How to Grow Amazing Plants with Compost Tea - Masterclass with Dr. Elaine Ingham (Part 3 of 5)

so i think we've talked about this it's you know when you're starting out you've got to find an aerobic compost what organisms do you need in your soil you can't know what compost you need if you don't know what's missing in your soil so what's the right compost so now find out well what does your plant need what's the plant you want to grow so you know what organisms that you want to reach what's your goal you need to know what's there where you need to get because that could be massively different you know as we go from i just remembered we got the weeds we got the brassicas we got the veggies we got the row crops the pastures as we go into shrubs into perennial plants

woody perennial plants it's fungal dominated we go over that edge and we have to have more fungi than bacteria when we get into deciduous forests we've got to have a hundred times more fungi than bacteria when we get into old growth conifer systems we have to have a thousand to ten thousand times more fungi than bacteria when we get into the most productive ecosystem on this planet eighty-five percent of the weight of the soil is fungal biomass so when you look at that little chart that the usda always shows you where you know here's you know the percentages of the volume of the soil and you have this little tiny sliver five percent of the weight of your soil is biology and organic matter throw it out the door because all they've been looking at is dirt not soil once you get into soil you increase through the course of succession the percentage volume or weight of your soil becomes more and more and more biology more organic matter to the time when we get into the most productive ecosystem on this planet 80 85 percent of the weight of the soil is fungus when you go out into this is work that paul stamets and i have been working on for some number of years the ecosystem is a old-growth cedar forest on the olympic peninsula in washington state in the springtime as the snow melts you go out and you push any small amount of litter material sitting on the surface of soil back all of that is bound together by fungal biomass when you take up a piece of wood all the other pieces of organic matter debris residue sitting on soil surface comes with and a lot of the soil will come when you stick your fingers into that soil and you try to pull it up it's almost impossible to get just a little tiny amount of that soil because handfuls come with all at the same time it is all bound all held together by fungi so early springtime late winter is just amazing the fungal biomass when we've gone out and dug in that system it is a single individual of fungus 20 miles wide and goes down at least 25 feet we stopped digging at 25 feet because we didn't have any equipment to go deeper we needed the oil company there to you know do the old uh yeah dig deeper so we stopped there this indo a single individual is the size of about eight to ten blue whales it is the largest organism on this planet and as other people in other forest systems start exploring more and more they're all in look of these ginormous individuals the largest organism on the planet is a fungus there's another one that lives down in the amazon in japan finland there's one in norway sweden all over the world we're starting to find them when we look in these highly productive ecosystems but as soon as the predators in the springtime wake up their favorite food flying squirrels in the pacific northwest when you talk about ground squirrels when you're talking about the microarthropods the voles the shoes the mice they wake up and they go whoa look at the party and by the time june comes around you can barely find any remnant pieces of this great big mat of fungal biomass yeah when you look over here yeah this is the same individual as over there but all of this got eaten think of the nutrient cycling going on in that forest system how do we supply the nutrients to have those great big ginormous trees stay alive how do they get the nutrients every year there are more nutrients sequestered in that plant material in those old growth forests than any agricultural field on the planet we have removal sequestering of more carbon in those systems more mineral nutrients tied up in the biomass of the plants on an annual basis than any agricultural system on the planet so how do those old growth forests stay alive nobody's out there putting on fertilizers mineral nutrients and yet every year we're putting away more nutrients into that plant biomass in any place else on the planet because it's coming from the rocks the pebbles the sands the silts of the clay until the day you run out of bedrock don't worry about nutrients it's in your soil it's the life the only reason the green revolution worked is because we had already destroyed the life in the soil put the life back we don't have to do that so how are we going to get these organisms back into the soil so we need to know what's in the compost now what foods could we just put foods out on our soils if our inoculum if the organisms are present in your soil then maybe all you have to do is put foods out so go out with your sprayers and put on umic acid the kelp and the foods to feed those fungi to move them along in the right direction well if you don't have the biology in your soil so here you go you got to go back here do you have enough fungi in the soil no then we're going to have to be putting the compost out and it's easy of course easier of course to put the compost the organisms out in a liquid form than a solid form so how much food to add how much do you need to grow the fungi so i see i can't stand up here and tell you are always going to put two cups of fungal food into your compost tea brewer because what if you have no fungi at all and or such a low level that you're going to have to put way more or maybe you already have a decent amount of fungi so you really don't have to grow that much just got to get an inoculum out there so see some of the problems here this is um not a system for people who don't want to think which a lot of the chemical farmers i think we can say exactly that about them they don't want to think they just want to be told by their agronomist what to do and your agronomist is probably not interested in this information at all because he doesn't have a job if you start following this approach so that agronomist might have to become a soil food web advisor so he could still have a job so we need to see that transition if you have no protozoa we can make a

protozoan infusion which is a version of a compost tea really except the place most protozoa go dormant are on the stems of the grasses in a meadow in your lawn as your grasses grow dormant in the summertime the protozoa that we're running up and down the stems of your grasses out there on the leaves of your grasses chasing the bacteria and the fungi that grow on those surfaces when it starts getting dry the protozoa go there's not enough water here so i'm going to go to sleep and they just go into a dormant stage a cyst form so if you mow your grass keep it dry store it away keep it dry then when you need protozoa you take a handful of that put it into your five gallon bucket fill the bucket up about halfway with water please make sure you take care of the chloramine and the chlorine so rain water rain barrels good place to get your water from so the bacteria on the surfaces of that grass material wake up in the first 12 hours the protozoa go hey guess what there are bacteria in the water i can wake up and i've got something to eat so your protozoa wake up after about 40 36 to 48 hours you got billions of protozoa running around so take that and put that out on your soil if you lack the predators in the system to get nutrient cycling going so really simple easy way you know you just need a little air bubbler to keep it aerobic in that bucket so we can add back things like that so i now want to do a few little pictures and then i'll go into these examples now i've been telling you about starting

with aerobic compost so here's a client that we were working with and we were emphasizing this information to them what would you say about that compost look at the little air pipes that they're trying to get oxygen down into the middle of the color of the middle of that compost is black not brown black means it's gone anaerobic you've turned your carbon into charcoal which is black you go anaerobic and any of your soluble inorganic nitrogen is going to be turned into ammonia it's a gas and you're going to lose your nitrogen say goodbye don't go anaerobic we do all these ferments you go anaerobic what happened to your nitrogen it's not there anymore when you go anaerobic and you get that ammonia being produced a black color is left behind as we go anaerobic any of your soluble inorganic sulfur is going to be converted into hydrogen sulfide which is the smell of rotten eggs and it leaves behind a black color think about swamp gas well that's what we're talking about that's ammonia and the rotten egg smell plus a few other wonderful acids so when you see black color in the inside of a compost pile it's not compost turn around and walk away is not worth the money that you're going to pay for it they should be paying you to take it away because you're going to have to resuscitate it get a good compost and get the biology back in there along with some foods for those organisms to be eating because the carbon got turned into charcoal that is not a food resource for any microorganism biochar is there any food in a biochar for my our microorganisms to grow on you're going to have to add it so yeah biochar might be a way of you know putting carbon into the soil and it's not going to go away very rapidly but if you want to make it a medium that will allow your plants to grow and oh yeah wouldn't we like that to happen we're gonna have to put the biology back in there and we better grow some plants in it so we get the foods to keep your organisms alive biochar

you're gonna have to put the biology back into it so is that biochar what should we be calling biochar charcoal exactly you got it so if they soak the charcoal in a compost tea all these wonderful organisms move into the condominium housing in your charcoal and now it's biochar it's not biochar until you put the biology back in there so hype has happened once again why should we be surprised so and then somebody else when uh when i was pointing out the air pipes somebody else was saying look at all the grass going on the surface what's the um

ratio of fungi to bacteria in this compost pile look at the weeds that are growing on it yeah so sometimes quite often you can tell what is in that soil because of the plants that are growing there if what's growing there is a whole lot of weeds you can tell me now what's the ratio of fungi bacteria in there strictly bacterial we've got some poa growing on here okay we got some fungi in here but probably not what we want to grow a good healthy pasture they need to work on this they need to fix this so um you know compost so these guys are out every morning checking every single windrow what's the temperature do they need to turn it so you can see the two piles three piles that needed to be turned on this particular day so long comes the turner runs through it gets the oxygen back in there they'll cover it back up so preventing evaporation in the middle of the summertime preventing water logging when we're in a rainy part of the year and so um typically halfway through the day they all go out and start taking their starting materials and build more piles you always go from the oldest piles to the youngest piles because you do not want to be contaminating your compost by going from something you're just hauling around manure back into a compost pile that's almost finished so you wash your instruments at the end of the day so all of these mechanical appliances get cleaned at the end of the day and then the next morning you're ready to start all over again so they make some fantastic compost up here so you know

recipe guidelines i think most people are probably interested in this you want to really look at your brewer if you don't have a lot of aeration you only want to add a total amount of food that's about point one zero one percent you can't be adding a lot of food if you don't have really good aeration so in a 500 gallon tank you're only going to be putting you know five tenths of a gallon you're putting a couple ounces total of the food going into your into that volume of water because if you don't have good aeration you can't be feeding them much food because they just go bonkers they go crazy

your bacteria and fungi whoo can they grow how rapidly do bacteria reproduce takes typically about 20 minutes for bacteria to go from one to two to four now every 20 minutes they're replicating fungi typically take about three hours in a tea brewer so you're not going to get as much fungal response so you have to be really careful if you already got all the bacteria you need don't put anything in that's going to be growing bacteria you want to put in things that are strictly fungal foods if aeration is moving your surface pretty well then you can increase the amount of food by a factor of five if you've got that rolling boil on the surface of your soil then we can be putting in 0. 1 percent we could be putting a whole gallon into a 500 gallon brewer but that's a sum total of you know if you're putting kelp if you're putting in humic acid if you're putting a little bit of oatmeal in the sum total are these rates a maximum of one to five gallons of food you know no more ever under any condition or you're going to be going anaerobic during the t brew so if you're doing a 50 gallon brew well just reduce that by a factor of 10. if you're doing a 5 gallon brew yep you reduce that by another factor of 10. so just giving you some guidelines of what where to start and then once you make your brew you check the biology and see what actually grew somebody comes along with oh yeah this material grows great fungi how do they know where's their data have them show you what they did oh trust me yeah turn around and walk away trust me have we not learned anything from my favorite company in the world monsanto

why would too much food make a compost tea go anaerobic because remember as the bacteria and fungi grow they're using up oxygen the more rapidly they grow the more individuals you have growing the faster you're going to use up oxygen and in a tbrew we can very rapidly outpace the aeration that we're doing i'll show you some data in just a minute

yeah fungi reproduce um every three hours so one cell of fungal hyphae will become two cells this guy will branch and now yep exponential growth so fungi can be right up there not quite as much as bacteria so we want to feed fungal foods so here's a typical fungal recipe just to give you an idea the compost has to have this level you want to see at least 300 micrograms of bacteria in our compost high diversity we want more than one species we want to see you know like 16 species that we can pick out through morphology we want 300 micrograms of beneficial fungi wide diameter colored oxalate crystals on the surfaces we want uh ten thousand flagellates in amoeb no ciliates at all please ciliads are the anaerobic stages the anaerobic type of protozoa so you see a ciliate mother nature is trying to tell you you're going anaerobic do something about it up your aeration reduce the amount of food

a few beneficial nematodes will not reproduce in a tea you're going to extract them we'll have whatever was in that compost in the tea or in our extract they don't reproduce in 24 to 48 hours nematodes take a minimum of at least a week to reproduce flagellus and maybe will reproduce once every eight hours so yes we will increase our protozoa when we're doing a t brew so extract into the water you know so now here's a typical fungal recipe 500

gallons of water two cups of kelp one gallon of humic acid or one gallon of fish hydrolysate so right there that's kind of maximum we're going to be growing a lot of fungi with that so just to give you an idea where to start if you're kind of concerned that my compost tea is going to go anaerobic reduce this by half be safe not sorry question back there i don't just say don't use molasses i say why why would you not use molasses in a tea brew

brew why does molasses grow bacteria really well in a typical non-sulfur so if you are going to use molasses make sure it's non-sulfur if you've got sulfured molasses what are we adding the sulfur in there for to kill microorganisms it's a preservative so sulfur in any form is a fungicide and so sulfured molasses we're trying to prevent the growth of the fungi in that molasses so we must buy non-sulfured black strap molasses blackstrap because we want lots of different kinds of sugars so we will grow a massive diversity of different kinds of bacteria but it is strictly a bacterial food when we add it into a tea

do you need more bacteria in your soil think about what we've been doing with agriculture for the last 150 years we've been destroying the bacteria fungi the protozoa the nematodes the way we till the way we manage a conventional agricultural system selects for strictly bacteria do you need any more bacteria probably not so that's why i say don't use molasses we already have too many bacteria that's not what we need to be enhancing are the fungi protozoa the nematodes so that's why you'll hear people say elaine says no molasses that there's a reason for no molasses okay

so selecting a good machine we've kind of been through this so i'm gonna just let you go ahead and read through that really quickly you know look inside the brewer if there's any parts that you're going to have to take out and clean if there's any holes you're going to have to get in there and clean those holes pipes you're going to have to open up the pipe you're going to have to clean the inside of the pipe i don't know about you but i am not interested in working that hard so typical brewer air pump notice that the at the pipe the air pipe goes up to the top and then back down because if the electricity goes off we don't want the water from the pot from the tank backing up and destroying the air pump so simple little valve on the bottom so you can close this or open it and a simple cone tank this is a dirt simple brewer and yes it is dirt simple there's the compost bag so mesh size 400 microns opening size you would close the valve you would fill up however much tea you need to make so in a system like this you can be making 20 gallons or you know 50 gallon whatever you don't have to fill a tea brewer like this up completely full once you've got the water in there you're going to add your humic acid to deal with the chlorine and the chloramine start the aeration open you know start the pump open up the valve now bubble bubble make sure you're getting a rolling boil on the surface of that water if we're making tea we're going to add foods at this point every one of our food resources that are going in here is probably going to have a preservative in it and we must dilute the preservative so add those materials that are stabilized they came in a sealed container

container how do you prevent microorganisms from growing in fish hydrolysate yeah you're going to have to drop the ph to really low level and then that means you have to dilute that low ph by adding the fish hydrolysate to the water before you put any organisms in there we don't want anybody dying so the foods go in first and then you put your compost in your bag in a brewer like this we're going to be using a couple pounds of compost if it's really good compost we could probably get away with putting one pound of compost if it'd say you know we may be missing a little bit and the inoculum's not quite there we might be putting five pounds if it's really not so wonderful compost there's not much of anything in there you might have to use 10 pounds in here but we're going to put that bag so it sits right in the flow of those air bubbles coming up

so extracting the vortex in this particular brewer is set up so that air bubbles coming from the top the water itself comes around hits the sides and then dives back down so there's the vortex if you look down on this from above the bubbles are coming straight up the middle the water goes around to the side so it's a torus so we have a really good vortex going in here extracting the organisms out of the compost into the water extracting any of the soluble foods in that compost into the water of course if it's an extract we don't have to put the foods in we just extract and then we're done not difficult so you got to be looking at your compost what's the biology in there how much is it one pound is it five pounds is it ten pounds shouldn't be you know on a brewer this size we don't really need that much compost hopefully so it's a way of increasing the organisms in your compost getting them out there actively growing question here

he's asking about air stones the response is don't absolutely do not use air stones you would have to replace them after each brew there is no way to prevent the organisms from getting on those surfaces inside the air stone and so in the time between this brew and the next brew that air stone dries down well the organism's growing in those very you know secluded spaces oxygen is not diffusing in there very rapidly at all when the air stones off and so it goes anaerobic so your next brew you use that same air stone what do you put it into your brew some really nasty toxic possibly pathogens no air stones don't do not do that there is no way to clean an air stone so that the inside part of that ear stone doesn't have the anaerobic biofilm in it you want to prove that one to yourself break the air stone open see the black layer inside there black layer what does that mean oh the smaller bubble issue yes um talk to a person who really understands air bubbles and exchange surfaces it is not the size of the bubble as it's rising up through the water column that has absolutely almost no bearing at all on oxygen exchange into the water the place all the oxygen is exchanging is in the rolling boil on the surface that's where oxygen is being entrained it's you know little bubbles big bubbles that is not the important thing yes there's some oxygen exchange there but yeah come on this is where most of it's happening so have some fun talking with aeration experts on this one really the reason we're bubbling from the bottom is to get your water moving so we're getting the extraction with the speed that water starts to move around and the place where muscle oxygen is being entrained is up here so as your water is going by air is being extreme entrained and then your water dives down to the bottom round and round it goes so i don't care what size air bubble that's a past silliness that's mythology um okay we all learn things i need to finish this i'm gonna sorry i'm gonna stop on the questions i'm just gonna ignore your hands until the end sorry so a slightly bigger tea brewer the only thing that really changes here is you might be adding a little bit more food and you're going to use a little bit more compost so in something that's a hundred gallon brew you might be using five pounds of compost if it's really good um seven pounds if it's kind of okay 15 pounds if it's really not real wonderful you know so how do you know exactly what you need to be using microscope you take a drop of your compost tea put it on your microscope slide cover slip under the microscope and you look through there and go yes look at all those critters running around they're just having the grandest time there's a fungus there yes got it or you take a drop of your compost tea you put it on my drop on your microscope slide cover slip stick it on the microscope and you go there's nobody home okay you don't have compost there's something dreadfully wrong going on so it's that easy it takes you five minutes to do these this kind of work you don't have to be perfect about identifying anything either people get so anal i don't know what every little piece is in here so not what we need to be worrying about so here's another brewer um you know you can get these uh totes often for free or for a very low price

this the unit comes with the air pump here the air goes down to the bottom this is where the actual aeration and of course then the air bubbles are going to come straight up and out the surface nice bubbling nice rolling boil on the surface the water then of course comes up goes sideways and dives back down and you set up the vortex the compost bag oh excuse me

it's the microbe liberation chamber so bob postama who built this one great um so the combo sits in the bag uh there's a pipe that goes to the bottom and then a crossbar with little holes in it so you're aerating the compost in there and so really excellent extraction in this kind of tea brewer uh and it is pretty easy to um clean because there's quick release valves here and here um those parts come off it's a lot easier to open up the openings at either end of that pipe run a cloth through that is pretty easy to clean it's going to take longer to clean this machine than it is going to take to clean this machine because there's absolutely nothing in the inside of the tank at eight hours you're going to take the compost bag out dump any compost that's still in the bag back on your compost pile go stick your bag in your dishwasher or your washing machine whatever so it's clean in time for your next tea brew when you are finished with the tea brew of course you're gonna close the valve at the bottom then turn off your air pump hook up your um sprayer pump and open the valve and pump your compost tea into the sprayer or if this is up on a platform you just open the valve and let it run straight into your sprayer that's my favorite way to do it just gravity works so the tea goes in while you're standing there watching your tea go out have your hose and finger in the end of the hose and blast the any biofilm off the surface make certain that the valve down here that opening you're going to have to blast that a bit so high pressure washer that you might want to buy from kmart or walmart or anything it's simple you're clean you let it dry you're ready for the next one with this one you are going to have to be cleaning the stainless steel but stainless steel is pretty easy to clean it blasts off pretty well so you know you're gonna spend the time it takes for the tea to drain out of here is the time you're taking to clean this unit this is probably going to take you a good half hour to clean the inside parts which is not bad it's too much for me but so there's the compost in the bag and we're just going to hook it up to the and you can see that rolling boil on the surface of the water that's the kind of movement on that surface that we want to see adding the foods we did that the wrong you know but it's demonstration purposes add your foods first then put your compost in there um there's dairy tanks so um when these are on sale you know dairy tanks they are curved surfaces inside so there's no 90 degree corners here's their aeration it's just simply the air gets pumped to the bottom big long pvc pipe with holes punched in it yes every once in a while they forget or the power goes out and the tea ends up inside their pvc pipe and then they're going to have to clean that out that is not fun so it's going to take a you know good four hours to clean it when a snafu happens so yeah but still you could do this if you've got the manpower this kind of system again old dairy tanks smooth surface at the bottom you want to have the aeration going in at the bottom when we first started working with these people they had disc diffusers on stands so they had air pipes coming down the sides lattice work across the bottom they had about eight of these disc diffusers down there but the disc diffusers sit up about a good four inches off the bottom so here's your air going up hidden your compost comes the water then comes around but it goes under the disk diffusers and drops off any sludge so that was a real problem they could not make good tea they were not being able to get rid of some of their problem organisms so we had to make certain that from the bottom of the tank that's where the air is coming up so we had to drill through the bottom and basically put a number of little nozzles all over the bottom so that they wouldn't get that sludge layer forming on the bottom of that tank so think through the design on this number of people anybody at any one of the sfi laboratories could probably help you build these and do it simply i can talk to you about lots of different places that we've worked i can't go into detail because i'm running out of time