Pigeon peas (Cajanus cajan) and lablab beans (Dolichos lablab or Lablab purpureus), though unheard of in many parts of the world, are among the most widely consumed of all the world’s basic grains. They richly deserve this position because, if properly managed, they fertilize the soil extremely well, can easily be intercropped in the tropics with maize, and provide large amounts of highly nutritious food.

But perhaps most important of all, pigeon peas and lablab beans are the two green manure/cover crops (gm/ccs) that can best overcome the “droughts” that are now destroying people’s food crops every second or third year across close to one half of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as significant parts of Asia and Latin America.

As explained in the first of this set of four papers, during the last 20 years, droughts have increasingly caused this catastrophe, which Antonio Guterrez, the Secretary General of the United Nations, has called the “Hurricane of Hunger.” And although most people think that these droughts are being caused by climate change, in fact, at least 80% of the problem is being caused by the loss of organic matter in the soil, which makes clay soils almost as hard as a rock. After all, the total rainfall level has not dropped by more than 10% hardly anywhere in Africa, but the amount of rainwater that can actually infiltrate into the soil has been reduced by between 65 and 80%.

Because gm/ccs are the cheapest and easiest way for smallholder farmers to restore the previous organic matter levels in the soil, they are by far the best way to solve this devastating problem that otherwise could well result in the deaths of up to 60 million people in Africa within the next two decades, making it the worst famine in human history!

What Pigeon Peas and Lablab Beans Can Do for African Farmers

If you are working in an area above 1,500 mt in elevation, neither pigeon peas nor lablab beans will be of much use to you. At these higher elevations in Africa, you should probably be using scarlet runner beans or fava beans, along with alder trees. Also, if you are working on a field with a slope of more than 10 to 15%, and do not have an effective soil conservation technology in place (that is, there is water running downhill across the soil surface), then gm/ccs will not work well because most of the leaves will also be washed away soon after they are applied to the soil surface.

So what are the advantages of pigeon peas and lablab beans when they are properly managed? First, we will describe the tremendous advantages that these two species share with each other.

First of all, if properly managed, they both can fertilize the soil very effectively. For instance, the pigeon pea can fix up to 200 kg/ha/year of nitrogen (by far the most limiting nutrient in most African soils), and the lablab bean up to 140 kg/ha/year. Actually, this sounds like a major advantage for the pigeon pea, but both quantities are far more than any basic grain, including maize, sorghum, or millet, will ever need under African conditions. In fact, the lablab will fertilize the soil somewhat better than pigeon peas, because it produces a lot more total organic matter than the pigeon pea does. But in either case, farmers who were producing about 1 t/ha of maize in years of good rainfall, will, within about five or six years, be producing 3 t/ha of maize in the good years, and their fields will continue very slowly to increase yields even further. If either of these species is accompanied by gliricidia trees (Gliricidia sepium), they should achieve this tripling of yields in about four or five years.

Secondly, and most important for African farmers now, both pigeon peas and lablab beans will, in those same five to six years, dramatically reduce the impact of the droughts. This is because they both provide huge amounts of organic matter that will soften up the soil and allow the rainwater to penetrate the soil much more easily. This will mean that, in those same six years, the percentage of rainwater that infiltrates into the soil will increase from just 10 or 20% now up to 60% or more. Thus, their maize yields in droughty years will typically increase from somewhere between 100 and 400 kgs/ha, to about 2.5 t/ha! That is, within six years, farmers can expect that the droughts will only reduce their much improved yields from 3 t/ha in a good year to 2.5 t/ha in a drought. Their yields in the droughty years will be somewhere between 6 and 25 times what they were before using these species of gm/cc! And this is what is most important to the farmers. After all, maize, sorghum, and millet are not decent cash crops in Africa. So it is far more important for a family to have enough basic grains to eat during the bad years, than to have an excess of these grains during the good years, because that extra grain is not worth that much in the market, especially right after harvest time.

A third advantage of having pigeon peas or lablab beans intercropped in their maize fields is that these gm/ccs add biodiversity to their fields. This biodiversity is advantageous ecologically, as well as economically and in terms of their diet. Instead of just having more maize than they did previously, they will have maize and pigeon peas or maize and lablab beans, or even all three (by intercropping lablab beans in part of their fields, and pigeon peas in the rest of their fields). They will be getting plenty of vitamins, minerals and proteins in their diets, instead of just the calories that maize, sorghum or millet produce in large quantities. They will also have much fewer problems with pests and plant diseases in their fields. Insects, for example, do not have good eyesight; they find their food through a sense of smell. This means that a crop of pigeon peas that is planted alone will have far more problems with insect pests than will pigeon peas within a maize field, especially if several other plant species are growing there, too, because all the smells will get mixed up with each other by the time the insect can smell them. A major piece of evidence of this fact is that all the hundreds of species of plants that we have gotten from forest environments survived for millions of years without the use of any pesticides. They were protected by the biodiversity around them and the inability of insects to distinguish one smell among the ten or twenty that were coming from nearby.

Of course, a lot of scientists from the temperate countries will immediately say that intercropping does not work. That is true—but only in the temperate climates. There is a huge difference between
these two environments that is little understood. First of all, the very demarcation of the tropics is such that the tropics include all the areas where, at least during one period of the year, the sun is almost directly overhead. This means that in the temperate areas of the world, a short plant of beans in among a crop like maize or millet will only receive the sunlight that comes in at an angle, heavily blocked by three or four rows of maize, rather than receiving the sunlight from directly above, in which case it receives all the sunlight that can come through a dozen narrow maize leaves. The difference in the amount of sunlight received is tremendous. But there is another factor even fewer people are aware of. During the months of June to September, the sun is almost directly overhead in the northern tropics, between the equator and the Tropic of Cancer, and the rainy season, or growing season, occurs during precisely these same months. In the southern tropics, from the equator south to the Tropic of Capricorn, the sun is directly overhead during the months from November through February, and these are precisely the months when the rains allow people to plant their crops in this area. So the sun passes almost directly overhead, in either case, precisely when the vast majority of farmers are growing their crops.

A fourth advantage of both of these gm/ccs is that, by intercropping them, we are producing more organic matter and a more biodiverse organic matter that will become a year-long mulch. This is in contrast to temperate, mechanized agriculture where the soil has very little organic matter, so neither the rainwater nor the roots can go any deeper than the level in the soil that is ploughed, and even less deep any time more than a month or two after the soil was ploughed. Once the roots reach this depth in the soil, they are forced to grow horizontally, increasing competition with nearby plants. In contrast, in fields with gm/ccs, the crop roots, during the first three to six years, will gradually go deeper and deeper into the soil. Furthermore, where there is a good mulch, crop roots will grow upward into the mulch, feeding on the nutrients that the mulch gradually releases, before these nutrients totally decompose and fall through the mulch into the soil. Hydroponics, a way of farming that uses only fertilizer and water to feed crops, proves very clearly that roots do not need soil to ingest nutrients. And this process also means that well over 50% of all the phosphorus is available to plants (because it never needs to touch the soil itself) instead of only 10 to 15% of the phosphorus applied to the field as happens when inorganic fertilizer is placed directly in the soil. Plants whose roots can feed both deep down in the soil and up into the mulch obviously have far less need for their roots to grow laterally, thereby competing much less with nearby crops.

The fifth advantage of both pigeon peas and lablab beans is that they do not die at the end of the growing season, but can perfectly well grow for a full 12 months right up until the following growing season starts. This is tremendously important because in the lowland tropics, any dead organic matter that is exposed to the heat of the tropical sun will lose about 15% of its nitrogen every month, which means that in the 5 or 6 months before the following rainy season, it will have lost nearly all its ability to fertilize the soil, along with a lot of its organic matter. These leaves are therefore almost no good for fertilizing the soil or ending the droughts. To fertilize the soil and end the droughts, the leaves of the plant must stay on the living plant, right up until a month or two before we plant our next food crop. This way, the impact of the legume on the soil and crops will be maximized. This factor is the reason why nearly all the species used around the world as gm/ccs are perennials, rather than annuals. Furthermore, farmers in most of Africa who are growing sorghum, millet or cassava and then start using gm/ccs correctly, find that by the second or third year of doing so, they are able once again to grow a good crop of maize, which they strongly prefer to eat over sorghum, millet or cassava.

The sixth advantage of these two gm/ccs is that they both greatly reduce the amount of work that farmers’ families must do. By the third year of managing these gm/ccs correctly, plowing the soil or tilling it by hand will have become unnecessary. Nor will farmers have to make planting stations or ridges. The reason for this is that, very simply, the rainwater will infiltrate into the soil before it has a chance to start running across the surface. Since soil preparation for food crops is normally considered to be women’s work in Africa, this means that women’s labor is dramatically reduced.

Additional Advantages of Pigeon Peas

Each of these species also has a series of advantages the other one does not have.

The first important advantage of the pigeon pea is that, whereas the lablab bean eventually covers everything in the field, the pigeon pea allows quite a bit of sunlight to pass through its canopy all year long. This means that it does not control weeds at all, as lablab beans do, but it does allow farmers to grow an additional, low-growing food crop underneath the pigeon peas. In Malawi, for instance, thousands of farmers use what is called the “doubled-up legume system,” which means that under the pigeon peas and maize (and gliricidia trees, too, if they have them) they plant a third bushy-type crop. This additional crop will normally be another food crop, such as groundnuts, cowpeas, rice beans, eggplants or soybeans. In spite of these low-lying plants’ growing in the partial shade of two other food crops, they do very well. The advantages of this feature are obvious, both in creating more biodiversity in people’s fields and in their diets.

The second advantage of the pigeon pea over the lablab bean is that it does not die after its first year, unless we kill it. And that is the most important change farmers need to make to turn the pigeon pea into a wonderful fertilizer that will end the droughts. The pigeon pea should not be killed right after it has been harvested. Rather, it should be allowed to continue growing all through the dry season. Then, just before the maize, sorghum, or millet is planted again, the pigeon pea stem should be cut off right about the level of an adult’s lower ribs. This process is called “ratooning.” All the top of the plant (except the larger woody pieces, which may be used as firewood) is then left on the ground, and most of the side branches are also cut off and left on the ground. All of this plant material will then serve as fertilizer for the soon-to-be planted maize, sorghum or millet. And if the pigeon pea is growing vigorously and one wants to fertilize the soil even more, about 20 days to a month after the maize is planted, one can cut off all the new leaves once again and leave them on the soil as a “side-dressing.”

This process of ratooning can be repeated each year for the first three years, allowing the same pigeon pea plants to continue to grow for up to four years before being reseeded.

Ratooning the pigeon pea has a whole series of important advantages. First of all, the farmer does not have to use any additional seed the second, third and fourth years. This seed one would traditionally have planted can, instead, be eaten or sold. Secondly, when we plant a crop by seed, the roots look like little hairs, and they only become a few inches long during much of the growing season. But when we ratoon the pigeon pea, it already has, in its second, third, and fourth years, a well-developed root system that has penetrated quite deeply into the soil. The plants are therefore nearly as drought-resistant as those in a forest, which is never damaged by today’s droughts. Often, the only food crop in an African farmer’s unimproved fields that will nevertheless produce a decent harvest during a very bad drought are the ratooned pigeon peas that are in their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years. Smallholder farmers who have already been using pigeon peas for several years will often begin staggering their plantings, so that each year only one quarter of their fields are planted from seed. As a result, 3/4 of their pigeon peas will produce well even in a drought.

A third advantage of the pigeon pea over lablab beans is that lablab bean plants need to climb up the maize stalk. The lablab beans can therefore only be used in sorghum or millet fields if one prunes the lablab halfway through the growing season, which is a major job that must be carried out during the busiest time of the year. When the soil is still quite degraded, even maize plants can be pulled over if lablab beans are intercropped with them. However, pigeon peas have their own strong stem that supports them, so they will never pull over any other crop. As a result, pigeon peas can easily be intercropped with sorghum, millet, or cassava, while lablab beans can only be used easily with maize. However, in most of Africa, this advantage only exists during the first year or two, because after that, virtually everyone who is growing sorghum or millet will very happily abandon them in order to eat maize.

The fourth advantage of pigeon peas is that they are also the only gm/cc we can easily use in vegetable gardens. In this case, one grows only one pigeon pea plant in each square meter of land. The pigeon pea will then not only produce fertilizer for the vegetables and food for people, but will provide a partial shade for all the vegetables. This can be especially important for sensitive vegetables like tomatoes in places where the extreme lowland tropical heat makes it difficult or even impossible to grow them during the hotter seasons.

If the pigeon pea does not stay alive until the end of the dry season, then it will have to be replanted when the rains fall again, but this will likely only happen the first year of using it, and then only if the farmer did not use jack beans the first year. After the first year, the soil should be better, and the pigeon pea should stay alive until the following rainy season has started.

Additional Advantages of Lablab Beans

Lablab beans do, of course, have some major advantages over pigeon peas. The first of these is that the lablab beans do a very good job of controlling weeds. Usually, when lablab is being grown in a maize field, the farmer will have to do a first weeding, but the second weeding of the maize is completely eliminated by the lablab. This fact is especially important for African women, because the weeding of crops grown for home consumption is considered women’s work. Furthermore, the second weeding is the most difficult of the two, and it occurs right in the middle of the hunger season, which means the women are out in the hot sun all day for a month or more doing hard labor after they have had very little or no breakfast. Some years it is necessary, even when the lablab is there, to walk through the field pulling out an occasional weed by hand, but that is nowhere near as hard as doing a major weeding. Of course, it is usually preferable to grow another food under one’s gm/cc (as one can with pigeon peas) than it is to have no weeds, but also no food, growing under it.

A second major advantage of lablab beans is that their leaves are highly nutritious and very palatable for cattle, and they normally continue to grow throughout the dry season. This is especially important during the dry seasons following a poor rainy season, because in such years the people’s cattle run out of forage in the middle of the dry season, and many of them die. In Mali, for instance, thousands of farmers now save the lives of their cattle because they have lablab plants in their fields. Farmers thereby never need to make hay or silage. In fact, probably the cheapest and easiest way to keep cattle well-fed during the dry season is to put them in a fenced field right after the lablab beans and maize have been harvested, and then lock the gate. If the number of cattle is such that they will not finish the maize and lablab bean plants before the next rainy season comes, they will be very well fed and gain a good deal of weight, at virtually no cost, all through the dry season. Scores of university-educated cattlemen in southern Honduras have been using this system for decades now.

Another advantage of lablab beans is that they are native to Africa, so they will not suffer in any major way from most of the plant diseases that are native to the continent.

But probably the most important advantage of lablab beans, especially compared to pigeon peas (for which only the beans themselves are edible), is that almost every part of the lablab plant is edible for humans—the dry beans, the green peas, the pods, the tender flowers, and most amazingly, the tender leaves. And all these parts of the plant are easy to prepare. Furthermore, the actual beans, which contain about 22% protein, have about 50% more protein in them than do the common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) that are eaten in developed countries.

Nutritionally, the leaves are probably more important than any other part of the plant. They are edible, they are produced in quantities as high as 30 to 40 t/ha/year, during 11 months of the year. Because these leaves are dark green, they have plentiful vitamins and minerals, in addition to having what for leaves is an incredible amount of proteins--over 10%--making them a surprisingly well-balanced food. They can also be easily dried and stored for up to a year. And they are a free by-product of producing the beans. In significant areas of Africa, during the serious droughts recently experienced, they have been the only food people have available from their fields during nearly the whole 6-month dry season. When you combine their exceptional nutritional quality with their being a free by-product of the dry beans and their year-round availability in people’s fields in such large quantities, you can see they are truly a nutritionist’s dream come true.

Although quite susceptible to drought during their first three to four months if the soils are extremely degraded, after a year or two of jack beans the lablab beans can grow through the entire dry season, producing leaves and grain for up to 6 months with no rain at all.
Lastly, whereas pigeon peas occasionally do not produce well if they have not been grown in a field for any of the last five or six years (probably as a result of the lack of certain microorganisms in the soil), the lablab has no such problem.
It is also very simple to cook either the dry beans, the pods, or the fresh leaves. Merely mixing any of these with a small amount of groundnut powder will completely overcome the slight bitterness they normally contain, making them quite tasty.

Is It Really Possible that Pigeon Peas and Lablab Beans Can Have All of These Benefits?

Many people, will have serious doubts that pigeon peas and lablab beans can really improve their soil so well and still have so many other benefits. But for over 2,000 years, African farmers used the forest to keep their soils fertile, and the forests did so even though the farmers’ families were taking nutrients off that land three to four years out of every 20 or 25 years. But the forests did a lot more than just fertilize the soil. Tropical forests typically produce more biomass/ha/year than any other land use known in the world. No one ever had to plow the soil in a forest, or ridge it up, or make planting stations. Even the first year after the forest was cut down or burned, farmers did not need to prepare the soil in any way; they planted it just as it was. The forests also protected hundreds of species of plants from the attacks of insects and plant diseases, for thousands of years.

But most important to us, the forests protected themselves and their soils from droughts. I have personally walked through hundreds of farmers’ fields where the maize was less than a meter tall and dying because of a drought, but then walked into a nearby forest where the soil was still moist to the touch and there were no signs of drought at all.

Lablab beans, pigeon peas, and other gm/ccs are only doing what the natural forest did for farmers’ soils and our environment for two to three thousand years. In other words, the gm/ccs are just acting like the forest did. This is why our motto for growing gm/ccs is to “imitate the forest.”

The more species of gm/ccs we can get to grow with our maize (as in the photo above), the better our “gm/cc forest” can make our fields fertile, free of weeds, resistant to pests and diseases, and, above all, resilient to droughts. So farmers who are using pigeon peas or lablab beans should every once in a while experiment with adding to their fields an additional plant that they know won’t become a weed and won’t compete with their food crops.

All the things farmers do to improve their farms, including those suggested in this paper, should first be tried out on a plot of about 10 by 20 meters, so if something goes wrong, it will have only a minor impact on the farmers’ food supply. Once a small-scale experiment has proven that the new approach brings major benefits, the farmer can adopt it on a larger scale. Furthermore, by learning how to experiment, farmers are learning to take control over their own development process. Also, if there are more than one variety of pigeon peas or lablab beans that are locally available, it could be useful to try out more than one of them.

How Can we Choose Which of these Species to Use in a Given Situation?

How can we choose between pigeon peas and lablab beans as smallholder farmers’ primary green manure/cover crop? First of all, if a community already grows and/or consumes either of these species, it is almost always best to work with the species they already know, can access, and like to eat. This way the process is much easier. Farmers will be much happier to use a known species as a gm/cc, and the costs of doing so will be less because they won’t have to obtain seed from somewhere else. If the seed of neither of these species is available locally, but one of them is available somewhere easily accessible nearby, then that would also tilt the scales in favor of using that species. Also, if many of the people in the area are growing sorghum or millet instead of maize, then the pigeon pea would be the species of choice, because it does not need to climb the stalk of some other plant.

If farmers in a given area are not familiar with either of these two species, and neither is available nearby, then it is important to review the advantages of each listed above, to see which species most interests the farmers. The program should always ensure that women farmers are included in these discussions. If knowing the advantages of each, farmers are still unsure, then the program may prefer one of them because it is easier to obtain elsewhere, perhaps within the same country. If this is still not a deciding factor, lablab beans would probably be the best choice, because of their guarantee of highly nutritious leaves all year long, and the reduction in labor that they provide for women.

By the fourth or fifth year of using gm/ccs, farmers should probably learn to grow both of these species, each of them in a different part of their maize fields, so they have more biodiversity.

How Should we Manage Pigeon Peas to Maximize their Benefits?

Pigeon peas may not grow very well in soils that have been heavily degraded. If a farmer gets less than about 700 kg/ha of maize when not using chemical fertilizers, or is growing sorghum, millet, or cassava instead of maize, then the pigeon peas may not grow very well. In these situations, it is best to grow jack beans, intercropped with the maize, for one or two years before growing the pigeon pea. The reason for this is that the native environment of the jack bean’s genus is apparently on the edge of the Sahara Desert. As a result, it is extremely resistant to both heavily degraded soils and to droughts. This means that it will likely grow very well any year and in almost any maize field in Africa, and will start the soil improvement process very efficiently. One cannot eat the jack bean without a huge amount of processing, but one only needs to grow it for one or two years, and then the farmer can switch to growing pigeon peas or lablab beans in an improved soil that will allow them to grow very well through an entire 6-month dry season. (See the paper I have written on using jack beans.)

It is far better NOT to bury the pigeon pea leaves and plants when we ratoon the pigeon peas. First of all, burying the crop residues requires a major process of tillage, and tillage damages many tropical soils. It also dries them out. Even more important, this tillage requires a tremendous amount of labor, or the major expense of using a ripper or a plow. Furthermore, if we bury our organic matter, we are destroying our mulch. Soil cover is extremely important because it protects the soil from the hot sun, it helps keep the soil moist, and above all, it feeds our crops.

For pigeon peas to grow throughout the dry season, free-grazing cattle and goats will have to be kept out of the fields. Achieving this goal can be a very simple and cheap process. Using the monkey thorn tree (Acacia galpinii) one can easily plant a fence around one’s field. This tree must be protected from the animals during its first year (with branches of thorn bushes), but after that, it will provide total protection from cattle, goats and sheep for up to 90 to 100 years. The seeds should be planted one seed each 30 cm along the edge of the field, but the seed is so small that if the field is not more than one hectare in size, it can be totally protected with just 1/2 kg of seed, which normally costs only about US $ 3.00. Unfortunately, seeds from this tree are presently available only in parts of Malawi and southeastern Africa, but this seed would grow well throughout virtually all of lowland sub-Saharan Africa. The only other expense (involving only additional labor) is that the trees must be protected from fires during the whole 100 years. To do this, a 2- to 3-m wide space along the fence must be kept clear of vegetation during most of the dry season.

Even if a farmer is growing pigeon peas intercropped with maize, and has no desire to try out a full-fledged gm/cc system, he or she can ratoon the pigeon peas in these fields, as described above, and thereby save pigeon pea seed three out of every four years, while at the same time, achieve almost total drought resistance for the pigeon peas in the second, third and fourth years out of every four years. This alone would be a tremendous improvement over the normal pigeon pea system. Furthermore, such a system could also include other food crops beneath the pigeon peas.

Insect attacks can present problems for pigeon peas. The best protection against this possibility is that of planting the pigeon peas intercropped with maize and some other food crop that can grow under the pigeon peas. If insects do attack the pigeon peas severely, especially the seeds, some form of pest control will sometimes be necessary. If, however, the insects are only making little holes in the leaves, they are merely composting the nutrients in the leaves and dropping them on the soil—a benefit for the farmer rather than a problem.

How Should we Manage Lablab Beans to Maximize their Benefits?

Lablab beans produce much more grain and over-all biomass when they can climb, so farmers should almost always intercrop them with maize. However, if the maize is extremely weak from droughts or severely degraded land, the lablab bean may cause the maize stalks to fall over. In such a case, we use jack beans the first year or two to improve the soil before we plant the lablab beans. When intercropped with maize, the lablab beans should be planted with about 3 to 4 seeds/sq m, with four seeds being preferable if weed control is important. Unless one can obtain bushy types of lablab (which are not yet available in Africa, only in India), lablab beans should never be intercropped with sorghum or millet, because the stems of these crops are too weak to support the lablab’s weight.

The most important rule in maximizing the benefits of the lablab bean is similar to that of the pigeon pea: the lablab beans must continue growing until within a month of the following growing season. That is, we let the maize stalks that are supporting the lablab beans continue to stand until a month before the next growing season. Then, we cut them both down and leave them on top of the soil to form a mulch.

Insect attacks can present problems for lablab beans. Since people usually want to eat the beans, some form of pest control will often be necessary if the insects are attacking the grain. Nevertheless, if the problem is aphids, a very inexpensive solution will usually work. A lack of moisture kills aphids, so one can often control them by spraying the lablab plants with a powder made of cassava roots or wheat flour or something else that will dry out the surface of the pods.
If the insects are only causing a few holes in the leaves, there is no reason to worry. We seldom can eat all the leaves of the lablab plant, so for eating, we can select those leaves that are not punctured.

In areas where cattle and goats are allowed to free-graze during the dry season, lablab beans, like the pigeon peas, will require a fence to protect them from these animals. And this is needed even more with lablab than most other gm/ccs, because grazing animals are especially attracted to the lablab. By far the cheapest solution we have found is to make live fences of the “monkey thorn” tree, as described above.

For More Information

We have also written three similar papers on the cause of the “Hurricane of Hunger” that is advancing across Africa, and on the use of jack beans and gliricidia trees as gm/cc species to overcome these droughts. If you wish to learn more about gm/ccs, you can write me asking for any of these other papers. If you wish to see additional information that applies to the African highlands, or the use of gm/ccs in Asia or Latin America, you may also purchase my book, Restoring the Soil, How to Use Green Manure/Cover Crops to Fertilize the Soil and Overcome Droughts, from the ECHO bookstore in Florida, or even from Amazon. If you are trying out gm/ccs and something is not working out well, write me at rbunchw@proton.me.