'Living' soil on a low budget

[Scrappy4]

So no kelp meal or guanos?

Both are good, I use a little kelp in some teas as i indicated. What i am trying to convey is, there are microbe teas and nutrient teas, both have there place. Although it is generally thought, on this board at least, that nutrient teas are seperate from microbe teas, and guano may actually inhibit microbe growth in teas, so it would be wiser to top dress or add a slurry of guano if that is what your want to add. Does this make sense? scrappy

 

[mad librettist]

You can tell when a tea goes bad by the smell. Good teas have an earthy smell, like a woods after a spring rain, bad teas smell like sewer, a shitty stank.

In my experience smell is not a good way to detect bad tea. The only safe thing to do, other than getting a microscope, is to follow a good recipe very literally, and be conservative about brew time.

 

[Scrappy4]

In my experience smell is not a good way to detect bad tea. The only safe thing to do, other than getting a microscope, is to follow a good recipe very literally, and be conservative about brew time.

The nose knows shit from shinola

 

[mad librettist]

The nose knows shit from shinola

know it does not.

I have made plenty of crashed teas that had no smell whatsoever. Still anaerobic, and still bad to use.

Let me be absolutely clear: I am speaking from experience and direct observations with a good microscope. Your nose is not good enough to detect a crashed brew. Your dog, or a bear, maybe. You, not so much.

By the time you can smell a bad brew, it has been a bad brew for quite some time.

It's reckless to encourage people to use their noses to brew ACT. Your nose is ok along with your other senses including common sense for monitoring your compost pile or your worm bin, but not ACT. "Using your nose" is the kind of advice that makes ACT look like a stupid idea used by reckless people with no reasonable controls on quality or safety.

Let me repeat again in case anyone missed it: the above is based on experience checking my brews using microscopy. If someone is giving you advice on ACT, your next question should be about their personal experience behind a scope. If they give you any other story, ask for their source and keep looking until you get to a person with a scope who can give you tried and tested recipes.

 

[jaykush]

please go to this thread, and use it as a guide to learn about soil.

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=207215

once you learn the in's and out's of soil you will be able to to literally grow lbs for pennies. there is no need to go buy anything to grow a plant. learn to problem solve on the spot, adapt and adjust with whats around you and smoke nothing but the best of the best.

 

[descivii]

Any consensus on dehydrating a bad brew and reusing the powder in healthy water? I've done this once and didn't notice anything in particular. It was a trash bag of 100% Hibiscus flowers with a shot of tea and and squirt of molasses and tied up for 4-5months. Upon opening it was a stinky black cake that I left open and it became kinda like a cowpatty and I rehydrated from there latter on.

J.

 

[mad librettist]

for my recipe above using 1/2 gallon of water, you can add 1/4tsp kelp meal OR 1/4 tsp soft rock phosphate or 1/4 tsp biotone.

you can also add 1/4 tsp or a pinch or azomite or rock dust

 

[mad librettist]

Any consensus on dehydrating a bad brew and reusing the powder in healthy water? I've done this once and didn't notice anything in particular. It was a trash bag of 100% Hibiscus flowers with a shot of tea and and squirt of molasses and tied up for 4-5months. Upon opening it was a stinky black cake that I left open and it became kinda like a cowpatty and I rehydrated from there latter on.

J.

not sure about that, but I frequently make brews using dried compost. I get better results with dried compost than I do with a bag of wet compost compacted on a pallet and allowed to go anaerobic.

I find drying compost is better than 90% of the "wet" storage going on.

 

[Scrappy4]

know it does not.

I have made plenty of crashed teas that had no smell whatsoever. Still anaerobic, and still bad to use.

Let me be absolutely clear: I am speaking from experience and direct observations with a good microscope. Your nose is not good enough to detect a crashed brew. Your dog, or a bear, maybe. You, not so much.

By the time you can smell a bad brew, it has been a bad brew for quite some time.

It's reckless to encourage people to use their noses to brew ACT. Your nose is ok along with your other senses including common sense for monitoring your compost pile or your worm bin, but not ACT. "Using your nose" is the kind of advice that makes ACT look like a stupid idea used by reckless people with no reasonable controls on quality or safety.

Let me repeat again in case anyone missed it: the above is based on experience checking my brews using microscopy. If someone is giving you advice on ACT, your next question should be about their personal experience behind a scope. If they give you any other story, ask for their source and keep looking until you get to a person with a scope who can give you tried and tested recipes.

While I can't argue the benefits of using expensive lab instruments to check your compost tea's potential for going anaerobic, I can site Teaming with Microbes, in the section on compost teas on page 150, the author says , "If the tea smells good, things are fine. If it starts to smell bad, the tea is going anaerobic" I guess it's hard to beat common sense YMMV.....scrappy

 

[descivii]

It seemed similar to what they do on some of those "composting farms" with anaerobic lakes. They dredge a bit out and dry it in a pile on land and sift it and so on from there.

J

 

[mad librettist]

If the tea smells good, things are fine. If it starts to smell bad, the tea is going anaerobic

I can't agree with that statement 100%, I can't agree that smelling your brew is an effective tool for judging ACT, especially if we are talking about fiddling with the recipe. All smelly brews are bad but not all brews that don't smell are good.

That is way I gave very sound advice to stick very literally with a recipe tested by someone equipped to test it. That does not require you to buy any equipment. Why are you even arguing this with me?

Your nose = inadequate tool for the job you claim it can do.

 

[descivii]

Problem is the terms good and bad are relative to the user.....I love that warm ammonia whooosh you get from the center of a big thermal pile in the winter. Not so for most folks though

J

 

[mad librettist]

we are not talking relative. we are talking specific scents:

ammonia
butyric acid
methane
mercaptan
etc...

In my experience the tea has sometimes been bad before I could detect any of the above, even if they showed up later (sometimes days later).

 

[wilbur]

this thread began with some basic questions and seems to have gotten away from them into more esoteric areas.

perhaps beginner organic growers would like to look at 'organic fanatics' in the australia/newzealand section where an attempt has been made to keep it simple sweetheart, and avoid, as much as possible, going down to walmart for yr supplies ...

 

[Scrappy4]

Problem is the terms good and bad are relative to the user.....I love that warm ammonia whooosh you get from the center of a big thermal pile in the winter. Not so for most folks though

J

A good nose and common sense! Woo hoo

 

[pinecone]

It sounds like the nose isn't completely useless. Both ML and Scrappy agree that funky (versus good smelling) teas are bad teas.

Anyway..

@ ML:From a microbial perspective, are the good smelling not good teas actually bad teas in the sense that they would harm plants (or the life supporting them), or are the just indifferent teas?

Thanks.

Pine

 

[mad librettist]

yes I agree the nose is not completely useless. If a tea smells chuck it. If your tea consistently smells fresh, that's a pretty good sign. But on a brew by brew basis the nose has limited usefulness.

From a microbial perspective, are the good smelling not good teas actually bad teas in the sense that they would harm plants (or the life supporting them), or are the just indifferent teas?

If you think of culturing sick, anaerobic soil, and then inoculating new soil with those organisms, what kind of results would you expect? A crashed tea looks pretty much like a culture from anaerobic soil. Lots of really cool to look at ciliates.

You want to culture healthy compost/soil, and you want to maintain conditions that make healthy soil in your ACT. So to make up for the liquid medium, you need lots of air, and you have to not give more food than the brew can handle.

High temps, not enough air, too much food, and too much time can ruin a brew. If you are going to mess with recipes, stick to FPE's. Winging it with ACT is IME not a good idea. Use a scope or hew closely to the recipe.

 

[Microbeman]

A good safe way to make compost tea is just stir 2% (vermi)compost in non-chlorinated 70 degree F. water and 0.25% molasses with a stick as much as you can tolerate over an 8 hour period. Then pour it on your plants.

Scrappy; My webpage is not in my sig but it is in Vonforne's

 

[City Twin]

US peeps might check eBay for BMO. Blue Mountain Organics produces a small line of liquid organic ferts that are biologically active.

Bought their 4 pack last fall for the garden. Applied according to directions. Results were very satisfying. Tomatoes went on well past first frost. Previous years we had a lot of green relish to make up. Not last year. Picked leaf lettuce all winter long from under a short tunnel. Previous years things petered out by December. Hot and bell peppers kept going also, long past normal turn under time. Potatoes loved it and had good volunteer vines pop up this spring. A nice surprise.

You can start a reliable bucket of goodies with some also. Sweeten up and bubble away. Seem to do just about as well as starting with a dry inoculation mix. 2 oz in about 4 gallons of molasses mash will take off.

Also appears to inoculate soil mixes very well. Just sweeten up your watering can a bit and add the recommended amount of BMO.

This seems to be a pretty inexpensive way to get your organic feet wet.

 

[Scrappy4]

sorry if I inconvenienced anyone, I keep the web adress bookmarked myself


http://www.microbeorganics.com/