[Music] Hey, guys. Good morning. Today we're gonna show you how to do IMO 1 to IMO 2. I want to give you the whole step-by-step process. So here we go. First, what you need is water, rice, and a rice maker. And then, if you want, but you don't have to, a tiny bit of OHN and FPJ. Up to you. I think it helps the process. Master Cho taught it. I'm gonna share it with you. But, the main thing is the rice and the water. So first step: pour in the amount of rice you want to use. I'm not going to give you an exact amount. So that's going to depend on your box, which we'll explain this next step after the rice is finished cooking But however much rice you want to use, go ahead and pour that in there. Go ahead and wash your rice, especially if you want to make LAB. So just pour up to the rice line, and then just give it a good rinse with your hands. This is to get off all the excess. And what we can do is pour off this water for use in making LAB if we want to. After you're finished cleaning it, you can pour off into a container, and that can be set out with a breathable lid like a paper towel, to collect your LAB inoculum for 2 or 3 days So smell that. Go check out How to: LAB to know what to do with that. Next, we want to add our water to make al dente or kind of hard-cooked rice. Now again, the ratio to give to you is kind of difficult, because it's all gonna depend on your rice maker or if you cook it in a pot on the stove. It's all gonna be different. So the main thing is if you know how to cook rice or if you know what you need to cook rice, to cook it properly, to have it that soft kind of gooey flavor or consistency. You wanna do this with slightly less water than that. So this is cooked rice. But if you took it to a party and people started eating it, they'd look around and say, "Who made this rice?" it's just not quite right. It's hard, still in individual grains rather than
kind of sticking together and gooey. So I know about what I need for my rice maker, and what that is is just below the rice line or right about at the line of the rice. Normally, for my rice maker, I'd have water just above my rice line. For this type of rice, I want the water to be right about at the rice, maybe just barely above. So in my rice maker, the water line is right about where the rice is, if you can see that. It's right at the level. But again, for your rice cooker, it's gonna be whatever it is for you. All right, I finished adding my water. Now what I'm gonna do, and this is optional, but I recommend it if you have it, is take a tiny bit of OHN, about 1/4 teaspoon, or like 1 milliliter, just a tiny bit, and add that to your rice, and about 1/2 teaspoon or approximately two milliliters, just around there, of FPJ. And what this does is it kind of preps this rice to both be attractive and kind of primed to not be inviting to any funky biology getting first shot. So it just primes the rice to be that much more appealing to your microbes. All right. Our rice is all ready to go. I stirred it in my FPJ and my OHN. Now we're gonna cook this till it's done. And I'll show you how we load it in our box and take it out to the field. All right, everyone. We made our dry cooked rice. It's fully cooked, but kind of granular still. Perfect for what we're trying to do. So you're gonna have to play with that. You don't want them sticking to each other. You want a kind of granular rice, but fully cooked. So you're gonna have some more cooked areas and some less cooked areas. Still pretty hot, so I've gotta use my knife. And what this does, the dry cooked rice, is it allows maximum air flow in between, so that your aerobic biology can get in there and colonize the whole thing of rice, because you don't want it to be one big mass where no oxygen can get in. So what I'm doing now, I got my cedar box
that has some holes in the bottom. I'll teach you how to make that on a different video. But I got my cedar box and I'm adding my rice. And then we're gonna go out to the field and find some good forest biology to get to move into our rice. After I have all my rice added, I fill it about 1/2 full. You could go up to 3/4. I like to do about 1/2. And so there's slats in the bottom that allow some rice to fall through. That allows microbes in the soil to kind of move up into the column. And then the overall rice is about 1/2 full. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cover it with paper towels. You can cover with something else if you have like rice paper or something. What I do is I use a stapler, open it up and just staple my paper towel along the edges so it has a nice tight seal. I don't want a bunch of bugs crawling in here. I just want my biology. And the biology can pass through the paper towel because a fungal spore to a paper towel is like a marble to chicken wire. Why do I only fill it 1/2 full? That air space is a neat principle in natural farming. The microbes will actually take that air space, heat it, and cause the moisture content in that airspace to be higher than the ambient air. So they'll use that and grow into it. So ideally, when we open this back up, it'll be full to the lid, right up to the paper towel, like cotton candy with visible mycelium. Which is a lot of fun. I stretch it nice and tight so it's not sagging down on my rice. And now I have my box all ready for collection. It's got its cover, it's got its breathable bottom, and we're gonna go out to the forest and show you just how to do that. So I have regular spots I go to collect IMO 1 and 2 And you'll find you have spots where you know are thriving. Today we're looking for a new spot to see if we can find a nice collection that's a little different area from some of the other collections I have. So let's go look. So I just start moving things around in the forest till I find stuff like that. And what we're looking for is a big area in full bloom with a bunch of visible mycelium like this guy. So I found a spot I like. It's full of white mycelium all over the ground. And we're gonna bring this mycelium we collected from other places and tuck it in all around here. Let's go get the gear. We found a slightly better spot full of all kinds of fun stuff. So we're gonna bring our collection box and put it right here. So we found a good spot to place our collection. And what we want to do, I set up a cage, and this is mostly for rodents. And so we'll place the collection within the cage on top of kind of the visible biology that we found. And so all this stuff in the surrounding forest we're now going to go collect and bring around. And all that spider webbing material is what we're actually looking for in this process. So we collected some from 1/4 mile away, and now we have more that we found in this area that we're going to tuck around this whole box. So like I said, the biology can pass through the paper towel So we're gonna to tuck it around the corners, and give this biology time to access our collection box. So what we don't want to do is we don't want to leave it all in the center, because as the microbes use this airspace, they're gonna take the little bit of moisture that's in the rice and they're gonna cause it to kind of go up in the air into kind of a highly moist environment. And if we have a lot of weight in the center, we're going to end up with our paper towel kind of dipping and ripping. So we're gonna collect a little more biology from the surrounding area, tuck it around this box, and then we're gonna close it up and set our tarp so the rain doesn't ruin it. So let's go find some more. So what we wanna do is get like 3 good handfuls between the 5 of us and tuck it around. We'll tuck it around. So you can just reach in as you find stuff and just place it on the corners. And just make sure it's kind of that spider webby material. That's what we're going for. If it looks like lichen or something, we don't really want to place that. So here is some of the stuff that's gonna go into the box: nice, visible, spider webs, mycelium, and more of the organic matter being decomposed by your beneficial fungi that you can kind of see with the naked eye. If you can see it with the naked eye, you're dealing with something about 4 micrometers or larger which all your disease-causing fungi end up being about 1.5 micrometers or smaller. So if you can see the visible strand with your naked eye, you know you have beneficials. So I'm gonna take a little bit of the visible biology, and I'm going to tuck it under the box. There's stuff all over the floor or the kind of dirt that we've placed it in. But I wanna get some stuff that's right up close to the rice that's falling out of the bottom. So I have those big gaps in the bottom of the box, and those are going to help us get some of our rice falling out and making ladders, so to speak, for our microbes to kind of get in and populate this nice little – All right. Maybe we'll collect a tiny bit more and then we'll call this good. Actually we'll call that good now. All right. Next step is we need to tarp this. And when we tarp this, we're going to tarp it high enough that the air is gonna flow underneath. All right. So our collection is placed. It's in a beautiful cinnamon forest. The cover is going to protect it from the rain. But it's high enough here that the air has plenty of room to blow over, and bring in the yeast and the bacteria from the trees all around. And then the fungi that we tucked in and around will, hopefully, all of this will inoculate nicely. And we'll come back in about 5 days to find a nice, blooming box of indigenous biology. CHRIS: There's a peacock, Jordan. JORDAN: Where? CHRIS: Do you see it? JORDAN: Oh, yes. It's so pretty. CHRIS: Isn't that pretty? See that thing on the top of its head? It's running away. JORDAN: [inaudible] CHRIS: It only does that when its talking to a girl peacock. JORDAN: Is that's a boy? CHRIS: That's a boy. JORDAN: How do you know? It's been 5 days here in 70-degree weather, and I think it's about perfect for getting our IMO 1 collection and seeing how it did. So let's go check it out. So if you're going to do IMO 1, you don't want to do it in the middle of a rainstorm. We had a lot of rain, but I waited until 2 days of sun had passed before I went out for my collection. And we had some projected good weather coming too. So I wanted good weather for this. There's nothing wrong with harvesting it in the middle of a rainy season We just don't want to harvest or try and harvest in the midst of a rainstorm. That much moisture can often lead to too much moisture on the box and a bad collection. So it looks like everything stayed nice and dry and no rodents have gotten into it. So let's pop it open see how we did. First thing, I'm gonna do is drop my tarp. Whether it succeeded or not, I am not gonna collect again here right now, because if it failed, I'd still need to go down and make a new batch of rice. Now if you want, if you have kind of a time crunch and you wanna make sure you get things done, and you're coming far out to do your collections, you could bring a second box full of rice with you to check your first collection. And so I'll do that if I'm going kind of far up on the mountain or something. But this time, I'm hoping that it turned out good. Here we go. Let's see how we did. So you know you're in trouble if you come back here and there's water covering it or there's a big hole in it. But as it is right now, I can smell a little bit of the fungi, and so I'm hoping that all that good stuff we put on top moved its way into our box and became a good collection. So let me show you what it looks like. Here we go. And you can see all that nice white spider web, that visible fungal hypha, and that visible mycelium is still hanging out on top of the box. Our center sagged just a little bit. If you can see, it's kind of cupped towards the middle. But not so much, because we didn't put a ton of weight in the middle. That nice spider webby stuff. Let's see if it moved right onto the rice and we have a good collection. Let's pull it on out. All right. So what we do need to do is we need to take this stuff off the top. If you want to save it and take it down and use it in your compost. Nothing wrong with this material But you don't necessarily want it in your rice if we have a good collection and we want to move to the next stage. Let's pull up the edge here and get our first peek at what our rice did. All right. So we don't have a ton of fungal growth. We have some, which is cool. So on an ideal collection, the whole thing would be covered with this white spider webbing material. Now we may have ended up too dry, as it made my rice pretty dry, which is kind of what it looks like. But – let's see how the bottom looks. Because if we were too dry, then the bottom and the middle should have some growth on it that we can see. So I'm gonna use pretty clean hands and check out what it looks like. So here we have a good caking biology through the rice. It's held together. It's this somewhat solid material. The top is still pretty loose, but the bottom is nice and caked. So this is not our best collection, but still a good one. I'll show you some pictures of perfect collections here Now here's the question: Should I use this? Is this of any value? It definitely is. Here's the thing: You don't want this to be your only collection. I know I'm damaging some of this hypha, but I wanted to continue to just show you what it looks like. So it's holding the rice together in kind of a cake, a conglomerate, where it got established. And so if I had known this before I grabbed it I probably would have waited till tomorrow. But that being said, is still a decent collection. I will mix this with rice and keep it and store it. So this is, again, not the only collection I want to use, because I want great collections, stuff that's really pretty like some of these pictures. But it is worth using. So check it out. We established some of this mycelium onto a rice box. I've taken several of these videos of seeing IMO 2, and how to do it And I could show you a perfect collection. But I'm gonna put this one online because I want to show you that it's okay to fail. And something like this where it didn't go rotten, didn't get wet, is not a complete failure. This is actually a good sampling of indigenous biology from our forest that we can establish in our cropland. So let's get this down and mix it with the right amount of brown sugar. You ready?
