Growing Cannabis Organically & the Soil Food Web - Jeff Lowenfels

give it up pervert a natural place I wanna thank you all for coming my name is Rudy I'm the CEO of Verde we're very very excited to have you all here the idea behind the series of meetups is to try to create a strong community of living soil cultivators I see two types of growers in this industry people that care to honor the plant and other people that just want to get the most out of the plant that they can for themselves so for me it's an honor to be able to host something like this for that thank you so much for coming will be having events like this once a month now for this year and we'll try our best to be available for you in any way we can and also to learn from you about your experiences in your own cultivation garden so thank you so much and please give it up for Jeff low in Fell's that doesn't need an intro really appreciate it can you hear me in the back yeah I guess you can you know I was here a couple of what two months ago I guess and this guy comes up to me Jamie I didn't know him he says you know we got a grower on him down the street here would like to you to come soil grow normally I don't do this kind of stuff you know but I did and I was so glad I did because your facility was phenomenal your attitude is phenomenal and it just shows very putting this together thank you very much and and and really everybody here I think appreciates what you've done so thank you we're going to talk about the soil food web we're going to talk about growing organic cannabis and I'm going to be offensive and occasionally but I apologize in advance many of you know I wrote teaming with microbes the gentleman Wayne Louis is is my business partner I'm not sure Wayne's read the book but he answered the telephone and did all the business work while I wrote the book so he's a great guy teeming with nutrients was was the second book the first book teeming with microbes is is sort of how the food gets to the plant the second book teeming with nutrients is how the food gets into the plant and what happens to it once it gets into the plant and then I just came out with this book at the beginning of the year called teaming with fungi tour last year I guess and this is another way that food gets into the plant so now that I have a trilogy of plants books I call myself lord of the roots and if you don't get the feeling that this is gonna be a little humorous talk you know you should get that feeling I'm an old guy I'm 68 years old I'm almost 69 years old when I was a kid aluminum foil appeared out of nowhere and all of a sudden we had things like Jiffy Pop plastic out of nowhere people started eating off of plastic people started eating plastic for those who heard the story this morning about the margarine package that's me on the margin package and for those who didn't hear the story I would just simply quickly summarize it by saying the founder of Miracle Grow worked for my parents at a butter company my father grandfather and put my picture on this package and so when I tell people Miracle Grow is not a great product don't buy it you know normally they'd sue somebody saying something like that but come and get me because she did this to me I think the jury will be on my side at the same time all these new fertilizers started to appear out of nowhere and commercials and magazines and all sorts of still we had a lot of gardening magazines newer better easier when we learned how to spray our food because nobody wanted have blemishes on their apples instant coffee you cannot imagine what that was like to have happened and every Wednesday night my brothers and I would watch at 6 o'clock mr. wizard who would talk about chemistry and better living through chemistry which was the name of the television show sponsors you know better living through chemistry mr. wizard there he is and his little dweeby assistant who you know put chemistry a little too seriously as she grew up and that was kind of fun we had no varied lighting you always knew somebody that was growing because the lights were purple you could see him down the block you had to hide where you were growing your cannabis you know and sometimes you forgot where you hid it and when you finally got got a crop you know you would you would end up with a crop and you would say hmm let's see here you know you'd have to rake through the stuff the sticks and the stones in order to find stuff and believe it or not back in the early 60s a lot of us thought when you just smoke the leaves you could get stoned out of your mind oh my god the headaches we got and and if you didn't have a degree in chemistry you basically couldn't grow good weed simple as that because everybody was hydroponic and you had to have an advanced degree in chemistry to be able to do it well okay so now we're at today there is no Jiffy Pop this is popcorn nobody would know what Jiffy Pop is you guys don't know what it is TV dinners don't even have a luna minimum instant coffee you don't know what instant coffee is this is our instant coffee today you know we all have a you know a telephone that has in it all the books and magazines we could read even teeming with microbes on your telephone my goodness gracious you know we've got television sets in our color and yet for some reason when we go into these stores to buy stuff to grow cannabis what do we discover but an overwhelming abundance of reliance on chemistry still after all of these years pretty incredible particularly when you consider what we're doing what we're doing is you know not just regular growing we're growing stuff that people are ingesting and so there's reliance on chemistry is bad really good and we all know it and and and we all sit here and worry about the day I hope we don't worry about the day because I think all of our ethics are probably a little better but there are growers who worry about the day when their crop goes down but they can save it with poison and they do because they'll be good the next time around but this time we've got to make the money in order to be able to survive and they put the poison on it you know well you know it doesn't make any difference to me whether you survive or not if you're giving me poisonous cannabis to ingest into my system you're doing a terrible terrible thing you know it's supposed to be medical cannabis it's supposed to be you know good for us and there's a moral and ethical requirement that we all need to follow period and if you lose money that's not good we got some crop insurance we were talking about in the car maybe we need to figure out a way we can support each other but if we end up in an industry where you can use anything you want on it we're gonna end up in an industry that's not going to be a good one to work in you're not gonna want to even grow because you're gonna have to use poisons and stuff it is a bad bad thing that's happening and we need to nip this in the bud right away some things are so obvious but you really shouldn't have to say it if your crop goes down walk away from it don't try to sell it to somebody so what are our goals today our goals are to grow the best possible cannabis you know we want to grow amazing cannabis and from my perspective the way you do that is by using soil and the soil food web we need to know a couple of things we need to know how plants get the nutrients which again is teeming with microbes sorry about the add how plants take up the nutrients and and how plants use the nutrients and when you read these three books as a system and put it together you begin to appreciate what you're working with and it and it all begins right here with this diagram I could give the whole talk on this diagram everybody's seen this this is the soil food web for those who don't know what a soil food web is you have all these food chains with a little guy eats the bigger guy gets eaten by the bigger guy in the soil thousands and millions of them and every now and then something on one chain takes a look up and says see I can eat that thing on that chain up there and does so and connects the two chains and eventually you end up with a barbed you know chicken wire fence and you end up with a soil food web instead of food chains they're all connected what happens is about 50 to 60 percent of the energy of the Sun goes in to the plant and the plant uses that energy to reproduce which you can learn how it does it in teaming with nitrogen nutrients how it it produces extra dates and it uses about 60% as I say more than half to drip out things these extra dates out into the root system all right you're all extra dating right now as we talk you're sweating that's the same exact thing and in fact your sweat does the same exact thing as these extra dates what do they do they attract bacteria oh right your skin is attracting bacteria and they attract fungi and the bacteria and fungi eat the carbon that's in those extra dates the exudates attract tremendous numbers of bacteria and carbon then I'm a bacteria and fungi and the bacterium fungi in turn attract the things that eat them nematodes and protozoa the nematodes and protozoa eat the bacteria they eat the fungi they do so because they also need carbon but this is excess what do you do with excess when you're in living organism you poop it out they happen to do so right there in the rhizosphere and they end up pooping out this stuff in plant usable form they take organic molecules or even organic molecules and convert them to inorganic molecules that are capable of going into the plant all right so how does it really work let's just let's just take a look we've got for cannabis plants sitting out in downtown Denver you know on a Friday afternoon and one of them starts to [ __ ] about the food and says yeah I had like a little Mexican or French food today and the plant next to it which is a little bigger sis now let's do Japanese all right let's do and so so this is the roots of the plants you know they're going down into the soil and so the plant mixes up the right kind of exudate drips them out of the root system and the next thing you know attracts Japanese bacteria okay so they are the food source for the plant the plant is in control if it wanted American food it changes the exudate mix so if it wants to get some real good stuff it just changes the mix and it gets what it needs the plant is in control we're gardeners and growers we like to think we're in control but if we're smart gardeners and growers we let the plant be in control so it's exudates that make the system work think sweat in addition to the bacteria and fungi that are attracted there are other things in this exudate that we're discovering new stuff all the time this is about a year and a half old picture now these particular extra dates that are in this picture coming out of this route are what are known as X DNA cells that's what your white blood cells are and they do the same thing they go out into the soil on behalf of the plant and they create poisons that would be going into the plant and prevent them from moving into the soil to the plant the plant is in control pretty capable of doing a lot of stuff just because we don't know exactly what plants are doing doesn't mean that they're these stationary dumb things as you all know all right so those extra dates are designed to attract large populations and diverse populations and I would leave it at that normally but just on Thursday an article came out I think it was in science news that they have done testing now on growing situations all around the world and what they've discovered is absolutely dumbfounding to me there are 500 species of bacteria that are in each one of these areas the same 500 species of bacteria they can identify them the list is going to be made available I was just reading a summary so that means in addition to the diversity you know you have a couple of million different kinds of bacterium but you've got 500 in every gross situation do you have those 500 in your cannabis grow you don't know yet I don't know yet either because we don't have the list but we're gonna be able to find out and won't it be a terrific thing to find out oh my gosh we're missing 15 or 20 or 30 or a hundred of them and put them back in again so that your plans unbelievable things are happening all the time that just happened last week I had to change the slide so the big 500 this is gonna be something we're all gonna want to track and once we know what those big 500 are then we're going to be able to fool around by adding things that are not in that big 500 and see what they do is well and boy isn't that gonna be fun so you got this wonderful big large diverse population but now we know there's a very big core these 500 species and so there'll be a lot more on that now why do you want a diverse popular because diversity is what keeps you safe if we were a big monoculture and somebody walks in that's not part of that monoculture that somebody might be in trouble you know so this little guy here you know oh my goodness gracious you don't want to be the only chick in there diversity is good you know somebody needs to tell Donald Trump that but that's just sort of the way it goes so it's what keeps us safe and in addition to which these creatures all are doing other things than feeding the plant they're producing hormones to protect themselves and so they're killing off some of the bad guys and changing the population mix and and all of these things have an impact on how the plant lives and so they're very very important the last thing in the world you want to do is negatively impact the microbes in your soil so let's start at the bottom we've got bacteria that in a teaspoon of good soil there's 500 million to a trillion if you're very natural you have a trillion if you're Scots miracle grow grow you have 500 million but so you take these and they're in that spoon they're invisible you don't you can't see them and in addition to that which is bacteria there are archaea which which when I wrote the book the first time the first printing they weren't even in the book because nobody knew they were in soil in fact know if I had put him in there they would have said the books a piece of crap because these aren't in soil well then they found out that the dominant organism in the oceans dominant organism in the ocean and now we find out that the dominant organism in the second step of the nitrogen-fixing process they look just like bacteria they have a slightly different cell wall we used to think they only existed in geysers and hot events and those kinds of things that extremophiles but in fact you know these are the methods genes so you know cows and farts and all that kind of stuff it's the archaea and both of these organisms they eat and eat and eat and breed and breed and breed and what they eat are simple to digest things they nibble off the edges of long complex carbon chains if they can just the edges they can't really break up stuff the way that other organisms can so they're just nibbling around the edges and they breathe like crazy you take two of them and you put petri dishes under ideal conditions and you cover the earth in six weeks with you know bacterium 25 feet high or whatever it is fortunately we don't have ideal conditions but they do eat like crazy and they breed like crazy and they produce a slime and they do so for a couple of reasons not the least of which is to stick to their neighbors so that they can then have a slimy coating around them that prevents the things that eat them or or hinders the things that eat them from getting in at them and so you've got this slime layer sometimes we call a biofilm in this industry particularly if you're doing compost tea that black stuff is biofilm and the anaerobic when it's in a biofilm situation but in the beginning these are just you know colonies that are coated with this sticky stuff and and the sticky stuff is sticky enough so that these colonies not only stick to each other but they stick to individual particles of soil and what that means is these particles of soil end up being stuck together with this glue from the biofilm and and that is the beginning of soil structure this is what the what the slime looks like this is bacteria in slime again the thing that I use to relate to this when you wake up in the morning you brush your teeth to get rid of bacterial bio slime half of you are now licking your teeth right now that's what everybody always does that bio slime is exactly the same BIOS line as the bio slime that sticks together these little particles of soil BIOS lime itself has a pH that's above 7 and what that means is if your soil has a dominance of bacteria in it vs. fungi which is the other other organism that you can get a dominance with if it has a dominance of bacteria the pH is going to be above 7 because of the bacteria the bacteria are what are creating the pH in this kind of a situation now in that teaspoon of soil you also have 14 feet of invisible fungal hypha you can't see it it's in there it's weaving through that stuff and you know in a in a good mycorrhizal situation I'm going to talk about mycorrhizal function you can have three miles in a little teaspoon of soil so we don't study fungi in school I just read an article in New York Times last week they're now asking people you know let's start studying they have the same body parts as a plant except chloroplasts they don't have the chlorophyll and chloroplasts they can't make you know their own sugars and they operate almost exactly the same way as plants with one or two big differences along their cell wall instead of cellulose they have chitin which is the same thing that's in crabs and lobsters etc etc and they digest extra cellular Li so they they put stuff out into the soil and digest out in the soil I'll talk about that in a quick minute but these guys move by bringing up stuff from the back of the fungi their cytoplasm moves up all the particles they need up into the tip they open up the tip sort of like you can imagine taking a brick out and quickly add in more bricks so that they can move forward without leaking all the stuff out that's inside the thing they're fascinating organisms and that's why I ended up writing the third book actually because they're so interesting and we don't study them and they weave together and go through those stuck together bacterial particles and so again you get more soil structure those weave together particles you know the bacterial bricks so to speak are not flat they're irregular and so you end up with something that has pore spaces with a little guys can hide from the bigger guys where when it rains the bad air gets pushed out good air gets pulled in behind it reservoir space for water this is soil structure comes from bacteria and fungi and who knew nobody okay so they drip out acids in order to digest food and then they take the digested food into their system through their through their or their wall which is a chitin wall they leave the asses in the soil now these acids break down hard to digest things like you know and stuff so making it edges available to bacteria and they leave this stuff in the soil so as the fungi continues to move on there's still decay going on and still breakdown going on as a result of the fungi having been there they are absolutely spectacular wonderfully fun organisms if this acid can be very very strong it is very strong this is fungal hypha going into felspar rock and breaking it down so you know it's very strong stuff and it's an acid and so acids have a pH below 7 we'll talk a little bit about that again in a minute or two now there's some really special fungi that are attracted and these are the mycorrhizal fungi now notice I didn't say mycorrhizae fungi I said Michael Raizel fungi don't say mycorrhizae unless you mean the root and the fungus that's the mycorrhizae the mycorrhizal fungus partners with the root to form a biker I see other great white shark guys here they told me they were gonna change their label because this says mycorrhizae down at the bottom of it but I know I bug people all the time i bug people about fulvic acids humic acids there is no such thing as you mckay acid is with an SOE so I'm gonna noxious son of a [ __ ] I apologize all right so the mycorrhizal fungi in return for those extra dates go out into the soil because the plant says you want more extra dates you go get me something and they go out on the soil and they get phosphorous and they get zinc they get you know nitrogen copper you can read as well as I can and they bring this back to the plant in return for extra dates 96% of the plants on the planet Earth have this relationship with a fungus it's a symbiotic relationship the ones that don't are generally in the Brassica family cabbages and things your kids don't like to eat and the importance of them cannot be overstressed and cannabis forms a mycorrhizae and you need to make sure that it's able to do so and we'll talk about that as well so here's how operate so we got two seedlings these are to cannabis seedlings you know one of them is organic one of them is chemical and they're sitting in the peach and the organic one goes I love a bologna sandwich and so what does it do it it's goes and mixes up the right extra dates right make makes the right extra dates no no one complex thing I might add and then it puts the extra dates in into the soil and the next thing you know it catches what it needs the right mycorrhizal fungi and the mycorrhizal fungi gets the signal from the plant the plant signals the michael Raizel fungi okay it's not the other way around and so you got to have a healthy living plant in order to have mycorrhizal fungi and you don't in compost because you don't have a live planting compost so there's no mycorrhizal fungi in compost so the other end of the fungus goes out and finds the Bologna and brings it back so let's take a look at that there's the root there's the fungi going in there it's a hell of a picture actually and the fungus goes out and it finds the Bologna come on guys you know it finds the Bologna and it says which one of these guys am I going to take the Bologna from but it's the same Bologna anyway it doesn't make a bit of difference so the fungus brings the Bologna back and feeds it to the plant okay and lo and behold as a result of getting the Bologna the plant grows terrific and because it's a symbiotic relationship and the plant says thank you very much it gives more extra days to the plant to the fungus the fungus stays there and continues to grow itself and it grows and grows and grows and what's really cool is if you've got two plants next to each other in the same vicinity even if they don't happen to be the same species lo and behold they will share their goodies between each other you know we should you think wow what good does that make who cares you know well I don't know you know kind of nice that these guys are sharing isn't it you know you happen to miss an area with fertilizer and all of a sudden the things continues to grow nicely because it's getting fed the same stuff as a result of the mycorrhizal Network that exists and there is a network throughout your soil and you don't want to disturb that network you don't want to rototill you really don't want to take a rake if you're going indoors you don't want to take a you know you don't want to break that soil up the least amount of damage you can do to your soil the least disturbance to your soil is gonna end up with the least amount of damage to these mycorrhizal fungi all right now there are seven different kinds of micro rise lefante that we know of orchids won't even germinate unless they have their own mycorrhizae fungi right there but the one that we're interested in is known as an endo mycorrhizal fungi as opposed to the other big group which is called an ecto mycorrhizal fungi and just quickly ecto mycorrhizal fungi you can see with the naked eye they have fruiting bodies that mushrooms you were eating you know mycorrhizal they have mushrooms or truffles you know and they're big and you can see them with a naked eye you can see the fungus itself with the naked eye and oh mycorrhizal fungi unfortunately you can't see with a naked eye so you're gonna have to just believe me that they're there and no of course means in if in their in that they're there although you don't you can't see it because you got astein them in order to be able to see them and when you stain them they look like this inside the plant those little round things are where the interface takes place between the fungus and the plant and where the transfers take place it's in between the cells it's not in a cell it grows in between the cells and it forms this imagination and then if that's even the right word don't even look it up and and you get this little round thing those round things incidentally are capable of being converted into spores so when you chop this guy up even though there may be no spores there it'll multiply you create what's known as a propagule and when you look at the label it says X amount of proper eul's per whatever that's what a proper you'll is so that you got to stain them it's a pain in the butt to do really I don't advise that people do it it's not not really that safe the product is not that good you ended up with these two basic structures that's the best vesicle and it's called vesicular and that's a tree like structure that's called call them our busk Euler so it's a secular or busk Euler mycorrhizal fungi and they're really quite beautiful and and and and it turns out that in the cannabis growing field you really only need to know about one there are about 350 so that we've been able to identify we like I an identifier that have been identified but there are only about 15 that can be duplicated in the lab and it wasn't until recently that they were able to do that people are always trying to grow more but fortunately these 15 sleep around and so they'll sleep with different plants and and and we've identified the one that sleeps with cannabis and the unfortunate problem is that over the years several different names have been applied to this ok so you'll see our labels rise off Vegas here again you see Glomus you see all sorts of different names but in the past year or so as a result of DNA we now have an official name and right now it happens to be rise o faggus interests CDs that is the only mycorrhizal fungi that associates with cannabis now why would you want to buy more mycorrhizal fungi you know when you're growing cannabis you probably wouldn't simple as that if if you buy one that has all 15 mycorrhizal fungi in it that we know how to make you're wasting your time now you might want a couple of other ones if you determine that they feed your cover crop if you're using your cover crop but other than that this is the only one you need and it's probably sold under the name of Glomus right now Glomus interest CDs or Glomus mossie but this is the proper name and these are the other names that you might potentially see you know I don't generally tell people to take pictures of a slide but that may be one you want to take a picture of because these things work how do I know they work because I've tested them I've tested them a lot actually and they're really kind of fun again that's what you want right there how do you apply them you apply them as early as possible you all your seeds in them you mix the stuff in your soil so that the roots grow into it you want to have infection as early as possible because you want these things to start operating as quickly as possible when you transplant your plant you roll your transplants in or you powder on some of the powder on it because they have to come into contact with the root so the root can put the signal out and you do it at transplanting time and it makes a big difference and you mix it into your soil so that the roots grow into the mycorrhizal fungi and form new colonies if that's the proper word and it's it's really an unbelievable thing so what I say you know you say well you know you get big plants sometimes if the genetics are proper we were talking in the car you know genetics are number one to me soil is number two and you can use mycorrhizal fungi in soil and get some very nice-looking plants I don't know the variety of this particular plant this was the first time I ever tested mycorrhizal fungi on cannabis the right one and I'm trying to show you how large these leaves were because I was pissing in my pants as I watched this thing grow now I live in Anchorage Alaska and you're really only allowed to have six plants okay I had 12 but I was testing other stuff and and you know so I really got this stuff late the season like you know early in the season but I had already started playing so I already tested one plant one plant that's my head behind that plant yeah he's faking it it's got that all right this is a frying pan a big frying pan okay like a frying pan you'd use on a trail ride you know I mean a big frying pan that's a big leaf okay that's my book okay you know look at that difference look at this anybody grow leaves that big on a normal basis I never had oh I was so excited if my wife says shut up you know well turned out to be a male plant so we're gonna be trying that again the the variety happened to be something called Wow Wallace Wow Michael Raizel the guys have a giant pumpkin grower and man oh man I can see why here's the other thing about this stuff not only can you grow bigger plants and more healthy plants but these this particular fungi produces an exudate of its own and this extra date is known as globulin that's how I pronounce that other people pronounce it differently the globulin you can't see you got a stain it gives a rigidity to the really fragile floppy pieces of spaghetti I feet and so it's really good stuff in that regard these things also tend to have you know it's got to be solidified a little bit pulled together and they often have gaps with your seals by this stuff you use much less fertilizer because the fungi going out and getting it and bringing it back to your planet you end up with better roots because it changes the morphology of how roots are developed on the plant you use much less water for a couple reasons not the least of which is these things bring water back to the plant Wow bring water back to the plant that's pretty cool and those little vesicles they contain liquid water and so if you're in a bad drought situation or you happen to just oh you don't get home in time you know that is where water goes into the plants in a perfect location this is a Illinois three or four years ago there was a terrible drought if you applied it you got a crop corn if you didn't you got a dead crop simple as that they also act as sort of protection not sort of protection protection nematodes do not like to eat chitin and these funds are covered with Titan so the nematodes dummy toads go away they're just they're terrific and in some instances not this particular fungi you get you get that kind of stuff on the end the end ecto and you can't even get in at the root so it's really important all right now remember I talked about the slime having a pH you know above 7 alkaline the fungal enzymes are acids so the pH is below 7 and the same thing applies if you have fungally dominated soil your soil is gonna be acidic and we all know that the pH of the soil has a lot to do with how the nutrients react with each other so this is important stuff to understand where it comes from because you can adjust it yourself and you can change it these enzymes are very very strong and and so that the it's a very important thing to keep an eye on so here's what's really going on in the soil you know you've got these these wonderful bacteria and fungi and along come the nematodes and the amoebas they eat them they poop it out and they feed the plant so you know I all his poop incidentally comes out as ammonia all of it always okay and the difference is and the reason why I pointed out the fungal dominated versus bacteria dominated is because if it stays if it's formerly dominated you have ammonium and very very few if any nitrogen fixing bacteria that would convert that ammonium into nitrate if the pH is above seven you have nitrogen fixing bacteria because they like to live in a pH above seven and you end up having the nitrates produced so the two different kinds of nitrogen are based upon whether it's bacteria dominated or fungally dominated your soils and you probably have no idea whether your soils are fungally dominated or back clearly dominated you need to test to find that out and once you test it then you can pretty well figure out what's going on now so what about cannabis where is cannabis in the grand scheme of things well cannabis is an annual and plants that are in the ground less than a year like pH is above seven they like bacteria dominated soil stuff that's in the ground for more than a year for those of you that are landscape architects that are around and I think there are a couple of they like fungally dominated soil the old-growth forest is fifty thousand fungus to every bacteria fifty thousand to one the beach is fifty thousand bacteria to probably know fungus so you need to find where along that continuum from old-growth you know beginning of life where does cannabis belong and fortunately I hear that dr. Elaine Ingham that wonderful person has done a lot of work in this area and the number that was quoted to me was a ratio of point six to one the point six up to one so you know one fungus per one bacteria and and you know that's a pretty doable thing which you can do and we're gonna talk a little bit about how to do it but cannabis is an annual and it likes the the bacterial e dominated soil all right so if you want bacteria dominated soil you know in your compost piles and then you compost teas these are the things that you would use and and and they foster bacterial you can put cover crops in that also produce nitrogen as well and foster that key and this is the kind of stuff that would produce fungus they like you make acids they like soybean meal so when you're making compost teas and you're doing these things these are the things you're gonna like alright so the bacteria the fungi which I've just talked about I call them the fertilizer bags that's the fertilizer bags you want to have lots and lots and lots of them because that's what gets eaten and pooped out and so they're fertilizer bags what spreads the fertilizer are the protozoa and the nematodes they're the fertilizer spreaders let's talk a little bit about them so this is an amoeba which everybody said they saw in high school but nobody ever really did and they're really spectacular organisms if you do see one they're all over the place and they eat all sorts of stuff and they're there they're easy this is the Paramecium which you all studied in high school took a diagram home you know and asked your mother and father to help you and it looked like the bottom of your shoe and had a little gullet in and you had to you know label the thing and then bring it in and nobody ever knew why we looked at these things we didn't we didn't study bacteria because they were too small we studied these because they were big enough to see and they were harmless but nobody ever had any thoughts about what what good they were but these little guys this is what they look like today under an electron microscope these little guys will eat ten thousand bacterium a day each one of them and poop out all tenth thousand of them so you want to have a lot of them in the soil and generally in that teaspoon you've got a couple of thousand of them and in fact you can grow your own and add them to the soil by simply taking straw or tall grass or hay putting it in a bucket of water and stirring it to keep oxygen in it maybe two or three times a day after two or three days you'll look in that stuff you'll see these things darting around like crazy you put that stuff on your plants and in ten days there in that rhizosphere eating and pooping their hearts out what a great thing and you study them in high school and mrs. Fisher had no idea that you would one day you know actually use the knowledge so that's what the diagram looked like in case you didn't do your homework and protozoa Tiki tikis is why when I talk about and it's really unbelievable you will be surprised they're really kind of fun nematodes there should be 40 to 50 of them and a good teaspoon of soil there are you know five or six of them that generally are in soil and maybe one or two of them are bad the other ones are beneficial so you know but they don't like the chitin they do get into there or the organism that they're attacking they'll lay eggs they bring bacteria in with them the bacteria act as food for the babies the babies eat the bacteria but then when they're ready to leave they bring a little bit of the bacterium with them in order to be able to repeat the process and of course you don't want to see this because this is the result of the bad Numa toads on cannabis so you want to be going to be careful about it they all have different mouth parts and that's what distinguishes them there are true worms they have a mouth and an anus and digestive systems it's the mouth parts that distinguish them and again you should have about 40 or 50 of them and about 20 of them want to be bacterial eaters the other ones ought to be fungal eaters that one looks like a fungal eater to me you know it looks like something I wouldn't want to put my hands in the soil but in fact it's a bacterial leader it's just a rubber spatulas waving water into the mouth that contains bacteria this one on the other hand is not one that I want to run into that's not you know fate that's not a nail but it acts the same way and it gets pushed into the cytoplasm and then it sucks out all the good stuff on itself this one attacks dogs and this one I think causes hookworm or something like that but anyway they're fascinating organisms and you can buy good ones that'll go out and ambush prey there has been a tremendous insurgence of people who specialize in beneficials and if you don't have a company that supplies them in your stable you need one and you need to make good relationship with at least somebody at that company who can help you because you can't identify everything that's happening to you and they probably can but just to help you there's another book you need to get it's by a guy named James Nardi na r di it's a book called life in the soil which I was asked to review and I went oh no nice anyway it turned out not to be like my book it's an identification book with all the things that are in the soil and it has a little paragraph underneath one and it tells you what they eat well if you know what the bigger guys eat you can figure out whether your soils are dominant in bacteria or fungi certain things you eat finest you have spring tails around you've got fungus all over the place so you want to know that stuff James in Artie's book is a big help and certainly again having somebody in your stable who can not only explain to you how these things operate you know but can help you is really really important of course you can go and look yourself all the shows you know have this stuff available there's lots of different companies that do it and it's definitely something you want to keep an eye on because new stuff is being developed all the time all right so these are some of the things you might find that are bigger that eat the littler guys you know so you've got a [ __ ] AGID there's the spring tail over here if you've got those in your soil you know there then you've got fungus and what you find when you take a look is that predominantly what you'll have are mites all over the place and there are two kinds of might well there's three kinds of mice there's bad mites but then there there are mice that eat vegetation and their mites that eat other critters and so you know you want to know the difference between those and learn that kind of stuff it is an eat and eat world down there more soil structure building because these guys are lower form are weaving through the soil creating tunnels the bad air gets pushed out by good air when it rains you get reservoir spaces places for things to hide the center etc etc it is unbelievable and you've got life and death constantly constantly if they're not trying to screw each other they're trying to eat each other and so you've got dead stuff all over the place which puts carving into the soil which then gets eaten by bad black you know and you end up with a wonderful system these are the if you take something known as a brûlées a funnel you can see this is just out of a regular batch of soil out of my garden holy crow you know and you get the orbited and you get that gamma said the gannis it is the one that eats the other organisms this is the evil rove people which i always stick in here if you're either a quasi hydroponic or hydroponic these little beetles here man oh man oh man do they eat stuff like crazy unfortunately they haven't taken out karl rove yet but they are really unbelievable organisms so then you get the bigger guys you know we all know what bears do in the woods right this is my house in Anchorage Alaska and I'm sorry I apologize for those who've seen this about 15 Crees over there where my wife heard me go oh what the and I jumped up cuz I heard this heavy breathing and I wasn't watching pornography and you know when I look at the picture I realize that window is open that's a screen right there and there was that bear watching the same television set I was you know fortunately when this guy came the window was closed because you never know what you're gonna see outside a window in Anchorage Alaska you see all sorts of stuff one time last spring when I was just walking through the room I looked out the window and I saw a pair of parents give the whole talk just for that slide I might uh you know and she was a lot scarier they were a lot scarier than the wolf that I saw later on but anyway we do lots of crazy things to these organisms in the soil food web whether they're big or whether they're small and and you know really destructive things like rototilling rototilling is a stupid thing to do because it breaks up everything in the soil food web the worms that you cut in half with that roto tiller don't turn into two worms unless you hit the eighteen segments in which case one half lives but what are the chances of that the bacteria that are supposed to be here end up down there that fungal Network which is putting out that wonderful exudate net exudate of the fungus globulin is destroyed so it's not putting out that gloom one here's the thing about that glom on that globulin is where the carbon comes from in your soil when we talk about global warming those idiots in Washington DC have no idea that when they rototill their garden that they're causing a serious problem for us that carbon is what we need and it comes not from Yuma gases maybe thirteen percent of the carbon in your soil comes from humic acids 27 to 37 percent of the carbon in your soil comes from these micro Raizel fungi and they pump it out into the soil every minute of the day so you want to keep them living all the time you want to pump an out of carbon into your soil all the time because at the bottom of the soil food web carbon carbon is the energy source that runs all of us and runs the soil food web so you know you don't want a rototill and and you don't want to certainly don't want to you know do it on a large scale basis anybody says well how do I plant my god you know they don't call it weed for nothing for one thing and for seconds we've all seen plants grow through pavement grow through cement they don't need you to rototill and pulverize the reason we do it is because there was a lawyer back in the time of Jefferson and Washington and he believed like everybody else he was English he believed that plants ate food is called the humors Theory plants eat food so rototill it up he said pulverize it so the plants don't have to chew so much huh we still water till today for the very same reason because Thomas Jefferson and and John Adams who was a farmer you know these were big - and George Washington read this guy and it became do-rag or in America to rototill and we rototill because of this silly guy back in the 1700s unbelievable so not a good thing to do even in pots you know just plant really and then we use chemicals we use these terrible's I don't have to tell this group how bad they are they're awful you know we don't really understand how they work my god if we do understand how they work we haven't been told you know I mean it's just unbelievable the fact that we are all sitting here right now every single one of us has one thing in common one thing in common roundup every one of us has glyphosate in our blood system did anybody here voluntarily eat glyphosate don't think so so that alone ought to be the reason you know then we do stupid things like this you know how many of your employees suit up put on the gas mask do all the stuff that's required if no one's looking no one's protected that's generally the rule and that's not good for the employee forget the plant for a second and then of course as I said at the very beginning think about the consumer and ultimately environmental perspective but from the plants perspective even worse because here's what happens you don't get nitrogen fixation why because if you're feeding the planet chemicals the plant says what the heck am i producing these extra dates for I'm using 60% of my energy I could clearly avoid doing that you're feeding me all this great stuff not the soil food web because you become the soil you're the base of the soil food if you're feeding your plants chemicals you end up with no mycorrhizal partnership why does a plant need to spend the energy to feed a mycorrhizal fungi if you're feeding it now again we think plants are stupid you know because they don't talk they don't walk they don't run they're very smart and they know how to save energy and they'll do it in a nanosecond because that's what they do and so you end up with 96% of the plants end up not having a micro Raizel relationship no globulin no carbon none of these nutrients phosphorus nitrogen holy crow this is important stuff and yet most people in the world have no idea of mycorrhizal fungi even exist nonetheless that chemicals can impact them in a niggle negative situation so really important dependency and disease is all these things happen as a result and you know you end up with some pretty bad situations and yet it's so easy to fix or to prevent you either keep the microbes there or you put the microbes back in again if you've got a ruined system and how do you do that well it couldn't be any easier the first thing you do is you can use compost because compost is phenomenal stuff will not explain why in a minute you can use compost teas both of which can be made fungally or bacterially dominated or you can use mulches and if you don't have mycorrhizal fungi you can add them as well so that's the fourth thing compost compost contains all of the fertilizer bags and all of the fertilizer spreaders you could possibly want if you've good compost and of course who here makes bad compost we all make good compost and if you don't you need to learn how to make good compost because it's terrific stuff you don't have to put very much of it on just a little bit and it goes down the microbiology works its way into the root zone into the soil and your happiest clamps now there are some problems with compost the first is you got to have a spouse this woman to turn your pile or you've got to have a really good source and you got to know what goes into your compost because if you're using compost that has manure in it from an animal that's been treated with tetracycline and the composting process misses just a little bit of it that tetracycline gets out of the leaf of the plant ends up into your customer you don't want that happening and other stuff worse so you've got to know where your compost comes from and what's in it and and it's it's terrific stuff once you once you figured that all out you can adjust it by adding more woody stuff there are all sorts of formulas to make it a more fungal it's not difficult to do compost teas now compost teas are very very controversial outside of this industry and why are they controversial because the Cooperative Extension Service hates it and why do they hate it because there was a lady involved with him who hates dr. Elaine England they had a fight they didn't get along and so the Cooperative Extension Service isn't even allowed to talk about compost teas in most places and yet this happens to be the proof of proof as far as I'm concerned but I'm a little prejudiced because I went there that's the president of Harvard University she's looking at tea Fleischer who did his master's report on compost tea using the Harvard Yard and lo and behold it was so successful that they now own probably a dozen machines the entire campus worldwide is compost teed that's how they maintain it and when you park your car in Harvard Yard you're parking your car on a compost yard I'm in a compost tea yard which is simply unbelievable it's just absolutely incredible to me Boulder uses University of Colorado uses it University of Arizona New York Botanical Garden Portland Zoo all sorts of places but the Cooperative Extension Service will tell you it doesn't work I had a conversation with with Kate I guess he's not here you know here's the bottom line on compost tea people say it doesn't work because you're not putting in the right microbes you're just putting in compost microbes and it doesn't work if that's true what's happening is you're putting in compost and nutrients that you've brewed and you've increased the amount of microbes you're putting it down in the soil and if it's dying it becomes food for the soil food web that's there so if nothing else you're adding nutrient source and biomass into the system to increase the biomass but I happen to believe it works because it does work we've all used it or I've used it for years and years and years I've tested it versus not versus I'm sorry if Cornell University isn't capable of getting the results that I get just using cilantro the difference is phenomenal in the two weeks that so it works and if anybody says it doesn't work you say well okay Harvard University is using it if it's good enough for Harvard it's good enough for little old me that's what I'd like to say so there are lots of different compost tea brewers you guys all know about it I want to stress too much on it a lot of people are now instead of doing compost tea doing compost extracts I know that there's an effort now not to use the word pot that's a fine word marijuana is a racist word we need to stop using it we need to go to the state of Alaska which has a marijuana control act and change the word anyway it's just so that's why I use cannabis and we already use cannabis it should be a standard let the pharmaceutical people talk about marijuana motions you want to mulch your soil period and and and again we're talking about an annual plant so the kind of molecule one is the mulch that feeds bacteria primarily you got to have a little bit of fungi and they'll be there by so the rule is this Browner's for fungal and green is for bacteria so I use grass clippings on mine I might put a couple of you know Berks leaves in that I find around out in the area but I use grass clippings you can use our falfa meal you know don't have bare soil doesn't have to be thick but gee if nothing else at that interface which everybody knows alone yeah you know you're losing all the nitrogen man you're getting great microbial life they're right there at the surface why waste that surface for if it did nothing else but it does lots of other stuff so so that's what you want but that's the rule and the end game is to increase the microbial biomass you want to have microbes all over the place dying because to be eaten and pooped out producing hormones like crazy and killing off the bad guys you know throwing each other multiple providing this wonderful or Ganic biomass which holds the nutrients that you put down unlike liquids which these nutrients are in the bodies of all these wonderful organisms so that they hold the nutrient and the higher the microbial biomass the better your grow is gonna be and I stick this in here because zach is here where he Zach okay everybody turn around and look at Zach right now and then write this down www micro bio meter comm micro bio meter calm because this is a new system that was invented by a woman named Ruth Fitzpatrick probably well probably about six or seven years ago that measures microbial biomass and what does that mean well first of all that means if you buy compost you can test it and you can tell whether it's good or not does it have a high mobile biomass or a low one what we need to be doing and it started already and you're can all be helped it turns out that the biomass changes in the rhizosphere as various things happen in a plant right before it flowers the plant says why the hell do I need all these bacteria right now I'm flowering man I need a little bit of boron and you get going but I don't need all other stuff and so it cuts down on the extra date and the biomass right in that area drops holy crow if you can tell that a couple of days ahead of time you know what to do next you know oh you can tell when your plant might be ready we don't know we're gonna do all these tests and you're gonna do tests everybody's brand new thing so that we can tell based on the numbers and the trending of the numbers what's going to be happening to our plant so we can test the medium that we put the plant in and we can test the products that people sell us so for example somebody in here gave me a product I tested it my god this stuff teams with microbes I said and it suddenly occurred to me that as a result of this bio meter we all now have a tool that in the field for five or ten bucks or 15 bucks right away in five minutes can tell us whether we're teaming with microbes that is unbelievable thing to me and it should be an unbelievable thing I hope for everybody else and I predict that this is gonna become a USDA standard you know just like NPK you know you send yourself in you get the nbk results well you'll get your NPK results in your biomass numbers and until that happens we'll have to take in more cells so that's that's the beauty of that information is power if you also want to do a soil food web test not every time but you want to know you know what's going on you've got to have information data is power really key stuff okay you want to use the soil food web as much as possible this is the guts here you know so you want to use the mulches and the compost the mycorrhizal fungi incident that you add as you can probably imagine if that's the one you have to use incidentally that's a picture of it with its spores isn't that a gorgeous looking thing and again all of this stuff helps to make it big fat microbial biomass that you want to have all right so you know that's sort of that's sort of how the software works in a sense but but you gotta also know a little bit about the nutrients and the chemistry and how that all plays together and I don't have to give a whole separate talk on that but I want you stick a little bit of it in here you know because you got to you got to know how this stuff gets in the plant it's important to understand this for two reasons one is when you figure out how the stuff gets into the plant and what it does inside the plant then you have a completely different appreciation for your plant what you're doing to your plant and what your plant is doing for you there are so many myths that have developed as a result of our lack of knowledge about how plants eat and what they do with the food you know that we end up doing things that probably don't need to do and I maintain that if you read teeming with nutrients and supplementary stuff you'll figure out you don't need to flush complete waste of time because it doesn't work molecular ly and biologically it doesn't make any sense in terms of how that cell operates you know and how that tricone gets formed flushing is not gonna help it's a stupid thing I've come to the conclusion as a result of understanding a little bit about the chemistry so you know now I've got a couple of things to say about chemistry first of all I would have been a doctor today had it not been for the methyl ethyl chicken-wire organic chemistry course that I was forced to take and didn't do very well in and so you know as far as I'm concerned is what I think chemistry but you got to know a little bit about chemistry okay but you don't have to know everything because plants only need four c---seventeen nutrients right 17 so that's not a lot of chemicals elements to understand 17 that's all it requires you know I always tell people the rest of the stuff and again I don't mean to be sexist it's just filler 17 is what you need that's stuff the 56 elements that are in kelp they're not feeding your plant they're feeding microbes they may contain hormone you know gibberellic acid and things like that but they're not feeding your plant it's not plant food so it's kind of interesting you only need these 17 you know you know what they are you can't play cards with 17 cards I mean honey you know how could 17 elements produce everything at your plant and essentially everything that you cuz you're eating plants to become you holy cow I like to say that cow is not a vegetarian no you're not a vegetarian but that cat the Cal you ate or the steer you ate was you know and so you take these 17 nutrients and you figure out the combinations that you could make because these are you know and you end up with holy crow you mix them together something like 25 trillion different molecules that you can make and I don't have the number here because for some reason it's not here but 95 percent of the weight of that plant are those three see hmm and you're not really normally supplying the CH and O most of the CH and already it does the same thing that's in beer which is my so important but you know you're getting the co2 and o2 h2o you know most of its coming in automatically not by you so 95% of the plants just happening not you don't need to do it it's just happening Wow okay so I only got to deal with 5% yeah and that's where that's where the work needs to take place and by the way C and H make terpenes and you know I always hear people there are got the stuff you put it in the soil you know goes into the plant and makes the terpenes better well it's the chemistry inside the plant that's making the terpenes better nothing no terpene is traveling into that into the you know it's CNH it's you know it's how that all works is actually phenomenal and so in order to understand why you wouldn't flush again you have to understand how the cells work and how these things interact amongst themselves so the five percent of the 14 mineral nutrients and and it's it's you know it's what you pay attention to now how does this stuff get in the plant you know that's that's sort of what people people need to need to understand so you've got your basic cell right it's got a cell wall around the whole cell right inside that cell wall something called a plasma lemma now you may know about it but as I sat down to write this book I realize how stupid I am never heard of a plasma lemma a plasma ulemas just like your television suite it's a true plasma you know when you touch it television screen you drag your finger across it gets staticky and you can see it's a plasma like fire is a plasma okay you know that blue and and so that this plasma which looks like this it surrounds the entire cell every single cell in the plant and it's got this this this unbelievable property because inside the plasma are these individual proteins that float around in it so there they are they're floating around it and these individual proteins are tunnels that allow individual nutrients to enter into the cell and there's also a plasma lemma around the vacuole of the middle of the cell and also don't let them in there and if it doesn't fit these it doesn't get in and it turns out that each one of these is different for each different nutrient so you don't get you know boron into the wrong carrier it has to go into the right one and each one of these proteins is made by the cell and inserted into it and sometimes they only use these tunnels for five or six molecules boron again comes to mind you only need it during flowering a little bit during so fair whew just go through oh the energy to make that protein to stick it in here Wow but nothing gets in unless it goes through there except for water which he can slip through I think carbon dioxide can slip through but the nutrients that we care about those 5% come through these tunnels that's how they get in and terpenes don't fit through these tunnels period so and this is the this is you know you can see the difference w reading well as I can't but there's the vacuole has the same thing this wonderful thing and that's what controls what goes inside and out of the plant and in order to be able to get through those tunnels you'll notice you have to have an electric charge because they operate as a result of different you know their electrons pulling on each other sometimes they have a carrier that pulls them but they all of these nutrients except occasionally boron have a either positive or negative charge all and what puts the positive or negative charge on it the microbes microbes take organic and inorganic eat it poop it out it's got the charge on it so what you're doing is you're feeding microbes you're not feeding the plant the microbes are feeding the plant and this is this is you know the the things and there's the ions that's how they're absorbed and and that's what you got to pay attention to NPK gotta do an NPK test too lots of people don't sometimes you want to do a tissue test also see what's taken up you know so you got a test data data data data and then you gotta appreciate and understand the size of things we're dealing down in the nanometer section way down here you know not millimeters which is dime sized we're dealing in really teeny stuff we're dealing with individual cells and you're treating individual cells and as each one of these cells grow they're very small if something goes wrong that cell doesn't develop right you know things get screwed up in your plant so in an individual oh well I here's a statistic that I always find interesting if each one of us was a nanometer tall the entire population of the world 6.5 billion people could fit into that seed packet right there you know so we're talking teeny teeny size stuff but that doesn't mean that it is an important stuff because even though it's small you could screw it up like you can't believe I mean we are talking unbelievably small okay yeah I don't know why I stuck this in here but I had to do it you're a jerk sorry in the period at the end of a sentence in any of one of my books there are five to fifty plant cells the atoms at each one of the cells that's how many atoms are in the cell and in a normal plant you know there's probably 18 trillion so holy crow so you're dealing with some really small things each one is a little factory and what goes on in these cells is absolutely unbelievable and each one is connected to the other one so that if you went into the root system you got into a cell you've gone through the cell wall you're in the cell you could go from one cell to another cell without ever leaving the cytoplasm so what you really got is a super nucleated organism like a beehive because each individual cells really not alive it takes the whole plant to reproduce just like a beehive and these cells work with each other and you've gotta treat them right in order to have them operate right you got to appreciate their size in order to understand and appreciate what they do so that you can treat them properly for example in every one of those 18 trillion cells there happen to be 42 million proteins in each cell a number they just came up with last week I might add so you're the first that I've talked to about there's a second I guess but so you've got unbelievable amounts of protein so you wonder why amino acids work when you put them in you know because they got the building blocks that end up Wow and and it turns out that they're special protein one of which happens to be enzymes so in each individual cell of which there are 18 trillion you should have about a thousand different enzymes and 10,000 members of each group that's a lot of enzymes operating in there and if you don't have that member number of enzymes in every cell your plants not chugging along at the right time and so it helps to understand that these enzymes work best at these temperatures that we grow our plants so that's why when you grow your plant at 90 degrees they don't do well or when the plant is too low they don't the best temperature is right there 76 to 80 or so and that's because the enzymes work best and operate the chemical system at its supreme spot so understanding what goes on in that individual cell and again just touch the surface I gave a whole talk just on on how these things work is simply incredible so so for example most of the growth occurs at night that's why you turn your lights off you know anchors last 24 hours suddenly big plants know the plants need some night time in order to be able to simulate and put the stuff together you know the only reason why we've grown big cabbages in Alaska or big pumpkins now we weren't able to do is because of the soil the Alaska Yuma soil that's in the area where they traditionally grew the cabbages for the State Fair is their richest soil on the face of the earth it has the highest microbiology of any soil on the face of the earth it has been tested as far as I know and sure it's right there in the six inch layer and it grows the big pump of the big cabbages I live in Anchorage Alaska which is 30 minutes away and up until three or four years ago nobody in Anchorage Alaska could grow a big cabbage and everywhere I go oh that's because of the sunlight it's the sunlight wait a minute I'm thirty minutes away I had the same sunlight they have where they grow these big in the Palmer weather where they grow the big cabbages well what we what we discovered and we thought well if it's not the sunlight obviously what is it it's gotta be the soil it's got to be this Alaska human stuff and sure enough when we started growing cabbages in Alaska you must bring it in anguish it gets removed in Anchorage because it's 80 feet thick so they take it off to build on you know Jesus said this is geo seismic problem and they put it in the landfill you can't ever touch it again but if you get some of it and you grow a cabbage and holy crow and the same thing with canvas and everything else so these pumpkins grow 40 pounds at night sometimes your cannabis is grown at night gotta appreciate how that cell operates what's going on in that cell and again I'm just I just scratched the surface of hardly I already touch it you know so you got to just understand what's going on you know what I mean you gotta gotta pay attention you know when you got to react properly particularly when you're dealing with things that are so small can you make a little mistake when they're small it gets tough for the thing to get big so that's it so you know the rest of this stuff may seem pretty obvious but I think it's pretty important stuff you want to start with a very best soil you can genetics first soil second as far as I'm concerned yeah you need light and water and all other stuff you know but if you've got great soil with great microbiology what do you guys call it living soil which is not a phrase I particularly like because for my perspective all soil is living dirt is dead but anyway we'll use living soil you want to have the most living soil you possibly can simple as that and how do you get the most living so you possibly can well one of the things you do is you create a situation where that soil becomes not only a condominium for microbes but a really fancy fancy first-class condominium for me so you put stuff in there you know that makes it as good as possible biochar the reason why biochar works is because it's a condominium for microbes you can't use just pure biochar you have to rechart you have to charge it why because you've got to fill that condominium up otherwise it's just an empty condominium and in doing you any good whatsoever so you want to have the best condominium the best condominium means soil the best you can have period don't skimp on soil or genetics you want to keep the pests under control in order to keep the pests under control you have to think like a soil food web if you're organic you're a soil food web II and you know you you can add organisms that consume out-compete interfere and reduce the pest okay simple as that you want to prevent things like this you gotta think like a soil food web what is the pest so you got to be able to identify it and if you can't identify it and you know right now with your gonna be capable identifying find somebody who does know how to identify pests and find them before you get the pests because it's too late when the guy says or the lady I'll see you in about a week I'm pretty busy no you want to know instantly you want to develop that relationship you want to know where the eggs are laid etcetera you can read as well as I can but these are the questions you need to ask yourself they're very obvious questions when you get the answers to these questions then you can know what to do where did you get to the answer to these quick you use your computer the best thing a cannabis grower ever ever got was the Internet Google is information being DuckDuckGo whatever it happens to be my goodness gracious if I had a dime for every time my wife asked me a question and I had to explain to her the difference between where I went to school where she went to school where where I went to school they said look it up well now you can look it up anywhere and you should and and so that's important so you know you need to learn some of this stuff and if you don't want to learn you got to get somebody in there again so these guys are all good stuff and you can buy them now no that's a gamete that's a gamma said for sure and they're beautiful I operate terrific and you can get these things going they're sort of like your you know these are like your your Shephard your dogs that are running around keeping your herd you know in context and in control and keeping the Wolves away and all that kind of stuff this is all key stuff you know so it depends on one where is the leaf what's going on in the plant how old is the plant what what what when do I put on what where weight center center again I don't go into this stuff you know these things can attract stuff away from your plant I have a friend who has banana plants in the middle of his grow and the banana plants attract all sorts of things that don't get on the regular cannabis plants oh pretty cool you want to want to put your traps in the right place for god sakes just because people have pictures of them hanging up at the top right you know what I'm talking about that's not where the pests are there now middle all right you know this is this is that Rove beetle boy you put this rope a water situation it sits down on the roots you know like an aquaponic situations okay and mean it sees something move out phenomenal great stuff you know Rove is a bastard Rove beetles are just as tough I have to say you know there's all sorts of stuff you can use and and it's all very very very very important the one thing that I that I really haven't talked about is the light is also important and I said here oh yeah it's right okay so I've asked a guy and gal who have a company that make a producer or lease out a brand-new kind of light called a plasma light and this plasma light we think has an impact on the microbiology why because this plan the light is like Sun used by NASA you know to be Sun when you look at that when you look at them UV that comes out of it it's it matches the Sun or it's better than the Sun LEDs don't do that you know the HID they don't do that they don't reproduce the sunlight and so the microbes are not living in natural conditions if you're growing with those so this is gonna be new technology that that has been improved because when it first came out you couldn't use it you couldn't use it for flowering now you can use it for everything you know all of these things are available and usable indoors and outdoors you know and again you've got that Paramecium T which you can use you want to use cover crops makes a lot of sense to use cover crops not only do they attract some of the bad guys if there are but they pump in nitrogen they put biomass into the soil because they're putting out extra dates and by the way if you end up with a male plant you know that male plant is still putting out extra dates attracting all the microbes that it needs that's soil that you have in that male plants great cut the male plant off plant right in it the new plant grows in down the roots of the old plant that are dead the microbes used a lot of that material that's dead because it's decaying and feeding who makes it easier for it to grow the water ends up down in that area and you've got all these extra dates for a cannabis plant that's been put into the put into the soil why are you filling that away just because you're scared of a couple of men you know simple as that anyway uh you wanna you want to build the microbial biomass or leave it in as you do in that particular instance you want to use compost you wanna use compost teas you know all this stuff makes the point here's the male plant you know literally in fact when I harvest I say I've been going down the same pots I guess for years I'm getting pretty stoned you know with what I'm growing so it's certainly working you don't have to switch soil every darn grow a lot of waste and if you do you put it into a compost pile your recondition it you reuse it again my goodness gracious you know we've got to do it the right way let the farmer companies you know the bad guys waste the money we're not gonna do that particularly when you think about the fact that we're ending you know we keep hearing tear or tear or tear or you know even if you're growing in a pot you know will you create your own when you start recycling your soil constantly and you that's your tour or you know if that's the proper way to pronounce it um you wanna test test test I cannot stress this enough you know in fact I got one slide in here someplace you want to do soil food web you want to do micro bite you want to do NPK you know you want to test information is power and what this says is you're stupid if you don't test simple as that you're stupid a terrible word to use you've got to test folks information is power you know you do it for your own health you got to do it for plants health it's just so important you know and this stuff that I'm talking about it works indoors just as well as it works outdoors the plant doesn't care where it is it wants a good viable hard-working soil food web whether it's indoors or outdoors it's last choice is Miracle Grow you know I'm saying it wants what normally gets alright so you know again I've already mentioned this this is your best friend guys use it all the time there's no stupid questions when you ask Google a question you know it doesn't laugh at you it gives you an answer and if it doesn't give you an answer then you can go other places and here's the deal we have this information anytime we want and any place we want it don't wait get the answer right away because you're dealing with 18 trillion cells you want to fix them right away they're gonna get away from you if you'll wait 24 hours if you wait till you go home yeah carrying your phone around I know you are I know and you know when Rudy's not looking you're on that day so you know use it it's very very important get familiar with the places to look you know there's certain ones that are there all right so here's how I end it not convinced think about this just think about this you know those redwoods they're growing out there they're like 750 years old some of them are 500 feet tall how the hell did they get that big without any miracle grow without any pesticides placed on it they got that big because even though they're that big they teamed with these teeny teeny little microbes and that is what makes plants grow and that's what makes amazing cannabis thank you very much and how about a handsome very natural yeah thank you so much screw it up for Jeff and now I would like to invite Cassandra Murphy the master grower of birthday and the mastermind behind the method that we use Cassandra taught the entire team at Verde how to grow in living soil and we are very very very grateful for that and I also love to invite Jaime Hubbard the cultivation manager at Verde give it up for Jamy and whoever would like to ask questions is good it doesn't plenty hearing this is not destroyed if you need to disturb the soil you disturb it the least amount as possible aeration happens to be something that helps fungi in particularly the first things to go and when ground is compressed I would like to ask Cassandra to elaborate a little bit on that because in our garden we do it a little different so I would love to hear your opinion on that me too [Music] is really always the right approach for outdoor cultivation Verde and anion aren't really both I've seen like amazing no-till growers I think the important thing is is just to rely on the soil food web and to feed that wherever possible at Verde because we're constantly turning over our our soil garden essentially what we take out is the roof mass which is pretty much just a solid brick by the time we we pull it out so it's a room so there's no yeah so there's no room in there essentially we're taking out a footprint of a three a three gallon pot and then we're putting one back in but we also tell in some kelp meal dole might live and things like that and so it's sort of a process of like Rhian ovulation each time we want to make sure that those nutrients break it down very quickly to give access to plants just because it's so high in attendance well yeah and it makes a difference you know when you using organic takes longer to break the stuff down so thank you please go ahead so what we do first thing when we harvest is we go ahead and pull the route follows which again are essentially just like three gallons footprint bricks a brief mass you see routes like travel the length of there are twelve foot beds but in any case we're taking like the bulk of just that root mass and the newsmen that could be composted and we do an NPK test the microbiome eaters a wonderful tool that we've started using as well and then we're you know we're also testing the pH we're just kind of getting a sense for where we're at and then we'll add new material and like granulated kelp meal granular humic acids that sort of thing and a lot of organic alfalfa meal as well and so we're just basically adding in some food and that's what we're what we're using instead of any bottle of nutrients when we use I know a number of growers that take the roots they don't listen to me they take the roots indoor growers and they pulverize the roots up and literally use that as sort of a mulch interesting because again it's got all the carbon in it it's got it's got you know some like arisal fungi in probably so it's do it but composting when you compost stuff you can use one quarter of the fertilizer you would put on directly on a plant in the compost pile and use that compost you don't have to use the hundred percent they do we use on a plant so putting something accomplished by hose basis if for no other reason again that the microbes are holding all the new creators the one they use is called a Geo Brewer and the the the basic of course is that you know syrup cart that you'd get anywhere in the world that's why it does them that way but the thing itself sort of looks like an outboard motor kind of deal and you can see pictures of it missed you you could duplicate it but you know this is all stainless steel design so that doesn't have any corners it gets viral slime so you know but yeah there are pictures of it's called the Geo vortex is really yeah I like vortex I mean again you know you're growing back to your growing fungi and multiplying bacteria and the fungi are fragile that dies for tech see you know biodynamic kind of you know it's it's got a good feel to it that Gio Brewer makes a little roll like this one yeah I do think of it I know it makes a difference because I again I explained the thought this afternoon I spent probably about a year and a half or two years almost on a weekly basis sending samples into dr. Lane Ingham and I was testing all sorts of different Brewer designs and you know and she write me back and say what the hell did you just do your teas terrible you know and so yeah it does become I like the board not that I know of but I know that the woman who invented them the microbiome eater is working on one because I keep bugging her about let's get one that does find that but but you can you can often tell whether you've got good fungi by inoculating your compost and trying to grow the fungi yourself so you know we thought we talked about taking a handful of baby oatmeal handful your compost mixing it up putting it in a dark room you know and and growing the Santa's beard if it doesn't grow the Santa's beard you know so you can grow the fungus to a certain extent and there's different soil food web labs in the country and as well as around the world and and that'll tell you exactly what you got but it takes you know it takes a little bit of time to do it and so that that's always the big problem do you have the time and again you know as everybody knows if you can plan ahead of time it makes sense you start you with your compost six months before you're screwing around with your plants and that way you can do the testing and to get all the information you need ahead of time right we have time for two more questions well I don't we agree on this but if you have if you have too much trikha derma they eat the fungus and they'll eat the mycorrhizal fungi now how much is too much good question timing is the key and that's often why it's nice to have separate you know not everything mixed together and that we're so you can put them on separately when you want to yeah the micro rise to take a while to grow and so if you kill them off you know they may not grow in time to really be doing what you really want them to do so you got to be careful using trikha derma I'm not saying don't use it I just have to be careful and use it when at the right time so you don't use all the time first of all how they relate to the 500 that they just discovered that's the first thing I'm assuming you're not talking about e/m you're talking about indigenous organisms in the soil and should you use compost from your own area should you green compost in from another area you know well if they if if all these plants have the 500 pretty key huh you know I mean doesn't make any difference perhaps whereas maybe last week I would have said yeah I probably ate probably it does make a difference but now I'm not so sure because these 500 should be there and we know those 500 are everywhere where plants grow so I'm not sure what the answer really is yeah you know I mean I can tell you that that we have shipped Alaska you miss around the country around the world for that matter don't tell the don't tell the border controls and and it works wherever you ship it so that so it definitely you can have compost from other areas that work the question is are you introducing something you don't want to introduce and and I've never heard anybody that has introduced something that they don't want to introduce from a microbiological perspective in terms of compost so it probably doesn't make a difference particularly again with this 500 well we want to thank you so much for coming tonight I wanna think again Jeff for giving such an amazing presentation you know I think that people that are that passionate and can explain such complicated topics with simple words to me represent truth you know and we have something here together that we're all seeking in cultivating this plant and so we would love to continue to provide an environment where we can get together learn together and actually enjoy also like-minded people Pincus Andra thanks Jamie

Channel: Verde Natural - Marijuana Dispensary

Views: 172,278

Keywords: cannabis, gardening, growing, jeff lowenfels, soil, teaming with microbes, teaming with nutrients, teaming with fungi, microbial, garden, marijuana, pot, weed, plant, science, soil food web, living soil, verde natural, compost, compost tea, probiotic, natural, how to grow cannabis, advanced grower, cultivation, cannabis nutrients, cannabis soil, growing cannabis, living soil cutlivation, meetup, mycorrhizae, soil cultivation, grow weed in soil

Id: nS5tZEIocKo

Length: 92min 29sec (5549 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/paxplantax]

I really wish I could have been there to be able to see the slides, Jeff seems like a cool guy to hang out with too.

His books are available in audio book form on spotify!

[u/kidkadian99]

I have smoked their weed and can confirm it is amazing! They are Denver based .