Local materials

[h.h.]

You could use a paver sealer/ sand stabilizer.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Glaze-N-...-153/206309547

[Microbeman]

I wouldn’t use cement.
You want polymeric sand.
Sand mixed with polymers.


I just use sand on my own stuff.
As long as you get it in the cracks, it’ll lock them in.


https://youtu.be/s3z_fnWTQ6k

Read my post about polymers

[h.h.]

Read my post about polymers

I read it after posting. The sealer will work.

[Microbeman]

I very much doubt I can get that sealant.

[h.h.]

I’d just use straight sad.Torch your weeds or use vinegar/salt.
Or plant thyme.

[Microbeman]

I've used sand and cement in burlap bags to create a dam sort of like this;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckx7NSolvkM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1lqzIQ34FM

[Hookahhead]

So my “predatory fungus broth” was a fail. Nothing grew in the Tea broth or the antibiotic broth. I got a little excited after making those broths and added antibiotic to my initial culture. Unfortunately, I now believe that I may have had an actinomycetes instead of a fungi. I didn’t even know these existed, bacteria with fungi like growth! The amoxicillin dissolved my mycelia mass, which due to its bacterial nature would be highly susceptible to the antibiotic. At least knowledge was still gained I suppose.

In better news, the Tithonia diversifolia plants I posted in #408 are starting to bud.



Our rainy season is officially over. We may get another light rain or two before the end of the year, but we’re pretty much rain free for the next 5-6 months. The lush green jungle will slowly turn into dusty brown desert. So I decided it was time to harvest a large portion of the plants leaves. I got a nice shopping bag full, the 5 gallon bucket is only for reference.



Two weeks ago I cleaned off some of the lowers and tossed them into the garden bed. The reports are right, these things basically dissolve into a dark green goo and disappear quickly. Some of the leaves are huge!



Working in small batches (quickly before the wife came home haha), and using as little water as possible, I puréed the leaves in a blender.



I ended up with almost 6L of juice. I added 2 TBS of LAB serum and “sealed” it with plastic (I’m missing the cap). I’ll give this a week or two before straining, diluting and using on my plants.

[Microbeman]

So my “predatory fungus broth” was a fail. Nothing grew in the Tea broth or the antibiotic broth. I got a little excited after making those broths and added antibiotic to my initial culture. Unfortunately, I now believe that I may have had an actinomycetes instead of a fungi. I didn’t even know these existed, bacteria with fungi like growth! The amoxicillin dissolved my mycelia mass, which due to its bacterial nature would be highly susceptible to the antibiotic. At least knowledge was still gained I suppose.

In better news, the Tithonia diversifolia plants I posted in #408 are starting to bud.

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Our rainy season is officially over. We may get another light rain or two before the end of the year, but we’re pretty much rain free for the next 5-6 months. The lush green jungle will slowly turn into dusty brown desert. So I decided it was time to harvest a large portion of the plants leaves. I got a nice shopping bag full, the 5 gallon bucket is only for reference.

View Image

Two weeks ago I cleaned off some of the lowers and tossed them into the garden bed. The reports are right, these things basically dissolve into a dark green goo and disappear quickly. Some of the leaves are huge!

View Image

Working in small batches (quickly before the wife came home haha), and using as little water as possible, I puréed the leaves in a blender.

View Image

I ended up with almost 6L of juice. I added 2 TBS of LAB serum and “sealed” it with plastic (I’m missing the cap). I’ll give this a week or two before straining, diluting and using on my plants.

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Yummy!!

Same thing happens to the forest here at the end of rainy season. Actinobacteria fooled lots of folks back in the day.

[Microbeman]

Ordinary stuff

My poinsettia tree is getting ready to flower. It sure responded to being cut back and given some topdressing. The hydrangea flowers are beautiful. I'm disappointed the camera washed out the colors.
The hibiscus elatus I grew from a cutting is flourishing. I've got about 15 more which I'm hoping to create a little forest with.







My throne made from mesquite I think. I found it at a junk store and put a varnish on it.

[Hookahhead]

Looks nice MM! We have a lot of hibiscus around here, I like making tea with the flowers.

It’s been exactly 3 months since I first started this Algae ferment (Post #267). It wasn’t at all intentional that I chose that time period, I only discovered it when I looked back. The ferment didn’t go exactly as planned. I added too much sugar and water initially and it spewed it’s contents out of the airlock for the first few days... rookie mistake, and a lesson I already learned in winemaking long ago. After the bubbling died down, I added more molasses and LAB serum. It’s just been sitting undisturbed since then. At some point the lid cracked and the bottle was no longer airtight. I set everything up to strain out the brew like the bamboo ferment. The algae didn’t liquify as much as I had hoped. It took a lot of shaking, swearing, and sweating to get all the material out of the jug. It has the smell of a dairy farm, and countless mosquitos bit me while I struggled with my mess. I stripped naked, put my clothes in the laundry and immediately took a nice shower when I was finished.

A bit of funky fuzzy stuff growing on top, fortunately no maggots or other larva got in.



The solid algae was collected and pressed by hand in a mesh bag. All together 1.75-2 gallon of dark green liquid was collected. The container is 2.5 gallon.



The algae solids were still pretty similar to the unfermented algae. Definitely darker in color, and not as fluffy. Since the river is still high from the rainy season, it doesn’t have any algae currently. So I used some of the fermented algae as mulch on this plant. She is 2 weeks into flowering, I’ll post updates on how this breaks down. It really does remind me of cow manure.


This plant has a container in a container. The outer container has a plastic feed sack in it to keep the soil from falling out. Lately I have been using the excess material to cover the soil. Hyphae growth underneath was almost immediate. I decided to cover this area with some of the fermented algae, and then covered it back up again.

[Hookahhead]

A lot of organic gardeners complain about bottled nutrients. I don’t get it what the issue is, bottles make great storage vessels



1. Tithonia diversifolia ferment (Post #427)

2. Algae ferment (Post #267, and Post #430)

3. Bamboo Ferment (Post #159, and Post #395)

4. My own urine. I first add about 1/2 a cup of LAB serum to a bottle, then fill it up. The bacteria and acidic conditions inhibit the bacteria that convert urea into ammonia. This particular batch also had Purple Non-sulfur Photosynthetic Bacteria added, before placing the whole thing in the sun.

5. Purple Non-sulfur Photosynthetic Bacteria (PNSB) culture. (See this thread)

6. Fermented Ganja butter water (Post #384)

7. Fermented red bean broth (Post #384, and Post #392)

8. Fermented garbanzo bean broth (Post #393, and Post #396)

9. LAB serum produced in the traditional manner. (See this thread)

Thanks to MM and everyone here for letting me share my wacky experiments.

[h.h.]

I usually don’t store them.

Great example of what can be done and used.

[Hookahhead]

I have a little bodega/storage area behind the house. A family of 6-8 little brown bats have been sleeping here.



Today I finally cleaned up some of their crap!



Screened guano



Ended up with 207.8g, almost a half pound... thanks Mother Nature!

[Swamp Thang]

I have mentioned a few times about a new garden bed I’m working towards. The previous owner had started it, but then it became a neglected project I think. It also the part of the yard that gets the best sunlight.

It’s our rainy season so we get heavy rain nearly every day. I wanted to protect the soil, so this is where I used all that bamboo mulch from the ferment.

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Another resource I like to gather is paperboard. When I had my worms this was my favorite bedding to use. Cardboard, newspaper and other paper products can be recycled, but paper board is made from recycled paper and can’t be recycled again. Not in the picture is a big stack of egg crates.

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I moved into this house in April, which is the peak of our dry season. This bed was barren, but with the rains since then these plants have shot up seemingly out of nowhere and are now probably 10ft tall or more. I didn’t know what they were, but figured they must doing something good since they are so “weedy” in growth. My plan is to let them go until after the rains stop and chop/drop them into the bed. Today I found out they are Tithonia diversifolia

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It turns out it’s a pretty cool plant, and my suspicions were correct haha.

Hello Hookahead, Your pictures of bamboo mulch brought to mind some opinions I have read online, claiming that bamboo mulch is very acidic, and thus retards the growth of any plants on which those dry bamboo leaves are used as mulch.

Could you be so kind as to describe your experience with bamboo leaves as mulch, to shed some light on whether there is any validity to those complaints that I have read about bamboo leaf litter.

I live in the tropics where there is an abundance of bamboo leaf litter, but I have held back from using it as mulch, due to the concerns I have about the effect of bamboo leaves on soil, over time, if used as mulch. The reason I would have liked to use bamboo mulch is that it does take a long time to decay, unlike grass mulch which breaks down relatively fast, thus making multiple applications necessary to maintain a good cover of mulch

I sure would appreciate any advice you can offer about the use of bamboo leaf mulch, particularly with regards to whether any supplemental nutrients need to be added to plants that are mulched with bamboo leaves, perhaps to compensate for any nutrients that might be depleted by the bamboo mulch.

With my limited knowledge of plant nutrient science, I had previously regarded bamboo leaf mulch as being almost inert, due to its very slow rate of decay, and therefore of no lasting detrimental effect to the soil nutrient content, but my research at the University of Youtube, has cast doubts on my presumptions.

Here is a quote I found on this subject @

"You have discovered the problem with using non-composted bamboo leaves, rutin and orientin are compounds found in bamboo leaves.
These two compounds have synergistic inhibition effects on many nutrient compounds found in soils, the effect is that these nutrients are no longer available for uptake by any plants.

The result of this nutrient binding is allopathic to plants other than bamboo, which renders the soil uninhabitable by other plants."

Standing by for any pointers you can offer on this subject.

[Hookahhead]

Hi Swamp Thang! Unfortunately I can’t offer you much wisdom on the subject because I am only recently exploring this myself. This is actually the first time I have heard this. It could very well be true, where I have the large cluster of huge bamboo, there are a lot of dropped leaves underneath. There isn’t much growing in that immediate area, but the bamboo shades a lot too. Nearby plants don’t seem to have any trouble growing, but they all are local “weedy” species. I have never noticed an immediate dead zone around any bamboo clusters I’ve seen here. We have a yellow and a green variety here, fortunately both of them are clumping types.

Like you, I’ve noticed the leaves take a long time to break down. Bamboo is supposed to be high in silica, and I thought this may have something to do with it. They also don’t seem to absorb or hold water like normal leaf litter. I have used them around the house in places where the gutter overflows and cuts divots into the ground. Untreated stalks that I’ve cut seem to attract decomposing fungi within a few months of the rainy season.

My little trial with them may or may not be beneficial to you, since I fermented all of my stems and leaves before applying them. Interestingly, I’m using that same ferment on my plants. I haven’t observed any immediate consequences, but it will definitely be something I’ll keep in mind and likely research a bit further. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!