Boosting Soil Biology: Making JMS Part 1

[Music] [Music] [Music] hey folks welcome to bear mountain today this is a little different than we've done in the past we're going to be making a sequence of three videos covering jadam microorganism solution or jms we're going to be doing the first video sequence which is how we put it together how we actually make it and then we'll do two other videos following up the actual brew process as well as the application question would be number one that might be on people's minds besides what is jms which we will explain later in the video but what is it you're trying to do with it what we're trying to do is increase the biological diversity in our soil particularly as we apply it on the plants and the idea is it will improve the plants ability to grow by improving the soil so that's our focus and what we're trying to work on so let's get into it and start the process okay let's start first with some definitions and explaining what this is jadam microorganism solution or jms is an anaerobically steeped t it's not in in a sense it is not the same in any way as you would normally think a compost tea is this is more taking the biology that's in a very small inoculum of either leaf mold soil or soil that's right below a compost pile and steeped in a water basically rain water is the best or a softened water works as well hard water tends not to show as much biologic action but it still will work too but what it is is that bacterias and the actinium my seeds and all the other protozoa lives that are in that leaf mold soil are basically grown for a period of 36 to i can be depending on the temperature as long as 60 hours in in a water solution that has as its only feed source potato starch and then in addition to the potato starch we also add in sea salt to give it a slight mineral content that the microbes can use while they're propagating themselves in this brew and so it's totally different than when somebody makes compost teas most of them are aerated and actively aerated compost teas where they have a bubbler in it or they have some kind of vortex going where the water is in constant motion in this case what we're going to do is when we mix this up we just set it aside at ambient temperatures if you're in the spring late spring and into early fall or in the winter time with a small like aquarium heater in it which would heat the solution to about 72 degrees fahrenheit the whole point on this is you don't want to disturb it once you do the mixing in and the idea is this material then is used as a soil drench whereas most activated aerated compost teas people when they get finished with them after the brew cycle will either use it as a foliar feed or they'll use it you know as a soil drench as well this focus here what we're trying to do is get this biology into the soil itself so we're trying to basically brew up what's in that leaf mold soil or compost soil and get a large dose of very diverse bacterias and protozoas and things into the into the soil where our plants are growing or going to be growing so what do we need to use in this part of the video what we're going to show is what we're going to do to make the feedstock which is the sea salt and the potato now any kind of potato that is something that i have just found um on experimenting with this that it appears to be that the best type of potato is is a spring potato such as like a red potato a very thin skinned potato like a yukon gold as well either those early to mid season seem to perform better for me although you can use a russet or a late potato late storage potato it it what we're doing is is we're taking the potato and we're boiling it until it is cooked just like you would if you were trying to make a potato salad and it seems though that the bacterias really grow very well on the non-russet potato which tends to have a little bit more coarser flesh to it if you think about how like a spring potato is or a new potato is it tends to have a very soft flesh and almost melts in your mouth i think what happens with this even when blended up that these materials tend to be um smaller and act as a as a the starch material seems to break up maybe a little bit easier in the water and it seems for my my experience in making these things that it makes a better brew organic or regular uh that is important um organic potato you either want to have potatoes you raise yourself without any chemicals a lot of potatoes when you buy on the commercial potatoes that are non-organic they use a lot of fungicides because potatoes are susceptible to many types of diseases blight diseases and things of that nature so commercial potatoes particularly the russet potatoes tend to have a lot of these fungicidal residues in it and these bacterias and things that we're using from the soil inoculant are very sensitive to that and i have been using non-organic potatoes gotten very poor results very inconsistent results but when i switched to the organic potato and using the potato that is like i said the the earlier potato uh the results have been much better and when i look into the microscope i see more diversity so there is enough residual i think that it does make a difference now one of the other things in particular if you've read any of young sang cho's book and in jadam he says you can use you know quite a bit of potato if you want there that you can use more potato he doesn't really specify exactly you know what the maximum limit of potato is but he does talk about the minimum and what i have found in experimenting with this that using the minimum gets a better product and that and think about it from the standpoint if you're putting in too much food into an environment the bacteria certain bacterias are going to grow faster than others and deplete the oxygen faster and it's going to change the dynamics of what you're you're trying to get out of your jms in other words it may become more anaerobically bacterially dominated with maybe less protozoa or or less diversity of other things like attenumeis or something like that so if the oxygen level drops very very fast the other bacterias and things that maybe work a little bit slower uh don't have that that time to develop fast enough before the oxygen drops off this is a theory i have because what i've noticed is when i was using twice as much potato as i'm using now as an example i would get a poorer result less diversity and it would not tend to brew up the same so what is the minimum basically what it works out to is it works out to um approximately two to four grams of um potato to a liter of water and so if you're somewhere in that zone between two to four grams um it tends to give a pretty good result so what i have done is is i tend to shoot for when i'm making a bucket a four gallon bucket of this jms i tend to shoot for putting 60 gram of potato in it which gives me approximately four grams per liter yeah four grams per liter and that is more than enough food but it's not so much food that it causes things to get out of balance really quick the other thing that we add into the solution of the 15 liters is sea salt now if you put too much salt in you know it's going to throw things out of balance from your plants and etc so the whole thing is is you're you're actually diluting this down by putting one gram of sea salt in per liter of water so if you stay to that ratio what you're what you're doing is is you're you're really you know dropping the percentage of actual sodium because it's sodium chloride is in the salt but there's also a very large amount of other minerals in sea salt there can be up to 83 or maybe even more minerals of all kinds of things that plants can use and that's what you're really targeting to get to keeping the sodium and the chloride levels down low enough but these other minerals are are available to the plant and then most of these micronutrients plants and microbiology need very very small amounts so one gram of this doesn't really cause any problems in terms of once you you know get ready to put the jms on the soil you're diluting it usually again you're not putting it on straight so you get a lot of dilution relative to this but it is it provides an availability of micronutrients to the bacterias and things that are growing in the solution okay so the first thing we're going to do is take our boiled potato and see if we're in the weight area this is a pretty small guy so i'm thinking we're probably pretty close to the oh look at that 60 on the dot wow okay this can happen but this is perfect so we don't need to do anything cutting anything off or add anything on we got more than enough we'll just set that aside for a second okay so the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna weigh out 15 grams of sea salt at 11. 14 one more a little more just a little more not changing there it is 15 15 grams okay so that we're going to add to the water in the brew bucket so we'll just set that aside at this point scales off okay so one of the things that i found is when you read the jadam book he says well you know you just put the potato in a in a mesh sack like a sock or something like that and then just kind of you know massage it into the water you can do that but he also kind of notes that well you could use a mixer and just blend it up really well and what i found was if when you're using just like hand massaging the potato starch into the water it it tends to um not get in his complete uh form that's as useful um it's like some of it gets in maybe 80 percent of it gets in so instead of that what um i do is i use just one of these small stick mixers and i'll break the potato up i put in maybe a cup of water into a pot and then what i'll do is i'll just kind of hand break up the potato a little bit so it's you know ready to just put that in the water and then as a last step i'll use the uh the mixer here [Applause] [Music] okay so it's all mixed up now and it's liquefied and basically this is now in a form that can be really easily mixed into the brew bucket and there isn't much more to it just takes a couple of minutes to get them kind of blended up so you basically pureed it um you know if you didn't have a hand mixer you could just use a blender or cuisinart or something with a little water and the whole idea is to get it into a pureed slurry that's not too thick that you can't pour it but you know you don't need a lot of extra water in it either at this point now some people may say okay well why don't you just add the salt to it at this point i've tested that and what i have found is that i get a better dissolution of the salt if i mix it with a little hot water ahead of time to get the salt to dissolve and then mix it into the bucket of the brew water before adding the the food and the inoculant so you you can you know do you can put it all into one and just throw it all in at once but this is kind of cold in a sense that it's room temperature and by using the hot water you get a little bit better um you get the solution to dissolve so then it can be more evenly mixed in the brew bucket is kind of the approach that i've taken so let's take this outside now to the brew bucket and we'll do the last couple of steps to get it going okay so now we're at the mix stage so the the first thing we're going to do is we're going to dissolve the salt and some hot water uh we've got a little hot water heater here in the greenhouse so we'll just put it doesn't have to be a whole lot and so we're just gonna as you can see it looks a little cloudy in it right now but it's dissolving and i'm gonna just kind of gently swirl it around until all that granular stuff there is dissolved in the solution and then once that's dissolved then it's going to be a lot easier to get it mixed into the brew bucket okay you can see now we got it all dissolved in it so this is ready to be added to the brew bucket in the brew bucket we have with four gallons of rain water in it so let's just go over and get this mixed in we're going to want to make certain that we get it well mixed into the water itself so when we pour it in it's just a matter of getting it in and then i just kind of use the tray just kind of like a big spatula and just kind of mix it give it a few stirs okay and then that that should be in there fairly well dissolved since we're filming this and brewing this in january our nighttime temperatures even with a small space heater in the greenhouse still get down to about 45 and the daytime temps with good ventilation in here will be maybe 65 degrees so this is a really pretty cool greenhouse it's it's very slow when you get temperatures that are below 68 degrees for the biology to go through its process of replicating and getting you know full diversity into it so during this time of year what we do is we'll we'll put the brew over uh a two inch insulated foam board on the bottom and a two inch on the back and inside of the the actual brew bucket itself we put a approximately a small um aquarium heater these things you can get it at you know amazon or whatever they're not very expensive this particular one can heat water up to 10 gallons so it's anywhere from 5 gallons to 10 gallon it's not a problem for it connected to um this is a thermostat that we actually used for heat mats but it really has a more sensitive control to it because it has a temperature thermocouple that we also put in the bucket so even though there's a temperature thermocouple on the aquarium heater we tend to set that to about 80 degrees um so that they will cap out it won't go any higher than that if if this thing for some reason decided to not do its job so there's no way the temperature can you know run way far ahead or drop too far below this has a very tight um temperature setting to it you can set it to you know eight within one degree and it will heat it perfectly okay now it may not show because this is an electronic led type device and so it has a pulse to it so it may not show perfectly on the camera but it has a digital display that shows the temperature of the solution as as it is right now and it's sitting at 74 degrees which is perfect um if it drops below 72 it turns the heater on so if it goes above 74 it turns the heater off so we can keep this within like two degrees which is perfect for the brew of what we're trying to get to so we've added the salt to the mixture um stirred it up temperature is set you may notice also too around the bucket we have a frost blanket and we're just using uh some scrap agribon 50 and this is a way to just insulate the side of the bucket as as well as once we get finished we'll put a lid over the top and we'll bring the blanket over the top of that too so it keeps the heat trapped in it so that's the whole point because we don't have to do anything after we add everything here it's basically the biology is going to take care of itself so now let's go to the next step of adding the inoculum and the food and setting it up and you know letting it do its thing okay this is the bucket of the compost soil we harvested a while back and as you can see it's got a little bit of biology on the top of it um we just keep it in the dark with a rag over the top it's not really dry but it's not really moist i mean from the standpoint of you like wet but it has enough moisture in it to keep the biology alive so if it starts to get dry as things go forward we'll just add more water to it you can also i found feed this material actually quite easy if you're worried about it you know like it's been sitting too long and there's nothing more for the biology to eat and this thing and then maybe it's going to start going dead i i just added oats i took i took the material out and i added basically i think it was about three cups of oatmeal you know just regular organic oatmeal nothing fancy in it make sure you don't use conventional oatmeal or conventional oats because they do tend to desiccate the grain when they're getting ready for harvest using roundup which has strong anti-microbial microbiota well it's basically a bacteriocyte steel cut steel cut is fine crimped is fine i just use regular rolled oatmeal because it was cheap you know it was the cheapest and you don't you need to use much of this to get an inoculation so for this four gallon bucket of jms i'm only going to use 20 grams of this actual soil as an inoculant which when you get down to it isn't much so we'll turn the scale on here you'll be surprised at how little it takes to get to 20 grams that's it so if you look at that and you go wow that's as much as he's taking to make one four gallon batch of a jms which when he uses it in the field when we use it in the field we'll dilute that down and for as an example three gallons of water we'll add basically 15 tablespoons of the jms so you can start to do the math here pretty fast and see that that this 20 grams of inoculant is going to create a lot of microbiology so that's why this three gallon pail will probably last us a good year so probably once every month or so i'll come out and i'll kind of disturb it a little bit and add those oats into it just to kind of give it it'll bring it up with a little more moisture just to keep it going and then i'm going to store it in a cool dark place when i say cool i'm talking about you know keeping it around 50 to 55. is it going into our root cellar yeah that's be a perfect place for it um if you couldn't you know use a root seller and say you had a cooler of some kind that you're keeping at 35 to 40 that would be okay but um it might be a it would tend to eat any food you put it into it a lot slower because you're really lowering the microbiology level down um you want to you know to have a certain amount of activity you you kind of want to be at least 55 to 60 um to get it now we're not what we don't want to do is we don't want to stoke this to the point where you know the biology just takes off so that's why we want to keep it as you know relatively in a cool uh damp place so for the winter time it's perfect out here in the greenhouse everything's perfect okay so what's the most effective way we have found to get the food and the inoculant into the brew bucket without you know basically creating um you know a bunch of muck down at the bottom of it we use a paint strainer bag you could use a sock or something of that or an old nylon or something of that nature it doesn't have to be that we just get these at home depot and they're like you get a pack of them for a couple of bucks and it's just a fine nylon mesh um so you know it's going to be pretty resistant to you know the biology and chemicals working on it and that sort of thing and it's easy to clean so when you're finished with it you can take it out wash it off and you know get multiple uses out of it so what we're going to do is just first thing is we're going to put the inoculum into the bag make sure we get it all in there as much as we can okay now the next step once we got this in the bag we're going to go over to the brew bucket and we're going to pour the potato puree through the bag as we're mixing it in the water so it's going to be kind of a simultaneous type thing and and then the last step we're going to do i'm just going to talk about it here is we're going to bind the bag up with a zip tie and we're just going to suspend what's left in the brew bucket over you know just like we're going to hook this to a stick that's sitting resting on the top of the brew bucket and then this will actually be in the brew water itself okay what we're going to do is we're just going to kind of gently put this in the water and you can kind of see then the last step is i'm going to put in the potato puree i'm pouring it directly into the bag that way any of the skins that are in the potato puree aren't going to be suspended in the water and i'm just going to take a little bit of the water kind of mix it around there we go got it in all right the next step is i'm just going to make sure that this material is really well mixed into the into the brew bucket itself so i'm just going to kind of like spin it around and you can kind of see the potato stuff is getting suspended in the water i'll just also massage the bag a little bit get the biology out of the material and the color of the water is turning a little bit kind of reflecting any of the humic acids or other things organic materials that might you know fine enough to get through the mesh bag but that is basically it that's the mixing process and what it's going to do is any any solids that are that are in the water that might have escaped from the bag are going to settle down to the bottom very quickly so we'll check back probably at about somewhere between 17 and 24 hours to see what things look like but my experience has been anything that the color on this will begin it will lighten back up you know in the first 24 hours but it'll be kind of a cloudy uh look to it a little bit opaque but that's the biology working on the on the starches and things of that nature so our last step is we're just going to suspend the bag what's left in it into the solution itself and what i do is i just use some reuse of reusable zip ties and i've got two of them here and what i do is it creates on one side just basically a kind of a loop and then i've got a plain old stick it's just a little piece of molding that i got and let me just make sure that's it tight tight so don't go anywhere and i don't want this plastic in the water per se so that's basically it the material is hanging in the bag so anything that's left that it didn't get massaged into the water still has access to kind of you know go through the water and in the first 24 hours like i said the first thing that's going to happen is material is going to settle down and then we're going to start to see some small bubble formation and what we'll do is we'll come back and check this at about 24 hours um probably tomorrow afternoon it's about 3 3 30 right now so we'll check it again somewhere between 2 and 3 30 and we'll talk about you know what's going on in it at that point okay last thing we're going to do here for tonight is we're just going to put a lid slightly ajar on the top of it and it's open to the back so if there's any venting that needs to go on it goes on and then we're just gonna put drape over the top this is the agribon 50 and make sure it's around the sides and um it doesn't have to be super you know in this case where we are right now that should be given enough insulation that the solution is at 73 degrees right now just perfect and it should just go on and do its thing all night okay so folks may wonder like why are you going through all this effort why don't you supply compost on the soil and you know water it in it's good enough right yes and no what we're doing here is we're actually brewing up where we're taking an inoculant and we're leveraging up the biology that's in that soil interface between the compost where the compost pile ends and the soil begins so there's quite a bit of diversity in that and what we're trying to do is brew up a good section of that and then apply it where our plants are growing as a soiled drench so the idea is is that yes this is somewhat of an anaerobic mix but i would say it's not totally anaerobic because we're not taking something that's sat for two or three weeks and all the biology and it consumed all the oxygen and there's nothing left in there except weird stuff this still what we're doing is we're going to harvest this at its peak and we'll talk about how we identify what the peak is but what we but once we get it at its peak it has a large amount of biology in it that will function well you know just below the surface level probably three inches to to 12 inches down so the idea is this is going to go down into the root zone and we're going to be doing this on a repetitive basis about once every two weeks so we're going to continually to you know keep adding this material in to aid the plants this biology then will help in terms of you know getting more diversity into the plant root zone and we'll probably with the protozoas and things of that nature we'll start consuming some more of the bacterias and things that are growing in our soil and release more nutrients for the plants in the plant zone so it's going to be kind of a kind of a combination if the plants get more materials they'll grow more they'll act you know put in more exudates and we'll just kind of keep the cycle going how deep into the season you can apply this material year round how long are we going um every two weeks till we'll we'll be doing um it particularly on things that are our perennial cut flower crops like our dusty miller and our mums and our senate geraniums we're going to you know look at that first we're also applying it to our spring ranunculus and anemones and early snapdragons so we're seeing a really good response so far and what we have been putting this on for the last three months particularly in our hoop house four what we've noticed is the compaction layer that we used to have at about 10 inches down is disappearing we have many areas now in that hoop house 4 where we're growing our overwintered snaps and our ranunculus where now when we do a compaction test see where that compaction level begins it's down now anywhere from 17 to you know i've gone as far as 26 inches on one of them so this material is drenching in and is working in a lower oxygen levels as it goes further down and it is creating a softer soil the other thing that we noticed with it in applying it to ranunculus and snapdragons is we are watering less this winter than we have in the past so it appears that the plants are getting a more effective somehow through the biology that's going in the soil they're more effectively pulling in water and the organic material is retaining more water so um it seems to be there's a positive here that the soils aren't drying out like they were and it's working really well so that's what we're going to be using it for and we're going to be showing you once this batch is finished how we actually apply it on our mums okay so what we did in this video is we worked on the actual brew in making the material itself and hopefully this helped you guys understand the ins and outs the most important thing quality of water you want to use either rain water or softened water or a water that isn't too hard it functions much much much better secondly you don't need this much food and you don't need as much inoculum you know there's lots of when you people you see maybe on youtube where they go well i got a you know this bucket and i put in you know two or three big potatoes and then i put in a big handful of soil you don't need that much to get the response so that's important so you can get your materials will go much much further always important use organic potatoes do not use conventional potatoes very important so those things being said what we'll do is in the next video is we'll show you the actual application itself so thanks for coming along today and as always stay safe out there and i hope you guys have a good day bye bye you

Channel: Bare Mtn Farm

Views: 12,310

Rating: 4.9384613 out of 5

Keywords: JADAM, Jadam Microorganism Solution, JMS, Soil Biology, Making Compost extract, Nonaerated Compost Tea, Bare Mtn Farm, Bare Mountain Farm, Bare Mtn, Using seasalt for plant micronutrients, Use seasalt for soil micronutrients

Id: 3HQ7s-xLyc8

Length: 35min 16sec (2116 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021