at dawn — the more vigorous the source plant, the more potent the result. Use one kind of plant per batch. Weigh it and toss it with brown sugar at one-third to one-half its weight, like a salad; don't crush it. Pack the jar full; by the next day it settles to about two-thirds. Cover it with paper, not cloth or plastic: cloth sags and gathers dust. Leave it somewhere shady for 3–7 days. The sugar draws liquid out of the plant through osmotic pressure. Strain, and you have Food. It should smell fruity, a little like cider.

To keep it, stir in brown sugar until a thin ring stays undissolved on the bottom; that puts the microbes to sleep, and any more sugar just falls out of solution (my video How to Supersaturate KNF Solutions shows how). Master Cho added an equal weight of sugar to Food he meant to store. Kept cool and dark in glass or ceramic, it lasts two to three years. Food from growing tips or flowers goes on at 1:500 in water left to stand a full day. Food from ripe fruit goes on at 1:2000, and 1:3000 once the fruit is large, because its sugar spots the fruit. (Master Cho also used ripe-fruit Food at 1:500, in Hilo in 2016.)

When to use it

Use growing-tip Food while the plant is building leaves and stems. At the changeover to flowering, switch to Food made from flowers or baby fruit. Once fruit sets, use Food from ripe fruit at 1:2000. Leave growing-tip Food out of the last sprays before harvest: its nitrogen holds back ripening. The exception is purslane Food, weak (about 1:1000 to 1:5000), which Master Cho sprayed about a week before harvest for colour and shine. Spray in the late afternoon, about two hours before sunset, so the leaves are dry by dark.

Source plants

Any plant growing with unusual vigor: weeds (especially fast-growing young ones), comfrey, nettle, banana suckers, bamboo shoots, taro tops, sweet potato vine tips, grass seed heads. The more locally abundant and vigorous, the better.