Biochar Inoculation Part 2

[Music] so compost tea it says we already kind of touched on this a little bit I'm going to move through this pretty quick when I may accomplish tea I've got a very specific recipe that I try to follow every time this recipe started out as one that I got from a guy who is local he has a company called Garden tea company he's out and Lester somewhere he's the one that told me my first batch of ingredients it sold me my first little air pump I got the recipe from him now I probably shouldn't have but I did immediately in my arrogance start tweaking it and I landed on this recipe only because I've you know lucky to work here and have access to a microscope and can actually check to see the quality of my compost we have people here that know how to do that so in this little bag right here I've got two cups of good compost two cups of worm castings two tablespoons kelp meal two tablespoons alfalfa 1 tablespoon fish meal 1 tablespoon of c90 1 tablespoon of azomite that goes into the little bag ok and then I'll have water that's about 75 degrees give or take you probably know wanna go much harder than 80 try to keep it between like maybe 65 and 80 and I'll add 1 tablespoon of liquid fish and 2 tablespoons of molasses right there and then I'll immediately start bubbling it one thing about this system right here is that you want to be just speaking from experience you want to be pushing air through this before you drop it into water the only reason you do that is because there's all these little holes right here I don't want compost tea going back into here just as a safeguard for that I did not glue these fit in so I can actually break this thing apart clean it run peroxide through there or whatever I got to do you don't want a lot of microbes in there that you didn't put there on purpose think of it that way so now that we've bubbled that for about 24 we've got tea that's ready and what we have is not necessarily a nutrient-rich liquid but very microbially rich we've taken the the microbes that are in that compost and we ballooned them out possibly a thousandfold just by feeding them the right stuff the molasses the sugars and then all those other complex ingredients like kelp meal alfalfa meal those are just microbial foods the tea is really good for soaking char it's possibly better for spraying directly on your plans I do that quite a bit in the summer time I try to maintain every - realistically three weeks schedule where I spray my orchard and my vegetable garden in the evening when the Sun is low with the compost tea that I make I try to ask Meredith to look at it for me just to make sure that I'm spraying the right stuff but it's been pretty consistent with this recipe maintaining those temperatures done pretty good with it so now I've got this stuff right here that I can mix in it's nice and soggy wet that I can mix it in with dry biochar hold on to whatever's left in here pretty good stuff so let me show you something that I try to do every time I make compost tea is I'll go ahead and mix up the ingredients for a batch that I'm gonna make two weeks from now that's all the dry ingredients that I mentioned on that list so what I'll do now in order to try to increase the fungal profile in my compost tea what I'm going to do is I'll feed it a little bit of extra fungal food in this case it's just oh this is pretty common sprinkle some oats in there and then I'm gonna take today's compost tea and I'm just gonna sprinkle it in there and get it nice and moist and then I'm gonna go ahead and put it in my bag that I plan on steeping later okay and by doing that I'll take that bag and then I'll go store it and like I keep it in the germination chamber I don't run the germination chamber but it's a nice dark moderately temp you know moderate temperature environment really induce 'iv it's pretty moist in there and jiseop to growing out fungus so let's go ahead and do that well we got some I don't know how it's gonna have to soak up biochar in half so probably want to try to get that a little wetter remember that squeeze fest I was telling you about that's the consistency I'm gonna aim for with this just for the sake of time we'll pick this up later yeah how long did you let the fancy earth board microbes soak in a town house before you brewed them 36 hours probably not long enough I don't know I think it probably is what they say they didn't say anything there's a pretty limited instructions there I think the person for an app state that taught the brook that taught me about it I think she said 36 maybe 48 but I think it was probably 36 I may have messed it up it's definitely time to look at again yeah yeah what Pat's referring to is the experiment that I told you about with the compost tea where we took one that was just my normal recipe and then the other one where we added to the I like to call him designer microbes and had I mean not necessary not worst results by any means but just not immediately noticeable results that stuff's here in the cooler if anybody's curious about it it's a two-part system from Earth fort you made send in microbes he met some microbes so you soak the compost with the you mean microbes yeah so far no results that doesn't mean it doesn't work yeah more science is needed I will say that for compost tea I do for the record I have amazing results in my garden incredible results all throughout the year it does great for disease resistance on your plants to some degree it'll keep the bugs off to at least make your plants more resilient to blow bugs my kale just like perks up overnight it's been good stuff for me here's a picture of the compost tea from today from about four hours ago just a little glimpse anybody know what they're looking at I couldn't tell you what I'm looking at except these little guys are moving around at about 90 miles and you can't tell because it's not a movie but and that these larger guys right here are doing a nice little wiggle an example what I'm trying to show you here is the different levels of life these larger guys are going to be eating the little guys that's the soil food web in action worms may be eating these guys worms are gonna be eating all these guys again that diversity is what you're looking for a little bit about urine inevitably when you talk about biochar there's somebody that wants to talk about peeing on it so I thought we just go ahead and address that right now and don't have a lot of direct experience with this but I will say that urine is incredibly nutrient rich nitrogen obviously and then potassium kind of sneaks up on you you wouldn't think so but it's in there there is a guideline for making urine safe and that's to store it at 68 degrees for 30 days that's based on prior studies that indicate that that what's probably happening here is the pH changes and the any kind of pathogens that were originally in the urine they're like a urinary tract infection and those kind of things aren't going to survive as the pH changes direct application on soil I'm sure you guys have had dogs and little spots in the yard don't put it on straight gonna burn it dele one two five four round trees one to ten if you're gonna put it directly in your vegetable garden I wouldn't eat right away of maybe give it a couple of like a week or something to kind of do its thing for charge and biochar now there's some really specific numbers if you want to get into it for charge and raw biochar this is in the manual that we're going to spend last 15 minutes talking about you want to use two liters of urine per one liter of slow pyrolysis biochar anybody that's making biochar at home we included make slow pyrolysis biochar it's incredibly inert there's not a whole lot of carbon in there that's not the fixed carbon that's more liquid than the biochar will hold so what you want to do there is it's kind of meter in your urine and let it evaporate out now what I'm describing is a composting toilet it's a bucket where you just pee on it occasionally until it's completely saturated right what you end up with is it's in and in this manual he'll describe that process as biochar that has a 100 to 1 carbon to nitrogen ratio and urine that has a 1 to 1 by mix in two parts your end of one part biochar you end up with a 33 to one ratio 25 to 35 is your ideal composting ratio you can end up with something that will actually just compost just by sitting there that was something I've learned recently I have always assumed that you have to take P char and then further compost it but as long as you have some sort of microbial inoculant you can you can compost it on the spot which is hard for me to wrap my head around what most people are talking about when they soak biochar or with P is taking that out to the compost pile and treating it just like any other carbon ingredient in the compost bomb is probably a lot of sugar in it I guess yeah I mean them may help yeah it's it would be an expensive way to add sugar for sure well the alcohols gonna be antimicrobial but there's not that much yeah yeah we're all aware of pharmaceuticals in your urine you know if you're on those kind of pharmaceuticals I would advise not to do this method another thing is salt accumulation there's a lot of salts in your urine be careful to accumulate those there are some hard numbers on that to these guys Walt in effect I didn't do enough research to really know where they're coming from but I think it's just too homesteaders somewhere in the Midwest that are that been doing a ton biochar for 10 or 15 years they suggest to go to 1,700 parts per million TDS that's what the total dissolved solids either solids or salts I hear that used interchangeably a lot salts okay and then you get it down to that number you you know salts accumulate in the soil over time they don't really get eaten by microbes like other things do they kind of have to wash out of the soil do you have anything to add to that I don't know we've had some solid dishes they do wash out in our climate especially like last month yeah so we have way less of a problem if you were if you're doing this and in the West during the summer and stuff you could get more more problems with it but it's not likely much of a problem here and I'll give to you and people can contact you like there's a link to this place called rich earth Institute it's doing lots of good research it has lots of information confirms and stuff about 68 degrees just know that people are going to scare you because they're going to talk about potential contamination if you're collecting this and then kind of toilets that collect yes you can contaminate the urine with fecal matter that's a whole other ballgame we're talking your and that has not been contaminated if it's contaminated and when safety issues are way different I'm just gonna go ahead and protect ourselves and and put in this line that says we're not really recommending that you do is do your own research make that decision on your own I'm not telling you to do it but it does work who stumbo kocchi effective microbes okay this is something I wanted to save some time to talk about this because I do it at home I don't do it as regularly as it might lead you guys to believe but Bo Kashi is a you a pretty unique system that it starts I'll tell you all day not to use proprietary microbes but I had pretty good luck with this stuff e-m1 effective my effective microbes I think effective microorganisms there yeah trademark you can take this bottle and you can balloon that out I forget the math but but you can take this and by adding the right amount of original inoculate molasses warm water let it sit for a couple of weeks you can take this stuff and you can actually grow it out and they only tell you to do it once but I know that you can do it a couple more times than that so just this one gallon that cost about I think eighty bucks or something that's not cheap you can take it and probably grow out 200 gallons or whatever don't quote me on that but Allah so complicated process here not complicated multi-step process I've got em that I know is done I'll send you some links if he wanted to want to try this at home and I've taken spent Brewer grain it doesn't have to be this a lot of people use wheat bran or something and and you take that either dried grains dried wheat bran and then you soak it in effective microbes and then you can you can further dry it after that don't heat it up to dry it but just let it kind of like gently dry and it'll store for for quite a long time so this stuff right here is that dry bro grain that I soaked in am a little over a year ago now notice it's in a closed bag absent of oxygen notice my airlock here this is actually anaerobic in facultative microbes there's no aerobes in here okay this is a unique kind of system all traditional compost and you're talking about make sure air gets to it don't have any you know damp wet spots in this case we're gonna try to exclude all air okay so what I've got at home and I should have brought it in if I know there's gonna be this many people I would have brought it in but I didn't want to put it in my car uh what I've got at home is a food grade bucket that's propped up do y'all see the ball valve down there in the bottom it's probably too dark but I've got a just regular old plumbing valve that I can do a quarter turn and it opens okay above that I've got a bucket with a false bottom on it I put that false bottom in there all that is is another bucket that I just cut a couple inches off the bottom and just drilled a bunch of holes in it and then wedged it down there real tight okay so here's my valve and in my bucket all load in a bunch of wet sloppy nasty food scraps meat fat Darry any of it can go in there the only thing I would suggest leaving out is that really salty food for the same reasons is urine you just don't want to accumulate salts in your soil and then take a little bit of this stuff and sprinkle it on top what you're doing it's just your inoculating that food with Ian and say I'll come back you know maybe I've got more food I try to maybe just do about two inches at a time of wet sloppy food add more two inches wet sloppy food sprinkle some more Bo Kashi is what they call it sprinkle some more bo khosh e on it and then what I've found is I just got lucky and I've got a little plastic plate that just fits snug inside a bucket and I'll take that plastic plate and I'll just when I'm done I'll reach in there and I'll just squeeze down and try to squeeze out any air that's in there and by doing that I may squeeze some let shake down here through the screen close it up and then walk away and then you know I usually can fill a bucket I mean if I really want to I can fill the bucket and just like less than a week's time I don't usually do that but I can let it sit for at least two weeks maybe every other day every three days which you got to do is you've got to come here and you've got to drain off the liquid from underneath here so what I do is I've got it propped up on that little crate just so I can put a little jar my little jar fits nicely in there it does about a jar every two to four days that is the leche from the bio Kashi system so yeah nasty food waste that's been pickled and then been completely overcome but these facultative microbes you can make your own absolutely yeah you want to elaborate yeah rice and milk yeah yeah now anyone has quite a bit more in it besides lactobacillus but but the certainly the main driver of this system is lactobacillus you can keep making it from more than one time but it'll keep shifting that's why they say one time if you want the you know to be certain of the policy very similar very very similar microbe profile they say to make it once every time you make it again the indigenous microbes are moving in and that's what's no longer than you yeah just to be fair to a.m. that's that's why they say that it is but it's just that so the e/m has lots of them photosynthesizing algae and all kinds of others you know sometimes big news remember I told you that biochars are normally alkaline like in our tea load system we register highs not likely that stay just to the high ash content we don't quench it in time then then we get a little extra in there what's neat about this is that the pH coming off of that is it's actually pretty incredibly acidic I wish I had checked because I don't really remember but I think it's somewhere around three and a half so that makes a nice high acidic liquid nutrient rich microbial rich acidic liquid that you can use to inoculate a biochar anybody want to smell it yeah come on up it's full to the brim so I don't want to pass it around but you can you can explain that smell to everybody yeah always neat smell yeah capers yeah not okay wow that's a good nose what goes in is what comes out you know you put nutritious food in there you're gonna get nutrients out they might not look the same but they're gonna be a they'll be in there I think it smells a little bit I call it trash juice I'm not the only one that calls it that because it smells like apple cider and a little bit like the bottom of a garbage can to me they say that you can do it inside em em proponents advocates are going to say this is a great system for doing inside a small apartment or something like that in a lot of ways it is it's a nice system for that if you nail it and maybe I'm just not nailing it then it doesn't smell at all but when I open up that bucket it's it's not a acrid putrid smell but it's a very distinct smell and my family yeah so I like this system for a lot of reasons I get to leche for biochar I also get to deal with like the meats and the fats and the dairy the stuff that you can't you know they just tell you over and over again don't put that in a rubber compost pile you know unless you're a pro just don't even touch it don't put that in your backyard pit I like it yeah for that reason you can get rid of a lot of stuff now here's the trick is that I've got this bucket full of stuff that's my empty bucket on the left see my little holes see that's the bottom of another bucket that I wedged in there that's my other bucket that I've just got sitting next to it with my bouquet she inoculated Brandt let me show you something here's a protip you see this lid give one of those that's called an easy off lid that's where we could do a whole class just on five gallon buckets and we might do that well you keep going to keep an eye out the easy off lid that comes from Northern Tool that's where I got that and I bought maybe five of them they're like not even a maybe $1 apiece maybe a little more hand on that real nice if you're doing something like opening a bucket all the time look I am here it is it's sorry for the blurry pictures but that's my food that I threw in there and sprinkle some Bokashi on I'll add more food I'll pile that up till it's about maybe three-quarters full that's my plate I'm a little plastic plate that I just wedge on there push you down that's what it looks like after it's been sitting for a couple of weeks definitely got some serious fungal action going on whatever that is now what do you do with that that's not compost you know that's not topsoil you can't mix it in straight what they tell you to do is go out and dig a hole either put it in your regular compost pile at this point or go out and dig a hole in your garden I dug a hole in a new bed that I'm trying to establish about a month ago and last night I went out there and dug it up and I can tell you that it's almost entirely gone almost there's little piece I think there's garlic scapes or something in there that are still persistent I had a little paper bag of banana peels and I threw that in there the paper did not is still there the paper still looks like it was you know originally just kind of interesting did you put it in the worm bin with any toxins in the works probably gonna be a little way too acidic for the worms I think they would be pretty upset you know maybe you could dose it to them but I would certainly wouldn't load them down with it I'll tell you one thing I did - and this is probably has a reason to do with why I still see persistent bits in the soil I just took that buck in just dumped it in and then covered it up absolutely next time I'll take it and kind of stir it up make sure I get lots of nice top soil around it but I have no doubt that you know a month from now that's going to be a nice place to to put a tree this is the ledge shade on the microscope now this actually looks this is a Meredith looking at the ledge shade from the last batch probably like back in April and it looks a lot like the original M the only thing I can tell you is these little green bits we believe those are the photosynthesizing bacteria photosynthesizing bacteria lactic acid that's the lie - bacillus yeast actin on my seats fermenting fungi so there is fungi in there don't ask me what any of those do but again I'm looking for diversity the important thing they do is out-compete the pathogens yeah make it more likely to be safe though I would I would say that you would treat vocation and leachate from it as if it were wrong and we're still because it's not guaranteed to you know eliminate all pathogens yeah but I mean that's for the elderly the very young and the immune compromised for the average person probably not a big deal but yeah you're talking safety you wouldn't you wouldn't count on it as being absolutely you know now like a worms got are hitting 132 degrees for the right amount of time with the compost it guarantees to take out all the pathogens yeah this is definitely me and there's very few very very few yeah we're getting down to some pretty low pH there okay he's doing compost it on just like the regular old traditional compost pile you guys hit in temperature like getting it nice and hot keeping it hot for a little bit okay good yeah that's great you know I struggle with that unless I've got a mountain of grass clippings I definitely struggle with getting in hot mixing as compost what I mean there is sort of mixing it with compost is the idea that you can mix it as an ingredient in your compost is probably ultimately the best way to do it I should say it's it's gonna be the most reliable it's that time element that's going to make sure that the microbes that are in your specific microclimate are gonna be well suited for what you need this manual here at what I've done is printed out one page where you guys I think it's 14 pages happy to share it link with you or just give you this when we're done it's called composting with biochar the guy's name is James Joyce he's a Australian biochar goo this thing was written I think probably ten years ago been doing it for a long time black is green that's the name of his company it's written right on the top I found this to be incredibly helpful explaining the the nuance of composting biochars and ingredient what basically he says is treat biochar as a as another carbon in this case call it a black carbon instead of a brown car then and the same deal where you want to get your target carbon to nitrogen ratio at about you know let's shoot for thirty two one carbons remember I said earlier you can take one part char and two parts urine if you do the math here it comes out to think 33 there CN ratio of ingredient a 100 how many parts let's do we're gonna do one one hundred times one plus C and ratio of ingredient B urine one times two so take that number 101 100 plus one and divide it by the total numbers of parts which is three and you get about 33 so that's within our target carbon to nitrogen ratio yeah everybody's tracking on that so you can do that with as many ingredients as you have say you've got a mountain of grass clippings like I do and a little bit of char and some leaves I can guess at this a lot of ways it's a guessing chad game carbon-nitrogen ratio a let's say I want to put in one par Bachar again so we're gonna go 100 times 1 and then I think I don't know let's put in to two parts leaves okay plus 55 times two and then let's do ten parts grass clippings and just see what happens so 15 times 10 100 plus 1 or 100 times 1 so that's 100 plus 55 times 2 110 plus 150 to 10 to 60 360 divided by 1 plus 2 3 plus 10 divided by 13 who can do that math 36 ok great nice work ok so that's pretty close to our target range well we might try to do is add I don't know what happens if we add two parts grass clippings to that so that's 15 times 12 now that's 180 this is 390 divided by 13 whatever that is yeah whatever that is it's a little bit closer to our target carbon-to-nitrogen ratio a big reason why we want to add biochar to a compost pile a couple of reasons again it's like ensures if you if you can nail a compost pile and get it right then it ensures that your compost is gonna be really well inoculated it helps you to get your compost pile right creates these especially the large pieces we're gonna create little passageways for gases to escape or to move across the pile it's gonna allow air to come in it's also going to remember that picture of char under the electron microscope and how porous it is what it's going to do is actually trap gases - it's going to absorb ammonia gases certain greenhouse gases that would otherwise escape off of your pile you can also put it down at the bottom of your pout to catch any excess liquid coming off the pile of pass-through box over on the right out you can pre charge the biochar with compost tea like I just did and then take that biochar and then put it in your compost pile and what you've done is just like seed your compost pile with the microbes that you know you want and you can presumably jumpstart the composting operation instead of letting just wild microbes come in there and do it you can jumpstart the process you can also do it is that that process to further reduce pathogens where if you do something like you're in charge you want to load your char up with your n and get those nutrients then you can further a compost it and guarantee that it's going to be safe same with the Bokashi now what I did last fall when I did my big compost pile had a bunch of raw biochar actually had two bins of Bokashi that were ready to go so I had 10 gallons of that slop put it in there had a little bit all kinds of funky stuff had a wood chip pile that had been sitting and rotting for four to three years added that stuff to it just added all kinds of crazy diversity ended up with some decent compost and ended up with some fantastic biochar certainly out of that ball so my whole life some milk products is there way she'll restart or should I just make the shot with that conference that I have a word would it be okay just to keep on continuing that does not put get early dairy in it I'm going to say what I think and then I'm gonna let Pat who can probably more eloquently answer the question I think that you're okay if it gets crazy hot I think you're gonna be fine if it gets hot it's hard to guarantee that it's gonna get hot it's gotta get hot hot like over 140 I think so building it day by day yeah I would stop doing that yeah I use all the things they say not to use except for patents all and but I have made compliment if you make compost well the real from what I could tell that's a dictum to just gets repeated repeated everybody looks it up they pass it from the next one yeah it's I don't think there's any scientific basis on it it's all microbe food if you get it to process to further reduce pathogens right to 132 and it's like yogurt I mean where the eyes are just gonna have a bad pathogen and it certainly is torn up by the microbes yeah you know I just think it's it's out there in the in the internet and it was in books before that never just says it won't person that's why you say it's because everybody says it it's a safeguard because a lot of people think they're composting and maybe necessarily aren't so you're generally safe I think if you do that with your grass clippings or whatever but um yeah the throw foods and it's it's a rodent attractant I mean I'm I know that's the main reason why you're not gonna do it it's definitely gonna bring around way more pests if you have those higher value foods in there yeah I think that's why Road and those people originally said it is because you're less likely to bring him but don't pull yourself you can still get rats with nothing but vegetable waste I'll cover this real briefly because I know it's getting late here's an interesting theory about using biochar from this guy from the Ithaca Institute this is definitely something to check out if you guys just want to geek out on biochar for a while check out the Ithaca Institute and this paper was maybe published again ten years ago just kind of riff on the idea of how it may be it's a little wasteful to make biochar and then immediately put it in your soil when biochar itself is such a fantastic filter medium it has a lot of other oddball properties it actually shields electromagnetic waves its insulating material you can take biochar and you can mix up a plaster and then you can use that presumably to actually filter indoor air it's a nice black has a nice matte finish again it'll shield the electromagnetic waves it's an insulating material that I've heard of somebody who takes that plaster and puts it on like 16 inches thick uses it as an insulation and then when you're done if you're gonna tear your house down or whatever just chip that plaster out and then put it in your compost pile or your soil use it first for a higher value and then use it in your soil a lot of people that now there's a lot of research right now about using biochar and storm or storm water runoff management systems in coal mine drainage systems they're taking biochar and they're absorbing pollutants in the biochar you know I'm not really sure how that's going to work it to further put it in the soil I don't think they're doing that but um but just be aware of that biochar has quite a few other applications I'll circle back around and talk about what I want to do in the pond now that I've had this experience with the aquaponic system is is again I'm going to clean up the pond with the biochar by filtering the pond we're simultaneously inoculating the biochar you know just try to get moving on that if if you have a use for it filtering the air of hen houses people have been doing that for a long time using charcoal as bedding for animals people have been doing that for a long time it's it'll absorb the urine and help manage smells in a in a hen house for sure a little review and then we're done biochar is helpful to crush it screen it apply draw by char will suck in the nutrients out of your soil no doubt condition biochar by adding nutrients add microbes biochar should be wedded as part of the conditioning process or prior to now some people just run rainwater through it you know just to wet it and and move off any residual ash or anything in there laid out a couple of oddball systems for composting at home you guys just like pick the one that's right for you if I was going to start doing anything tomorrow I would do the worms it's so easy yeah just me you got to have high organic matter in your soil regardless if you go through all this effort to feed your biochar and make this like Frank and really nice biochar that you load into dead soil eventually those microbes are gonna run out of food and you're gonna be done you still got to feed your soil hey and this is I'm still a bit of a newbie at gardening myself I've only had my garden for three or four years now but what I find is that I've got I know that I've got this incredibly like powerful topsoil no I know that because I put mulch on it and that mulch disappears so I'm feeding my soil mostly with my mulch the occasional spray of compost tea I do probably one application of compost a year and I'll put a little bit of warm castings in at each new plant in like at a transplant I'll just put a little little bit in there other than that I don't really have a fertilizing program by any means if you're gonna condition your char again mix it with a higher organic nitrogen source like your worm castings or your good compost and best practice is to keep it moderately moist don't let it dry out keep it moderately warm don't let it get too hot or too cold and let it breathe these little bags the little tea bags over here are a nice little container for that if you have a very small amount perforated bags are okay perforated check bags if you got buy a bag of blood cow compost it's gonna have little perf holes in it and if it's for that reason plastic woven bags we breathe plastic poly webbing bags yeah those that's that's what I was looking for consider the cascading applications that I described and put it in a one to ten percent by volume it's obviously a lot easier in practice to put it in by volume instead of trying to weigh it that would be pretty hard for a non-scientist to do get it in the rezone if you can if you have just a small amount of biochar that you make throughout the year best thing to do get it right there in the root zone a good way to do that is to mix it with your worm castings a little bit of compost if you have it do the compost tea if you want do the urine if you want but get it so that you know it's nice and inoculated you another step you can do is buy some mycorrhizae inoculant powder at that time you can add it to your conditioned biochar and then put it out with your transplants that would be the recommended method for putting out small amounts of biochar in a garden it's different yeah this is a micro Razi inoculum powder and how many of you guys have worked with that okay yeah fantastic stuff Pat I'm gonna let you explain mycorrhizae okay so mycorrhizae are just fun easy to have a direct relationship with plants Oh Holly why was plenty we love to harvest you know fungus mushrooms love the harvest are actually like horizon and there's two kinds there's ones that grow on the outside of the roots and they are specific to just some tree species but the greatest number are the ones into the roots and most of our vegetables have that relationship brassicas our broccoli family and beef family don't have that relationship but most of our vegetables our grasses our flowers have that relationship and basically those punji are working like fine root hairs they spread out they they make lots more water available they helped compete other pathogens and they actually exude acids that make recalcitrant than almost like passports available so it's very effective and actually when Dan was talking about feeding the soil small garden so he hasn't got the focus yet on cover crops though I'm leaning on them about it well cover crops are the very best way to be able to be the soil because they're pumping food out to feed that microbial community and then as those roots are dropping off the glues from the mycorrhizae the right mycorrhizae produce glues they're actually grabbing some of that carbon and making it much more stable so it stays in the soil so it's very powerful but I would say if you're trying to make sure that you have a way to keep the Micra a live longer that's it's fine to put it in the char and then people do that but if you want to be sure that it's accurate as fast as possible get down roots yeah that's why I said put it up when you're ready to put it out add it to the Risen one thing you don't want to do is compost it you know you'll kill it if you if you put it in before you compost but what you're getting is the spores of my cries II and they need roots to become active so once they clutch the root that's when they germinate and they become active and it's probably being made active by those exudates I know I don't know if the show yeah in my defense I am doing cover crops now yeah I just can't talk about it yeah and it's a lot harder if you have a small garden cuz you have to you always want to grow stuff in it for cover crops but that's another talk so we do you have your biochar in your garden is it a paid to water plants like not the whole plant but the roots with the compost tea to keep it yeah absolutely yeah I mean it do a like a soil drench with compost tea I'll tell you what I do and I don't remember where I got this idea from at home maybe probably from that with the speaker that we had come here Michael Phillips when he does he does a compost team he is a fantastic writer did get a copy of his book about four years ago holistic orchard yeah what he suggests doing is mulching your trees with wood chips and then drenching the fresh mulch with compost always love this which is yeah there's videos online okay yeah yeah does he get into that his spray schedule and the whole is the holistic sprays yeah doesn't he mostly use the M because he doesn't think you can make good compost to you maybe he did say that in the book although he talks a little bit about compost do you I think yeah he says couples tea is great it's just that it's harder day ain't dial in the thing about buying the microbes is their dial is ya know stuff you don't know that you have good compost and something I wanted to mention when Dan was talking about all this is you can't tell everything you want to know about compost by doing it but you can tell if you've got really bad compost too definitely shouldn't years by doing a bio asset and that's simply growing something like crest or beans that are going to be very susceptible to bad compost to the wrong acids and alcohols and then you just count like 10 or 100 you know so you can do that easily and you see how well they germinate how are they grow and if they all died then your compost is crap you don't want if they do well then you know that your accomplice is good it doesn't mean there isn't a pathogens in it but it means you said it hasn't made it hasn't got a whole lot of bad asses or alcohols that are gonna make the plants die and that's that matters yeah we're done with the presentation thanks for sitting through that yeah cool okay thanks [Music] you

Channel: Living Web Farms

Views: 50,140

Rating: 4.927619 out of 5

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Id: D-vlZ5u6avY

Length: 45min 20sec (2720 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 08 2018