Building Microbe-Rich Living Compost Part 1

[Music] I am Jane Weaver and I love composting hi this is a painting that I commissioned a friend of mine will price to paint when we look at plants normally we cannot see where the action is we can see the above-ground parts of the plant which are actually not the main show here unless you are an are weed if you're an are weed your business is to get going have sex make all these seeds millions and millions of seeds and not really sink any roots into the ground do this all in about six weeks or less and no real changes happen to the soil for you but Douglas fir for example will have roots that go down two to three hundred feet the Douglas fir really needs to have access to resources even though most of those resources are stored already in the tree itself so if I were a Douglas fir and I have that many roots let me ask you first what does a plant get from being above ground what nutrients does it get sunlight lots of different frequencies of light mm-hmm air and that's mainly carbon dioxide and that's it two elements come from being in the air everything else almost everything that's on the periodic table has to come from underground so the more roots or the more access it has to greater and greater volumes of soil the more the tree can handle what's going to happen to it so in addition to sort of stabilizing it there on the ground there it's reaching out for water and nutrients and all kinds of things you can buy a copy of this at William Henry price at the pink dog in River Arts District so most of what then happens to a plant you cannot see you can't see chemical reactions happen you cannot see vibratory things happen and you can't see who's doing it unless you get a microscope at 400x power you can actually see the little tiny beings that are making soil resources into plant available nutrients and this is where the whole thing happens here I want to take you through what I think is the most fascinating notion about soil and composting and then we'll talk about how to compost after that I want to get you excited it's really a cool story so what happens in a tree or a vascular plant that has green parts above ground is that it makes solar panels that are flat planar surfaces that can absorb lots of sunlight and the Sun shines down on these things and through the action of chlorophyll and whatnot sugars and starches and proteins are made and the elements they're in are of course carbon hydrogen and oxygen and the kinds of substances that the leaves make are in response to what they need so let's say that a calcium ion is required in some leaf near the top of that tree signal is sent down via this substance through the stem of the leaf through the branch through the stem of the the trunk of the tree down into the roots and is imputed into the soil this means a couple of things there's something there that is going to eat that sugar and is drawn there for that particular reason so the exudates that come down from the tree or the plant are creating an environment they're specific for certain kinds of bacteria and fungi when the bacteria and fungi get there those animals and plants are specifically going to give the calcium ion that this plant needs not sure exactly how it all works but it does and there are some processes that are understood and some that are not yet so in that case then the root absorbs the calcium ion back and sends it back up to the leaf in the tree how long do you suppose that would take let's say the tree is hundred feet tall that's been clocked at 90 seconds so this is a miracle I mean this is not something we can do the tree can do it and if conditions are perfect that's sort of how it works out sometimes I'm sure lots of other processes take much longer than that but that's the most amazing part of the story I think dr. Elaine Ingham who is my mentor in this work tells a fantastic story about a day that she took a bunch of a herd of graduate students she said out to a cave somewhere in Oregon underneath a stand of virgin Douglas firs and in this cave there are bunches of roots hanging down from the ceiling and dripping and so this the rest of the students - one went up to the top of the mountain and at the stroke of noon or something like that injected blue dye into the trunks of certain trees and they decided to go off to a bar while they are the lodge while they left this kid with the telephone inside the cave how soon did he call them because he saw blue dye was three minutes actually if they didn't get to go to the lodge after all trees are amazing we we also know now that they have communication systems through micro Raizel roots and who knows what else is going on there it's just not visible to us yet there's a lot of ground underneath our feet here where all this is going on so there's a lot of energy being absorbed from the sunlight a lot of different frequencies and how much energy goes to the roots in a weed there aren't very many roots so only 20% of its business is about doing anything for the soil or other plants its interest is in reproduction grasses vegetables and shrubs and trees you can see a succession here this is actually how bare ground would succeed in two mature ecological systems used increasingly more energy to make roots and to promote all these processes that happen underground so this is the famous Henricus Robin holding some grass that was planted bare ground and then treated by him with compost the grass was planted in July in Seattle and harvested in November and it was mowed to two inches when I pull up grass in my yard the roots are about that long so he harvested this by putting a big PVC pipe down and having a crane pull it back up Hendrika will meet him later if we have time is a landscaper he does for landscapes what Beethoven did for the symphony and it's true so we live on a planet where there are limitations that are precisely set for life here a certain amount of oxygen in the atmosphere a certain amount of nitrogen the temperatures do not in the temperate zones and the tropics do not vary all that much it's kind of a precarious system here we need to pay some attention to what's happening and to basically try to work with nature there's nobody here who does would not agree that when we act against natural processes things kind of get twisted up and so I would like to just go around just tell me your name and what are you a grazer or farmer or a gardener or some people just go really fast I just want to know who's out there would you mind starting blue Robinson we've just been here for two years but we've been an organically gardening half acre when I grew up to three acres off and on since the seventies and composting and all of those things but in North Carolina it's a lot different than our climate so vegetables first gently place the fruits of work as you mark ronson same things thank you thank you okay I'm Barbara Toria my garden in five verse boxes right now how because my house has a lot of shade at trees around so the only sunny spot is on the parking lot in front of the house so I have my ice box mr. haire Thank You Lucy just a small organic gardening domestic vegetables okay great thank you I'm James Davis and even I just gave up a 24-acre bed-and-breakfast and total project gardens etc I did the compost there I'm Holly white tugs and living work on a small diversified two and a half acres of direct market vegetables and also pasture-raised meats accordingly I'm a teaching farmer sustainable agriculture hi I'm Mike dill my wife and I have some raised beds so um I just want to actually bless you before we go on that'd be all right this is star Hawks blessing for composters abbreviated for this meeting blessings on you composters and you gardeners farmers landscapers growers of worms and mushrooms defenders and planters of trees those who guard and renew pastures and forests and soil builders those who cleans the waters and purify the air and all those who clean up the messes others have made those who heal grassland and stream those who heal cities and stand against greed those who take risks in service to the earth and all those who are moved in their lives to heal and protect the earth in small ways and large we are grateful for all the beings large and small who have made the great sacrifice of transformation consuming the dead and leaving the remains of their bodies here may we remember that waste is food for somebody and may our eyes our ears and our minds be open to opportunities to enlarge the circle and perpetuate the cycles of life to create abundance and more life okay so what if there were a perfected way to cycle nutrients into plants and out of plants and into plants and out of plants that we could use it turns out there is nature spent 3 billion years I believe sort of perfecting a process of nutrient cycling under the surface of the planet and a billion years ago vascular plants appeared on the scene and thought whoa if we had roots we could sink our roots down in there and take advantage of what's going on and so they did so there are many symbiotic systems happening for plants on this planet and it's very important of course because as plants die they would be mounting up and covering everything it's important that we have some way to deal with the death of biological systems here we also know that if we try to use pharmaceuticals so to speak as in sort of fertilizers we deplete some areas of their resources and we create problems some of which I'll look into here as we go on through the slideshow so I want to get you acquainted with why we do the things we do in the compost pile they'll make a lot of sense I hope when we get there so the first part of the show here is the most exciting to me what's the invisible stuff that's going on that we can't see when I got my first microscope I just it blew me out of this out of the water it was just so great okay here's the doctor Elaine Ingham who I believe is the guardian angel of the planetary soils she actually saved us from some very detrimental release of genetically engineered material one day and she has been proclaiming the quality of microbes in the soil back in the day when nobody knew about it she was very persistent and brave and finally people are now taking up the cause about microbes in the soil so this is Elaine showing she's on a farm where the farmer for 32 years every year turned in a soil test and the pH of his soil would be acidic about 4.5 which is very acidic it was recommended to him to put 8 tons of lime on his farm which he did every year and every year the soil tests would come back in two weeks right at the application the soil would test at six point five which is much higher and good in two weeks it would be six point four in a month it would be back to four point five like it always was and where was that lime going well there's a layer of compaction here about a foot underneath the soil which is interesting that it's that close to the top so between that layer of compaction where all that lime basically leached through the soil and hit is an anaerobic system because roots can't get through it water and air cannot punctuate it and so it would just stay acidic and there ought to be you know a lot more tons there but the s the anaerobic the absence of oxygen in the soil made it so acidic that it would just eat up the lime in the first place and what's left is in this layer of compaction so there is hope here if you could do one more tillage event with a chisel plow or something or keyline and pour in the compost in the compost tea the microbes will start to get things back together again they actually can save the situation but many gardens at home are like this all right they've been compacted and microbes will eventually eat their way through there it may take two or three applications of compost or compost tea but they will grow there if you treat them properly and take care of it I wanted to say a word about soil tests also there are over 640 different ways that a lab can check your soil and almost none of them resemble how the plants are going to deal with your soil with the minerals and nutrients that are in your soil they use very caustic materials basic reductions and acid reductions back and forth and so on just to find out what's locked in your soil and that's all waste product that has to be thrown into the landfill and what so it's interesting information but it doesn't really tell you anything until you have a lot of microbes in your soil that can make use of what's in there back here then after treating doing a biological treatment on this farm the pH immediately thereafter was about 6.8 which is great two weeks later it was 6.5 so there was a little loss of activity not very much but it was really really acid soil and then at four weeks and today it went back up to 6.8 you know this is astounding so please understand that anything that happens in the soil that is chemical any reduction or any creation of nutrients is a result of the biology that's in the soil it's not a result of dumping ground up stones the microbes still have to do the work of reducing that stuff to plant usable nutrients so what we are going to talk about today there are a lot of ways to compost and today is talk is biological thermal composting it uses live beings and heat to change waste products into useable plant nutrients okay we'll go through this really fast there are so many reasons to compost and you probably know all of them but it's nice to see them all in one place to advantageously recycle dead plant material to eliminate pathogens and unwanted seeds the heat in the compost pile the pathogenic microbes like Phytophthora and all the fungal diseases in that sort of thing really cannot survive high heat but most of the aerobic or the oxygen using microbes can survive high heat in one way or another and seeds of course will be rendered unfertile 160 is time to turn your pile in the beginning it will probably make several cycles so between 130 and 160 is a sort of ideal where the weeds and the pathogens will be killed we can concentrate the nutrients in ways that make them available to plants and we balance and optimize this soil microbial populations we can improve the soil structure bacteria and fungi grab little bits of minerals and organic material and humic acids and pelvic asses and they glue them together they are they are the original glue people and this will mean that you can retain gases and water and thus drought resistance in your soil once the soil is holding together you will limit erosion runoff leaching and compaction and the humic acids in the soil eliminate contaminants and rehabilitate six soils this is an interesting skill that humic acids have you have increased yields you'll not have to import anything from a third world foreign country that doesn't have an army to protect itself you'll optimize your soil pH and variability it'll basically stay at one level and I think it should be probably said here that soil pH needs to be variable it needs to be one thing at one time and something else at another time and even in a plant itself that is giving off exudates it is really not fair to say well your soil pH should be something or other because it needs to be able to very itself in order to supply these nutrients and ions to the exudates that are coming out of the roots maintain optimal ratios of fungi to bacteria there's going to be a theme here that we need more fungi we need more fungi how do we get more fungi maintain optimal ratios of predator and prey among the microbes optimize nutrient cycling and micro nutrient uptake maximize the nutrient density sounding very delicious we can sequester excess carbon the more fungi you get in your soil the more carbon will be taken out of the atmosphere to supply the carbon in the cell walls of the fungi if everybody who grazes we're doing rotational grazing properly it would take five years to get back to pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide in the sky in the atmosphere you increase your crop immunity because pathogens cannot live can compete with the aerobic organisms in the soil supports plant pollinators manages pest populations without pesticides you have very healthy plants they want to attract pests and improve flavor and nutrition for animals and humans you won't get that salty taste that you get in the vegetables that come from California they're raised with nitrate fertilizer concentrate and retain growth forces essential to human existence this gets into the biodynamic work poor soils cannot retain the forces that make plants grow actually inspire them and do the growing so we use biodynamic preparations in the compost pile so that it will receive these vibrations if you will from the cosmos and from the earth herself and put them on your garden and into your food so what is compost this is again dr. Ingham she cannot stand it when somebody says good compost that is its is it when you say too many things that's redundant thank you because if it's not really good it ain't compost it's something else so in compost we have large highly diverse populations of decomposing and living nutrient cycling microbes in their predators it is a big pile of microbes you look in there you will not any longer see a leaf or a stick or a piece of paper or whatever you put in their decomposed plant matter in humans we do want some organic matter in there to supply continuing meals for the critters that are living in there and humic s-- make soil aggregate and provide all kinds of chemical necessities for the plants finished compost is aerobic it has more than I forget what the level is something like six point six parts per million is starting to get anaerobic needs to stay full of oxygen and properly hydrated forty to fifty percent moisture what is the test to know if you've got fifty percent moisture your compost pile squeeze it and one drop who said that thank you if it's too wet you'll get a you know steady stream of water and if it's too dry it won't even hold together it will sort of crumble in your hand so basically what I'm trying to say here is that compost is a continuation and intensification of what is already natural what it was developed over time and really perfected so here's a picture of the soil food web and we start over on the left with the Sun creating these from all this fusion and transformation that's happening of elements in the Sun creating all the different vibrations and colors of light falling on earth something we haven't been able to duplicate it's too complicated and the solar collectors of the plants collect all these vibrations and make food and signals of their own that go into the soil they also die occasionally and their remains go into the soil as well that's the first trophic level of this process at the second level we have the decomposers the fungi and the bacteria bacteria will eat almost anything but mostly plant material and they do it by sideling up to a cell of a plant and opening their wall and letting in the the material from the plant and they digest it and they poop some nutrients out and later a predator will come and eat that bacteria and also poop and also beaten by somebody else and all the time this is providing nutrients that are plant available fungi eat rocks some of them so they are creating from your soil they are creating nutrients at the rate that your plants need them you know you don't have to bring a dump truck load of lime to dump on your garden the fungi will provide calcium ions I have a figure somewhere like nine micrograms of I wish maybe I'll find it in here so don't take this as the gospel truth here but some small number of micrograms per night of nitrogen per square foot of soil are all that's needed because there will continually be more made by the microbes to be absorbed by the plant at this level we have nematodes which are little wormy looking things and they are the root feeders they are actually usually what you don't want to ever see one of but they do clean up organic matter from your soil they eat roots the next level would be the Predators for the microbes in level two and they are protozoans or animals these actually are considered animal animals protists amoebas and flageolets and whatnot and there are certain nematodes that at this level are eating organic matter and bacteria and micro arthropods little tiny spidery creatures that basically chew up stuff and and spit it out or poop it out the fourth level you have nematodes that eat other nematodes and bigger arthropods and then finally you have the big animals that will eat anything and are benefiting from this cycle and they also poop out nutrients and it just keeps going in and they die and all this stuff so this is how it works here on planet and things we are born and live and die and when we become composters we are actually participating in that so I'd like to take you to my microscope now because this is so much fun here on this slide you can see these are coxae bacteria they're little round bacterias and all these little things here are further down in the mix on the slide bacteria we identify basically by their shape we don't need to know particularly what kind are there but we do know that we want lots and lots of individuals and lots and lots of species they all have their little niche and they all work together to make this whole thing work and we also have a piece of a root here that's not a piece of fungus and you can see some aggregation is starting bacteria start gluing things together in ways that leave little spaces micro spaces in the aggregates here's some organic matter whenever you see anything that really is an identifiable under the microscope it's probably a piece of organic matter I just hadn't been digested yet and this is 400x magnification so this is 400 times bigger than it really is looks 400 times bigger and you can see more aggregation here these clumps the ones that are sort of golden are fulvic acids and fulvic acids just keep attaching things to themselves and finally will become humic acids and these dark brown clumps are what we're after that's what we want here this is a soil that's not aggregated it's got nothing in it except a bunch of these shiny flat plates our silica so it's a very sandy soil and there's a sort of a mineral in there something going on and these longer pieces are probably silicates also this is an electro micrograph this fungus was eating a piece of silica and creating nutritive silica for plants that need to make flowers here's what fungus looks like the beneficial types of fungus this is kind of a narrow fungus that can you see that there are divisions the cells are long tubes anjaii are amazing they they will make a branch and go out and look for food and the growing tip is at the end of that branch and if it doesn't find anything the material in that cell will come back through the tube and get back into the main stem and go out again and try and find so the living bits of the fungi are in the at the very ends of their branches so the dark color here and the width of the fungus makes it more beneficial the darker the colors that come in lots of colors and the wider diameter makes it more and more beneficial more colorless and skinny not so good how many of you have opened up your wood chip pile or your compost pile and seen these filaments like that these are banded together fungi like we just looked at bands of fungi that have grown together and covered themselves with calcium oxalate so that you can see them and that nice and that's a good thing when you find that inside your pile that's wonderful things are happening there that should be happening this is an act in oh my seat she's not a fungus you see how rum Polly the cell walls are and if you find this in your compost pile or your compost tea you are cruisin for a bruisin this is a early sign that the the pile is going anaerobic however at this moment it still would be good on most of your brassicas so when you find this happening just spread it out to stop the process go throw it on your broccoli or cabbage brussel sprouts actinobacteria inhibit the presence of mycorrhizal fungi sorry I've been at a couple of workshops with Elaine and somebody phoned up and said or sent emailed her a picture and so she put it up she said call him right now tell him open up the pile right now and they do you do what do you lane tells you to do it's like the forest smell some of them there are many gazillions species and some of them smell great sorry yeah if you've watched your temperature you might know that it's that it's getting dry in there or overheating or other smells you've smelled the exit of the gases and what it it's like having a baby on your backyard I think so mycorrhizae fungi are different totally different kind of fungus and they sometimes are called VAM fungi but that passed out of vogue vascular are busk euler mycorrhizal fungi they infect the plants with little Arbus gills which will show up with a particular stain and then they send out filaments all over the world to collect nutrients from very far away they are so small that they won't show up on a 400 X slide and they are symbiotic they are working together with the roots of the plants holding hands for a better life there's another kind of micro Raizel fungi called ecto mycorrhizal they sit on the outside of the root rather than infecting it inside and these grow on air acacia plants blueberries azaleas the kind of thing they look a little more like trees now we get into the microbial animals in the center of this slide is a flageolet it eats bacteria mostly has two flagella one on either side and they don't seem to communicate very well so on the slide you'll just see it sort of bumbling around can't go in a straight line amoebas eat bacteria very beautifully I've never seen these are sort of stellate amoeba over here and this is an amoeba like we were talked about in science class in high school but they're so transparent you really can't see them on a slide and they are very delicate they get upset when you make a slide and you shake the shake it to get it into solution with water and they make a test or a wall around them which you can see very easily so there's an amoeba and it just surrounds the bacterium and just sort of absorbs it moves very slowly through there now every now and then you'll be having a wonderful time looking through the microscope and suddenly something like this appears or a really hairy leg or something like that shocking and I always jump and these are teeny tiny micro arthropods little little 6 8 legged creatures or more that are chew or uppers and it's great to have them you want them in there this is actually a ringtail sometimes you open up your compost and these little tiny things start jumping around they're great you want to have them they are covered with an integumentary system bit in fact a root unless they are right there they need to be almost within 1/4 inch of the root in order for it to happen so these characters spread them around that way and this one is a chim bola and it's basically okay unless it doesn't have any food to eat and then it will start in on your plants nematodes they are there are five or six different types and we distinguish them by their mouthparts this is a bacterial eater it will fill itself up with bacteria and you can see it all happening this one has bigger mouth part and eats probably algae these are fungal feeders you see they have a lance that comes out of the mouth and the cell wall the fungus is carbonaceous so it's hard and it needs to pierce a hole in there so that it can get in and eat the out of the fungi there's a that looks like a root feeder to me except you can't see the muscle here's a predatory nematode that will eat other nematodes hopefully root feeders here's a root feeder attacking a root and this is the profile of the root feeding nematode this the round thing there at the tip is a muscle that draws the blade in and then lets it go and draws it like a switchblade but what do you call that kind of knife nasty okay this is Arthur abates and these loops here if a nematode touches them they will probably from high dose hydrostatic pressure will grab the nematode and I just thought this was a horrible thing this is not nice and it's probably a fairy tale until my third compost batch I had I had glorious amounts of nematodes I had probably five or six per field on the slide we hope to get couple on a slide but I had tons of them and then they just started disappearing and they started going away so here's an Arthur bodies that's got six nematodes caught in it I called dr. Ingham and she said quick sell it you can sell a cup of that for the price for its weight in gold that I had already used it all up so you can also find pollen floating around in these and this is in compost tea and you can see it all the prickly little bits on it there might account for it's why it doesn't feel good when it comes in your nose and these are skeletons from algae and this of course is the beginning of fusion jazz and rock and roll you know the name three-two-one spirogyra still a popular group they never died out okay so this if we just look at the column on the right hand side of this I want to give you a sense of numbers here in this particular soil test that was done they're looking in the rhizosphere which is the area around the roots and they found in agricultural soils typical agricultural soils there's not much happening they had five pieces of fungi in a gram of soil and we hope to find 800 if we can and the number of species is huge we want we're hoping to get around 25,000 species in that much soil and nobody really knows if we were able to achieve those amounts what would happen what what would our plants do we've been talking about healthy compost where there's plenty of oxygen and all these microbes that use oxygen in their work now we go into anaerobic conditions which is a real possibility if you're making your own compost they can get waterlogged they can get too hot it's basically at the two things that can go wrong and they will be very smelly so I love this picture the pH will fall below 5.5 and you get all these gases now the minerals that are in there will make gases and they are a lovely assortment acetic acid will smell like vinegar butyric acid is the smell of spoiled dairy products the lyric acid is the odor of vomit phosphoric acid is the order of phosphine I don't think I know what that is poot Racine is the odor of decaying animals methane you've probably smelled that ammonia you would have probably smelled that means your nitrogen is all disappearing have you ever driven past a CAFO or they've concentrated animal feeding operation not at mile away you start smelling ammonia hydrogen sulfide is the rotten egg smell so y'all your sulfur is being evaporated phosphine and also it will make formaldehyde and alcohol what are the purposes of formaldehyde and alcohol in real life well I would say they kill bacteria and fungi that's why they're there why they're used so anaerobic substances are not compost be sure you know that what happens then in an aerobic compost is that or the anaerobic anaerobic substances that beneficial fungi and bacteria are all dormant or dead they cannot live under those conditions the environment is totally done but pathogens can live there the normal nutrient cyclers are gone that soluble minerals are gone it's strongly acid and you got alcohol and formaldehyde to boot alcohol is a fly attractant they'll come and lay their eggs in your anaerobic compost so now under the microscope we will see a completely different set of beings this is a ciliate meaning it has little hairs little philia that send it through the water this is compost tea and under the microscope they just go up sure you never see them like that you just know it's there and you under normal circumstances you would find one or two in your compost this is called a rotifer it is a beautiful Analyst My Fair I just love looking it's so boring to look at good compost I must say but anaerobic compass has all these creatures in it that are so cool this it fastens itself to something with a pod down there at the bottom and then it has two whirling things up here and you can see the water going into it and the bacteria and stuff coming in and then you can see it go along its digestive tube all the inside fascinating this is from a I did consultations at the mother earth Fair and a woman brought me she said she bought bagged plastic bagged compost at Walmart shouldn't like it so much so she took it back and got some at Lowe's and it was full of these poor old nematodes who have been invaded by chitra fungus that has made spores and broken open the body of this nematode wouldn't happen if it was aerobic this is a probably a fly larvae they all kinds of insects show up and they move around by sort of accordion there all these segments in that body very interesting and this one not very many people have seen this you are members of a very small group I made some compost tea with rain water one time and when I put it under the microscope there are all these gorgeous transparent shiny spheres just kind of moving around through there there are two I don't know if you can see them ciliates right here that apparently we're propelling them and then inside this beautiful transparent sphere was another sphere with an Archimedean solid in it that could be inscribed with regular features that could be inscribed in another sphere turning in opposite direction nobody knows what it is I've sent it around no one knows these are paramecia they have ciliates too and they move around a lot and finally the most beautiful of all this is a vorticella it has a very long flagellum and this shape is hollow it's like a Vaz and you can sort of see hair up there pulling in stuff to eat I would like to emphasize that purchased products that you spend money for it may not be what you think they are there's a place near here and they they got a new vortex chiral tea brewer and we're brewing to the day I went in and they asked me if I wanted to take a gallon home with me and I said well what are you making what did you put into it and I said they'd been running it for five days so normally compost tea takes about 24 hours to make and they said oh it's okay we could have gone seven days the manufacturer said you can run it for seven days if you are increasing bacterial and fungal populations making more and more species and they consumed oxygen and you get this large population there the demand for oxygen is going to be pretty high and it happens at about 24 hours at 76 degrees so this thing had been cooking for a lot longer than that and the ciliates remember they said they just sort of zip past you and you hardly ever see one there were 75 in one field that I looked at which means they're about six thousand on this whole slide and they were moving around like this and then I watched one of them and the cell wall broke open and this thing came out I imagined it was its soul leaving and the photo after this last one here there was nothing there was nothing to see so this was an osmotic problem the concentration of salt outside the affiliate was so much higher that it just sort of exploded and to equalize the concentrations this is an example of what you might see in a wood chip pile this is really big wood chips and sawdust so it it was totally blocked no oxygen could get in there and this is a front end loader took one load out of there this area in here is black so it has been anaerobic and reduced to charcoal way above 160 degrees this stuff are here are those Actinobacteria they have a a dusty sort of flowery look the flower FL oh you are and this was very hot and undoubtedly full of alcohol that was a dangerous thing to stick a front-end loader in there alcohol flashes at 180 degrees it probably was probably was that hot there been a lot of there been accidents of that nature this is a also act you know and you can see a little closer that everything's kind of coated with that grainy white stuff if you get that on your compost pile just stop put it on your brassicas and everything is fine or you can recom post it start over again with new materials and whatnot and make it back into compost it's it's not gone even with that black stuff you can recon post it if you want to the show isn't all the way over yet here's some black stuff and I think you can see there's a little bit of whitish actinobacteria is still alive there this is an example of an aerobic compost it hasn't gotten it didn't get too hot but it's waterlogged and everything is just all stuck together there are no spaces in there for oxygen this looks a little better this looks like the contents were chopped up more and you can see there are all kinds of air spaces in there the structure is really good this is compost that looks about like what you would hope compost would look like we say 70% cocoa chocolate bar that color and the touch of this stuff is great it looks good it smells good I put under the microscope and there was nothing there you could put it on your plants and increase the tilth of your soil it would feel better this was made by a client who had been saving materials for his composting for years and they weren't covered or anything and he would make compost and it would break down basically over time a long static pile and he would get this stuff out of it but there was no bacteria no if there are no nutrients in there in the first place so it was too bad so here's a test I'm not sure what those brown pieces are in there but the kind of what's been compost it looks about like 70% cocoa so please remember a compost pile is a living organism it is your baby to take care of the environment of the compost pile determines what organisms can live there and the chemistry that it will supply as a result of the activity of the microbes just a word about succession because this is basic for why we want fungally dominated compost if you have a bare ground or a rocky area and you try to find something in the soil there there won't be anything be some bacteria because there's bacteria everywhere and as the soil gets more bacteria in it then you will find those are weeds that we were talking about they will be followed by weeds with tap roots that reach more further down into the soil and bring up more minerals and finally you will get some grasses maybe and some weeds that are more healthy for the soil then the shrubs start coming in and finally trees and finally have climax forest as you go these are bacteria dominated there will be more and more fungi in there until you get to forest there's almost there's no bacteria and mostly fungus in the soil there this is a problem and I here in British Columbia around the fishing lakes people turn there just throw their worms out that they didn't use for bait and they worms live in bacterial soils and they're the slimy stuff around them is bacterial so around the lakes now there's becoming less and less fewer and fewer trees because they need fungally dominated soils so this progression in the soil environment will follow the nitrogen cycle and the sulfur cycle they're tuned to each other so disturbances halt this progression so if we we want to get a fungally dominated saw but we don't want a woodsy soil we want a soil that will grow vegetables and perhaps trees the orchards you would want more fungi in the soil then you'd have in your vegetable garden so these are the things that will stop the progression you can mine and clear-cut your garden you can use untoward livestock management you can put fertilizers pesticides and herbicides in there you can have extremes of weather temperature and moisture you can't ill too much your crop types will have an effect on this compaction driving the tractor over too much or actually the the worst compaction comes from rain on bare soil and the timing and placement and type of organic matter that you use so I believe this is a picture of in Australia and the to the left is a sheep pasture and to the extreme right is a sheep pasture just to show off a little bit this is an onion field in Tasmania and the rows to the left were sprayed with one or two applications of fungally dominated compost tea and to the right were not used regular fertilizer and you can see the weed the difference in the weed conditions their weeding and compaction seem to be big our biggest problems at this point here's just a picture of a small part of a humic acid molecule I thought that would be fun to see it's just way too complicated to worry about the two big issues that people are concerned about in home composting is what to do with kitchen waste what about pest attraction you know there will be all kinds of tangled municipal laws regarding composting because everybody's afraid you'll have rats and insects and what we're trying to do is if your vegetable gardening or orchard is promote fungal populations so I'm going to give like the perfect overview if you want to have perfect compost these are the guidelines for that and nobody like other things nobody ever accomplishes them I about a 70% success rate and I can't tell you why 30% of my compost is just not very good this is the 10 bucket method and it ultimately supplies a carbon to nitrogen ratio of about 30 to one which is what kitchen scraps usually are about 31 carbon to nitrogen bacteria are 5 to 1 carbon to nitrogen ratio so they have more nitrogen than any other species on the planet bacterial soils will give you plenty of nitrogen usually so because we can use percentages here if you have 5 to 6 of your buckets with brown carbonaceous chunky wetted wood chips material that's about 50 to 60 percent carbon is fungal food so we want to have that kind of thing papers from if you are careful what you put in your shredder or your paper and office supplies you can use that little branches just make sure it's all chopped up then 3 to 4 buckets of packed green material that's chopped up Brown material is dead stuff it's leaves that fell off the tree after they turn brown green material was harvested in some way while it was still green leaves on a tree will as fall comes around the the goodies that are in the leaves retreat into the trunk and roots leaving mostly just carbon dark carbon however you harvest them when they're still green they still have all these nutrients in them even if you dry them they still will be pretty healthy and then you want one bucket high nitrogen material if you're going to really take care of your compost and take its temperature and coddle it along you can use two or two-and-a-half buckets of manure or legumes or seeds around here you can get mash is that what they call it from the breweries the grains that are spent this when the nitrogen will determine how hot your pile gets it's the the fun behind the party as it were and then you need clean water to spray while you're building it if you are using city water it will usually have chlorine or chlorine means in it which are in the water because you're going to kill bacteria size of your pile in how you're going to use it fungally dominated carbon dominated piles will shrink about two-thirds and become so small they can't really hold any heat in if they're not big enough and you start with them if you're making a bacteria dominated pile not so much wood not so much carbon in it it will shrink about one-third so the pile needs to be big enough it needs to be about I would say six feet in any dimension to hold in enough heat to do the curing of the seeds and the pathogens here's another way this one is one I like take some fencing probably diameter of six feet which would be 6 times 3.1416 is about 19 or 20 feet and form it into a circle and start throwing your materials in there so that they are mixed and this picture they're not really very well chopped up but you can see how the thing can be contained you've got a way to hang your hose on the top of it or stick things in the sides and whatnot and these are just made I would then right away turn it so that they're mixed a little better you can see the green and brown ingredients here and hopefully between each layer is a thin layer from your one bucket of manure or your 10% manure that is going to provide the fire for this sort of thing for the heat to take up here's another one again it's it's that one's a little small and the stuff is could be chopped up better and it's ready for its first turn before the thing even gets going that will mix mix the ingredients up closer together the compost pile needs to be covered this one has a skin of autumn leaves and then I put a canvas have it cover the top and drape down a little bit besides with clothespins I can take it off and take the temperature and then put it back together works very well to protect it from the elements wind will dry it out and rain rain is if you have just a normal amount of rain or not too much rain it's likely you won't get any leaching away and it will be helpful that actually some kind of soaks in to keep it from getting too hot but if you have torrential rains you'll lose everything and sun sunlight also burns away the nutrients and evaporates them all so then you can open this up and move it over here that thing will stand there and take the top off and turn it into the new place it's very easy if you have a good back to turn that pile if you use these cages kitchen scraps can be a problem I put mine in a worm composter period I don't unless I'm making a compost pile today I'll stick them in there but otherwise to intrude into a compost pile that's already cooking along to put new material in there is asking for trouble if the compost pile is already finished you're sticking material in there that isn't isn't going to be finished it's going to just stay like it is and be subject to intrusion of animals that smell it because it'll go anaerobic in there because nothing is happening another possibility for kitchen scraps is to do Bokashi this is a fermenting process where you buy this rice leavings and I forget what all they are skins of barley shells and stuff like that they're treated with about eight kinds of lactobacilli which will ferment your scraps and keep them from smelling it'll make a liquid that comes out the bottom which you have to change but it actually is a preservative it will preserve your scraps and then when you make your compost you can put them in you also can freeze your scraps in flat bags and then put those in the pile and there's sort of a system for that be sure there are two feet the outside edge and just keep placing them around and put more stuff on and then two feet in and so on you can use up a fair number of bags of kitchen waste that way pretty much two feet will protect them but if you smell anything coming from the pile put more stuff on the outside you can mark where they are with surveyors flags if that's helpful sometimes the you build the pile over time you'll know where they are where you started and where you left off to control the process and if you're going to have a really good thermal pile this is essential if you're making a static pile you're just going to build it and walk away you have to control and check the temperature and the moisture and you have to think about turning it here's a compost thermometer and a hand you want to check the temperature in three different places it's recommended that the compost pile be heated to 131 degrees for three days to kill weeds and seeds and pathogens however if you go higher than that it doesn't take as long if you go higher than 160 you're in trouble possibly with an aerobics and alcohol formation 150 degrees for two days the organic regulations used to be you had to keep a minimum of 131 degrees for 10 to 15 days and turn the pile five times during that time to be sure you got everything that was on the outside of the pile inside and everything is actually broken down and heated enough yeah hopefully yeah mm-hmm do you take its temperature in that container and set and in the beginning they can go anaerobic in 20 minutes so you have to really keep and if you see it coming up close 260 quick call your friends and get out the pitchforks so here's an example of how a compost pile might turn out might express itself in temperature this 72 degrees Fahrenheit on the out in the ambient atmosphere the outside of the pile is about 85 and then there's another layer that's getting warmer and warmer as you get into the middle and then finally 160 degrees in the middle you've got to get the middle out at that point or the whole thing will go anaerobic and just to be sure you get everything inside that was outside they say take the top off that's the new bottom and then take the sides off that's the new inside and what was inside goes on the outside three times and you're pretty sure you've gotten at all and after the third time I would then put in my biodynamic preps to collect the growth forces and you're not going to turn it any more the temperature will start to go down and you'll see less and less organic matter in there so here are other things we can put into the pile the biodynamic barrel compost starter is a source for microbes from a file that was done before and it's just like it's just like buying a compost starter but it's biodynamic so it has qualities that cannot be measured or even talked about probably growth forces are are inherent in there I'm involved in a project at josephine porter institute where you get the biodynamic preps to see if there is a relationship between the microbe populations and the use of the perhaps there has to be but nobody can say that yet the biodynamic preparations are all related to growth forces the forces that make a plant grow forces that make a plant hungry enough to eat the forces that will make flowers form and seeds form and the roots grow and they are collected from the universe into your pile if you put these particular preparations in there I would use litter from a forest floor as an inoculant in my pile because you're going to be guaranteed there are lots of fungi in there be careful ask for permission before you start stealing the litter but just a shovel full is enough to inoculate your pile and make sure that you're going to have at least in the beginning enough fungi to work with then we can do dustings of fungal foods which would kelp is also full of sea minerals and nutrition you can just dust it around the outside you can poke holes in it and stick kelp or oatmeal or corn gluten also fish hydrolysate should be on that list not fish emulsion that fish hydrolysate they're processed differently and I believe the emotions still has a lot of fat in it which nobody in this pile is really interested in consuming but hydrolysate has somehow had the fat removed from it if you have good compost keep some of it alive and use it as an inoculant on your next pile and water to keep 50 percent moisture we've already talked about that here are some bags of biodynamic preps they are alchemical preparations that deal with the four elements of your plants if you have trouble with root growth in your let's say in your garden then you might want to emphasize the use of the earth force preps and so on so forth up the plant water forces help the leaves the air forces are flowering and the fire forces are the reproductive forces for the plant finished compost if you're going to let it sit will run out of food over time because all these this is just a glob of microbes and they're going to continue eating to stay alive so what do we do to preserve that if you're going to apply it you hope to apply it in the fall that's the optimal time there's more biological activity between a layer of snow on the ground and the surface of the ground in the temperate zones than anywhere else on the planet it sounds really weird but there will be a layer of water in there even if the snow is really cold and somehow nobody knows why that I know of why that happens so while you're waiting for application you might want to add some of these amendments these foods for the fungi maybe one week give it a dusting of kelp next week give it some steel-cut oats some fish hydrolysate punch holes in it and protect it so it doesn't dry out and it doesn't heat up too much from the Sun yeah I'm glad you asked that molasses diluted molasses is the food but that's just it almost doesn't come up because bacteria is so easy to get and I'm thinking of the guy who had nothing in there you know maybe if he put some molasses in there he would have at least gotten some bacteria out of the deal now once you have all these this marvelous microbial population you can increase it further by making compost tea spraying it on the ground spraying it on leaves it's very good the bacteria and fungi glue themselves on to surfaces with a strength that cannot be undone when you wash your lettuce or your cabbage you're not going to wash the back the lactobacilli off of there they stay there and it's easy to make this is a five gallon consideration here it takes about a cup of your compost and you can make five gallons of spray strain it a little bit and be careful with your sprayer and spray it and cover the leaves it will feed the leaves and spread your microbes around if one cup makes five gallons then you can probably make a thousand gallons with one compost pot is pretty amazing this generally at 76 degrees ambient temperature it's about 24 hours but keep checking it if it starts to smell throw it out you know that kind of thing this tea last year a friend of mine had black I forgot what it's called but it's a black fungus that grows on the holly leaves kills the plant you know what that okay it's black and she took some to reims Creek nursery and they said we'll come dig them up for you and forget it they're alive and well three applications it's great there's a picture of a grape leaf that had compost tea applied and you can see about half the surface there was covered with that application so if a fight after or whatever attacks grape leaves lands on one of those places there the sprouting spore will have no place to seed itself it won't there's no way it can get through that mass this is a Christmas tree farm in North Carolina and they sprayed compost tea on their seedlings these would be first-year seedlings here and after the first year they checked here the the height of these plants is almost no different they look alike there but look at the roots they're quite different here and turned out in four years these plants were ready for sale and these four took eight years this is my favorite compost story in the world this is the home of some sort of vice president of Microsoft in Seattle he can see the bridge out there in the back lives at the top of this marvelous mountain I guess with very shear sides and they constructed the house and they had all this construction damage to the yards and everything the guy whoever it was wanted to have Bill Gates over for dinner to see this his marvelous accomplishment he poured fuel oil and roundup down the size of the that steep slope there and killed everything that was on it then it started raining and the whole thing slid down into the living room of the people who live below him and they sued him so he had to very quickly come up with some way to save the side of the mountain there and they called up Hendrika Slaven first I should say though that he contacted two Landscape Architects who are going to build retaining concrete retaining walls and the first estimate was eight million dollars and the next guy said four and a half million and rikka said I'll do it for a million and a half and he brought out compost and put it on there and in 24 hours they had stability of the side of the mountain there that was about to slide down and this was in mid-summer I think maybe in June and in November this is what that same hill looked like of course I got planted I mean those those things didn't just come out of nowhere but they grew and everyone lived happily ever after as far as I know well if you have humic acid the the ends of the chains are so electromagnetic that they will pick up metals and contaminants and radioactive stuff and hold on to it for 500 years we're told so he does this so I imagine that was his point in using compost and so quickly it glued itself to the soil so that sort of the end of the sit-down lecture sort of thing we have 10 buckets of compost materials down below that we're going to carry out to your patio and we'll make a very tiny compost pile with those ingredients and then Pat has all this other stuff to show you what they're doing here other kinds of compost ways sixteen yeah okay you do fantastic you take you get a compost tea Brewer just like and that's why they call it tea you have a little bag that water can go through screen put a cup of compost in there hang it from the top and you can do this on a large scale you would put several pounds in a great big one and you put a narrator in there so that the water is circulating and bubbling and more oxygen is continually input in there let it run for a while the bacteria will reproduce very quickly they can bacterium reproduces in 20 minutes fungi take several hours and the other things probably will not reproduce and you just hope they don't get too breasted up am I not putting food sometimes it depends I put in the fungal foods that we talked about right now I just have a compost pile and ice for everything in there and then once you know about once a year it's probably okay and it's not gonna hurt you but if you use some of these methods that may get happier and make your plants happier I just don't have so much material yeah you have to go find it you have to find somebody who's got wood chips or when the chip you hear the chipper down the road there's it please me I have a basket okay you soak them first and let them volatilize off if they have oils in them those are antimicrobial oh yes and get some grass clippings find somebody's mowing as lard get a bag of those and put that in with all your other stuff [Music] you

Channel: Living Web Farms

Views: 316,091

Rating: 4.8017468 out of 5

Keywords: jane weaver, earth & spirit design, living web farms, making compost, microbes, making microbes grow, good compost, what makes good compost, building life in the soil, growing microbes, food waste, building soil, nutrient dense food, pat battle

Id: rZM2fhX7yK0

Length: 72min 3sec (4323 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 21 2017