Outdoor IMO beds! ID request!

Hello all!

My co workers and I have built 15 cedar boxes to attract IMOs on our farm!

We are using cooked white rice as our medium. I have a few pics! These pics are about a week into colonization.

We believe it is mold but we are wondering:

what the purple is on our rice?
what the red is on our rice?



One picture, a block of soil from our COMPOST PILE is pictured showing: fungus mycelium, trichoderma mold and a yellow growth. We were wondering about the yellow growth also.

Please help!! Thanks!

Hi, i never tried to attract IMO with rice..but if you got, they are good...so use them.

Microrganisms are good in their totality, if we start to select them, we create an unbalanced environment.

Keep us updated. Wonderful photos!

F.

pic 1 shows 4 different molds along with one patch of fungi mycelium, and the bright yellow appears to be a slime mold. (all are good to have, they will feed bacteria, amoeba, spring tails, nematodes and other micro organisms you want in your soil).

pic 2 shows more different molds (I count 7 of them) again great for attracting the microorganisms we want present in the soil there is also what appears to be a fungi (white patch) mycelium starting

pic 3 shows some of the same molds but it appears to have two different fungi species starting too.

those should be great for either using as is or to charge a compost heap or two.

Redhawk

(without being able to put a microscope on these specimens I can't positively identify any of the organisms)

What is IMO?

Dennis Mitchell wrote:What is IMO?

IMO stays for Indigenous Microorganisms. Korean Natural Farming and Jadam method starts from the point conventional farming destroyed the microorganism in the soil with the use pesticides and other chemicals...so you must re-build the indigenous microorganisms families in your soil. The native microorganisms that were always been in your soil before the use of the conventional farming. So you must create "traps" with the rice in very closed and uncontaminated areas next to your land, and then use these microorganisms on your land. They will start to revitalize the soil, eating locked nutrients and releasing other nutrients for the plants (vegetables and fruit trees). Jadam method use the JMS, a liquid solution made from leaf moss, a potato and non-chlorinated water instead of the rice traps.

Fabio

Thank you. I’ve never heard of these gardening methods.

i have been reading about IMOs and have a few questions please:
why rice ? why not cooked oats or potatoes or wheat or..
Why is this not just propagating rice eating organisms? or are many less specific than that?
I can appreciate that it is good to collect mycorrhizal fungi (vam & ecto) from a healthy mature specimen to inoculate young plants but I get the impression they are really quite species specific (or is that wrong?)
so how do the commercially prepared products cover such wide band of species?
Can I propagate from my bag of granules of MF ?

I appreciate this is being covered in other topics too sorry but my reading is giving me more questions with each answer!

hau Cesca,
Why rice? well the IMO techniques come from Korea and Korea has a lot of rice being grown every year.
Rice is also very starchy and when you cook it those starches gelatinize and then the bacteria can turn those starch molecules into sugars.

Rice eating organisms happen to be good for soil since they are mostly the right bacteria, fungi and molds which we want in our soil.

Mycorrhizae are not as species specific as many questionable sources will tell you they are.
Most of the really good (made by mushroom people) mycorrhizae products will have a broad spectrum of species of both exo and endo mycorrhizae so that you will most certainly have several species that will work with your plants and trees.

Now, yes you can use oats, wheat, barley, even corn that has been cooked as gathering mediums for IMO purposes and they will work just fine.

Redhawk

Thank you Dr. RedHawk.
Thank you for all your posts and knowledge sharing.