Nexus - 0217 - New Times Magazine-pages

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22·NEXUS ·lants, says Steiner, can only be understood when considered in connection with all that is circling, weaving, and living around them. In spring and autwnn, when swal­ Plows produce vibrations as they flock ill a body of air causing currents with their wing beats, these and birdsong, says Steiner, have a powerful effect on the flowering and fruiting of plants. A bird's-eye view across country south and east of La Belle, midway between the great Lake Okeechobee and Sanibel Island, reveals an ocean of citrus orchards cut by a skein of dusty 'sea lanes', extending for miles toward the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, once a par­ adise for seashell hunters until ravaged by pollution. Any bird overflying this greensward in the mid-1980s wou}dchave been perplexed by the lack of avian fellows among millions of orange trees growing in the cQnfines of GeIiber Grove, saturated by a fog of chemicals laid down to ward off swarms of insects= except in Section I. There a multitude of feathered fauna daned among the trees or perclled singing in their branches. To this oasis the birds had been attracted, not by a natural concen of their colleagues; but by a sonic diapason closely resembling birdsong, which to hwnan,ears-incapable of distinguishing its varied harmonics-recalls the chirping of a chorus of outsized crickets. This sonic symphony was being emitted from a series of black Iloudspeaker boxes 'seL atop twenty-foot poles, each-resounding over an oval.of about fony acres. Its purpose was not so much t.o attract birds as to increase the size and total yield of a crop of fruit, 'hung', as they say in Florida parlance, on trees as if it were a collection of decorative balls at Yuletide. "I have hung oranges the size of peas, shooter marbles, golf balls, and tennis balls, some still green, others fully ripe, all on the same tree, all at the same time," said Roy McClurg, a former Union City, Indiana, department-store magnate, pan owner of the Gerber Grove. We had driven down at dawn 'to his 32Q-acre holding, where two young field hands, brothers-in-law, each with a tractor and a trailer tank of foliar feed had started off between two long rows of trees, dousing them with an aerosol mist from top Ito bottom while a speaker, similar to the ones on the poles, tuned to maximwn volume, shrieked a whistling pulse easiiy audible above the roar of the tractor motors. Pointing to one of his many trees, McClurg raised his voice: "This is the typical fruit I'm getting with this brand-new method called SQnic Bloom. It synchronously combines a spraying of the leaves of any plants, from tiny sprouts to mature trees, with a broadcast of that special sound. With that process, simple but scientifically unexplained, I've been able for the first time to get fruit all over the inner branches of my orange trees, greatly adding to the 'UD1hrella'-type set which is everywhere the norm. Back in his pleasantly refurbished clapboard house, oldest in the county, McClurg took from his refrigerator a dozen oranges the size of small grapefruit. "Thes.e were picked at my grove yesterday, he explained. "Ordinarily oranges as big as these would be pithy and woody inside, with very little juice. Slicing four of them with a razor-sharp butcher's cleaver, McClurg held up several of the Ihemispheres dripping with juice to show off rinds no thicker than an eighth of an inch. An electric juicer processed three of them to nearly fill a pint-sized glass. "Oranges like these," said McClurg, "will give me a crop with at least a 30 per c~nt increase in yield and a marked rise in 'pounds solid'. Add to that the fact that Ithe Garvey Center for the Improvement of Human Functioning, a medically-pioneering research group in Wichita, Kansas, has tested the juice to show an increase of 121 per cent in nat­ uraJ vitamin C over normal oranges, and you can understand that this new 'Sonic Bloom' discovery we're talking about not only improves quantity, but also quality. I've run blind- DECEMBER 1993 -JAN UARY 1994