Urban Worm Composting -The Real Dirt: Soil Health and Soil Science for Gardeners Class, January 13th from 1-5pm
This is a 4 hour class on the soil food web, soil creation and microspy in Berkeley, CA USA. Bring your own handful of dirt to examine under a microscope. This class teaches how and why soil works; how to inoculate your soil with the right microbiology to match plant types; how to determine what is missing [...]
Mushroom Life Cycle and Mushroom Cultivation Cycle – Gardening Rhythms
Mushroom life cycles and cultivation is important to understand for taking advantage of mushrooms for monetary, health and natural soil biology reasons. Mushrooms is used for health benefits: For Information on health benefits from mushrooms, click here Mushrooms is used to make or save money: For growing and fruiting mushrooms, click here Mushrooms are germinated in compost teas and [...]
Soil Food Web – Predator-Prey Protists Bacteria Fungi Microarthropods in an Aerobic Environment
Soil Food web – Predator-Prey Protists Bacteria Fungi Microarthropods are some of the main components in soil microbiology. Below is a predator/Prey food/eating chart. Arrows indicate who is eating what. Some of the food materials are organic (meaning they contain some carbon), while other organisms are eating inorganic materials (like NO3, NO and etc…) The tangled [...]
Compost and compost tea is not fertilizer, but an infrastructure for soil
Compost and compost tea is not fertilizer, but infrastructure for your soil. This is really good place to start with learning how the Ecology and Phenology in soil works. We start with what we know and branch out. Definition of fertilizer: Fertilizer is made of a salt consisting of Ammonium (NH4) & Nitrate (NO3). [...]
Testing your Compost Tea Applicator(s), Pumps and Sprayers
Testing your Compost Tea Applicator, Pump and Sprayers is easy and can be done in a few moments. Micro organisms can be blended and killed when tea is applied on plants or leaves by using pumps. It’s important to have the right pump and nozzles or you will kill everything you grew. There are three places where [...]
Green Tea from Comfrey Or Other Leaves – IPM Control – Foiloir Layer Biology
Green Tea from Comfrey Or Other Leaves is an IPM Control for the Foiloir Layer Biology. Compost tea can be made out of leaves as well. It is not called compost tea, but green tea. It is used as a pest management for leaves. This method suppresses leave pathogenic problems. Fungi and bacteria issues. Link: For [...]
Compost Tea Brewing Equipment
Compost Tea Brewing Equipment can be bought as a kit or made with some house hold items around the house. The description posted here are for the DIYers. Compost Teas are used for disease suppressions on leaves on trees or plants. Once the compost tea is made, it is placed on tree leaves to prevent bacterial [...]
Hard Water-Chloramine-Chlorine-Dissolved Minerals Removal
When water comes to us from a wells, rains or cities, it normally has some or all of the elements of Chloramine, Chlorine or Dissolved Minerals. For us to make good compost teas, grow mushrooms, grow Aquaponics systems or just plain using water, we need to make sure it is safe for our plants and our [...]
Measuring the Amount of Fungi in Your Soil Sample
Measuring the amount of fungi in your soil sample is easy an inexpensive way to check your soil microbiology. The unit of measure for fungi in soil is ug/gram. Here is the unit dimensions. A “ug” means 1 micro gram. One gram is equivalent to 1 ml of water; or 1 ug is equivalent to 0.000001 [...]
Dissolved Oxygen Meter RS232 Connection Cable and Data Collection (EXTECH 407510A) for use with Compost Tea Brewing
When brewing Compost teas, it is very important the whole brew does not go anaerobic. That means the dissolved Oxygen in the water/brew can not go below 5.5 mg/L of dissolved oxygen. This can be measured using a Dissolved Oxygen meter. If you are very serious about making good compost teas, you may want to [...]
Identifying MicroOrganisms using a Microscope
Identifying what is in your soil takes you many steps closer to understanding how the world works around us. If you are a beginner to microscopes and to microscope slides with sample preparation, you first need to get a lesson oh how to use a microscope. Using microscopes is not hard, but is not as simple [...]
Preparing Soil Samples
Preparing soil samples for microscope analysis is easy. The actual analysis has a steep learning curve. It takes a bit of practice. Preparing soil samples is different than preparing compost tea and compost extract samples. In preparing soil samples we are going to be measuring the amounts of micro-0rganisms contained in the soil. That means [...]
Preparing Extract Samples
Preparing compost extract samples is the easiest sample to make. It is identical to makeing compost tea samples. You do not need to ratio water with the tea. The down side is you really can’t tell how much of each animal is in the tea. When testing for compost teas, you are really looking for [...]
Soil Test Equipment
Testing your won soil with a microscope is fun, but there is a large learning curve. It is simple to make the samples, but identifying the animals on the slides takes a lot of practice. Here is a list of items you need for basic microscope soil analysis. These items can be used for analyzing compost, [...]
Microscope Care
Microscope care is simple but it needs to be done. With all microscopes, dust is the biggest problem. When too much dust gets into the microscope it is difficult to see clear images. Get it cleaned once a year if needed. The best practice is to keep the cover over the microscope when not in [...]
Using Compost Tea for Pest and Disease Suppression Control
Compost Tea is the easiest and safest way to control blight, leave curl and most fungi problems in trees. The process is very simple. Spray compost tea on the leaves and tree branches. Yes, this does not go into the ground, but on the upper canopy of the tree. About 4 weeks before buds open [...]
Making Compost Teas – Video
Here are some simple How To Vidoes to Make Compost Teas. For more information on Compost Tea Application schedules for preventing diseases see, For more Information on applications schedules for Tea Applications, Click Here For more Information on Disease and Pest Suppression using Compost Teas, Click Here Compost Teas/Extracts Foods, Click Here Making Compost Teas [...]
Testing Confocal Microscope on Compost Tea
Here is an interesting test case of compost tea made this week. The tea was brewed with protists and fungi in mind. The tea was made in a 5 gallon bucket with 4 tablespoons of liquid kelp and 4 tablespoons of fish hydrogisate. It was bubbled for 48 hours at 68 degrees F. Below is [...]
Foiloir Layer Case Study – Laurel Bay Leaf Images
The sample is set up with two different stains. One stain shows all of the live bacteria (green) and the dead bacteria (red). Below is the BL (Back Lite) of the Bay leaf. The stomata are shown in semi-bright circles in this image. A stoma is a pore, found in the leaf and stem epidermis [...]
Composting for Growing Soil, Compost Teas and Compost Extracts – Videos
Gardening Rhythms: Advanced Composting Part 2 (2010) (YouTube Part 1) Gardening Rhythms: Advanced Composting Part 2 (2010) (YouTube Part 2) Gardening Rhythms: Advanced Composting Part 2 (2010) (YouTube Part 3)
Pump Batteries
The battery is the last thing people think about. In this case, I have used an 11 amp-hour 12 volt sealed lead-acid battery. It is strapped to the bottom of the applicator using Velcro bought from the local fabric store. It is recharged once a month. I used a cheap motorcycle battery charger. Any 12 [...]
Compost Extractor Attachements
I found a need to have three attachments to apply Teas and Extractions to everywhere. In the picture below, there is a normal chemical sprayer tip. Very thin Compost Tea will pass through it, but it normally gets plugged up with something. The center of the nozzle had to be clipped off with a pair [...]
Setting up the Right Hose
The hose and nozzle cannot destroy the micro-biology as it passes through. In this case, I have used a typical chemical pump up sprayer nozzle. This can be bought in any hardware store. You can buy the parts separate from the whole applicator. A 3/8 inch clear hose is used between the pump [...]
Choosing the Right Pumps
The best and cheapest pump for this application is a diaphragm pump. This is a positive displacement pump with a chamber that does not grind up the micro-organisms. A positive displacement pump causes a fluid to move by trapping a fixed amount of it then forcing (displacing) that trapped volume into the discharge pipe. Here [...]