Jerusalem Artichokes as Lactobacillus food.

Rice wash and mammal milk are used to select for lactobacillus  from the airborne microbiome in a given location.
Molasses and sugar are used to keep it viable, long term.
But neither rice or milk are universally available.
We know we can select for  lactobacillus by adding salt  and excluding air when we are pickling, and we know  lactobacillus is endemic to some plants.
Cabbage in particular seems to be loaded with these beasties.
I made some cabbage based   lactobacillus serum a while back, using coconut oil as the way to exclude air.
It seemed to work rather well, but I have difficulty growing cabbage.
Jerusalem Artichokes are easy to grow and they have that sweet inulin that lactobacillus seems to favor.
They also store in the ground, so they are available year round.
In the places they cannot grow, there are usually other high inulin roots that grow even more easily.


I plan to cultivate  lactobacillus in a barrel and feed it a little of everything, with Jerusalem Artichokes as the staple food.
Occasional additions of dairy especially yogurts, with their own strains should help keep the culture from losing dietary flexibility.
This will join my other mad ideas , like the bucket of rotting citrus, and live in the greenhouse over winter.

My only concern is the possibility of botulism in the submerged solids.
I lost one chicken to what might have been botulism, and I'm not keen to have repeat.
The chooks get most of my compostables, but maybe I'll skip this.
Since the whole thing is similar to making silage, or traditional pickling ,I'll look into those practices to see if botulism is an issue.

I've begun.
Because of a dumpster windfall I'm starting with cabbage and adding Jchokes to that.

I've done a few jerusalem artichoke ferments. Worked really well. A few tablespoons of curry powder gave it a great kick. In my limited experimentation it seemed easily digestible afterwards, so I think the inulin was broken down.

Is your intention to do this for human food? The implication is for animal feed?

Are you going to ferment the tubers or the leaves? The tubers naturally have lactobacteria on the surface and will ferment easily. I usually make a couple jars in the winter.
The leaves should work too but I have never done that. The leaves of Jerusalem artichoke are very thin and tender and I measured a water content of 88% once. If submerged in water, the leaves basically just dissolve in a few days. I am not sure if the leaves will stay intact or not if you get the pH low and add calcium to it.

Great questions!
I'm making lactobacillus serum to spray on crops and in animal enclosures.
I especially want to fight black rot on my grapes.
Your feedback on the Jerusalem artichokes is encouraging, an I'm hoping the indigenous root biome will merge with the strains that come from the cabbage.

As to the leaves, apparently they can be used to make a natural pesticide via Korean Natural Farming methods.
That involves boiling pots of leaves for a long time, and I actually have few pest issues, so I'm skipping that for now.
That they break down easily makes me want to add them to my liquid aerobic composting.
That's just a 5 gallon container with a bubbler that I stuff full of  soft green waste.
I've been using the output on my seedlings , so far it seems good.

Recently I acquired a lot of dumpster produce and a bunch of cat litter buckets.
I processed much of the produce for our own use,  and used the scraps and rejects to start new lacto ferments.
Each bucket was spiked with a bit of juice from the "garden sauerkraut" I started earlier, and topped off with rainwater.
Every feedstock that takes well to lactobacillious fermentation will be eventually combined together in a single barrel.
Those that don't will probably ferment in some other way, which might also prove useful.
So far I have a bucket each for  potatoes, onions, mixed fruits,  tree leaves/ weeds, jchokes, citrus and urine.
I've left the fruit and roots  whole, except were I'm adding peels and cores, and I have included stuff that has begun to rot.

The citrus has been going on its own for a while before this.
I'm not sure what kind of fermentation is happening, but it's is growing  increasingly acidic, to the point that my immersed hand could feel a little burn.
It is intended as a way to maintain the ph of the soil arround the blueberry bushes.

The lactobacillious seems to take to green leaves pretty well.
The grape & mulberry leaf bucket smells nice and sour.
I have a couple of grow barrels that have some black spots on the plants, so after weeding out the dead pea plants, I did a soil drench with the lacto water and left a wad of the leaves in each barrel.

The other buckets seemed suspect.
They don't  smell as distinctly sour.
I added new fruit to fruit bucket , onions to the onion bucket and potatoes to the potatoe bucket and topped each off with more sauerkraut juice.

Actobacter and yeast seem to have  out competed lactobacillious in some of these buckets, specifically the ones with fruit in them.
Because of this, I dumped the fruits into the chicken's composting yard, but kept the boozy/vinegar liquids .
I have been wanting to make a "serious" aerobic digester.
My experiment using an aquarium bubbler to digest greenery went ok, but the product wasn't stable, it got funky when it was left to sit unaerated.

What I'm hoping for in making scavenged fruit vinegar, aside from playing with stinky stuff,   is preserving the fruit as silage,  producing some low grade heat,  and create a liquid that can be filtered by biochar to activate it.
I'm not sure about that last part, I can find lots of descriptions of filtering vinegar with activated charcoal but it's not clear if the parts that are removed would make good food for soil microbes.
I should at least be able to make calcium acetate, maybe I'll just add bones and egg shells to the vat.

I have read about acetate being used to grow plants in complete darkness, but that is a scientific process that is beyond me.


I will continue brewing greenery and inulin heavy roots into horticulture sauerkraut.
Mulberry and grape leaves seem to take lactobacillious fermentation quite well.

The potatoe fermentation was  my biggest disappointment.
It didn't smell like booze , vinegar or sauerkraut,  it just smelled bad.
Potatoes are a great soil builder anyway, so I might not ferment them again, or I might cook them first.

I keep a 32 gallon trash can for killing seedy weeds and diseased plants in an anaerobic condition before composting them. Somehow the can goes sour, literally, in a good way. Now I am doing accidental bokashi and here are the sunchokes after fermenting for three days. The color was a nice olive green before turning black when oxidized.

May, I love this!
So far I've only used the jchoke roots, mostly because our bunny loves the greenery, fresh or dried.
That being said, there isn't ever a lack of jchokes.
I can make garden-kraut and still have plenty leftover  for the bunny.
I bet chicory and burdock would ferment in a similar way.

I wonder, would drying and crumbling theses stalks give you a diy Bokashi bran?

William Bronson wrote:

I wonder, would drying and crumbling theses stalks give you a diy Bokashi bran?

So you are talking about keeping dry stalks for inoculation. That's an interesting idea. If not working, the leaves of cabbage or bok choy naturally have abundant lactobacteria too. Any greenery can be fed into the can to keep the bacterium population going. I prefer this set-up to simply anaerobic "swamp water" for killing weeds since it's not stinky nor attractive to flies.

Yeah, I only know about Bokashi bran by reputation.
Evidently people use it to compost kitchen scraps.
My chickens get most of what comes from my kitchen.
They do pretty good work on the greenery as well, but I get a lot of it , and preserving some as silage would be great.

I started my lacto ferments with dumpster cabbage, I  wonder if mulberry or grape leaves would go lacto on their own?

BTW, what kind of water are you using?
I've been strict about using rainwater since my city water has chloramine, but it's kind of a bother.

I used city water in the vinegar reactor, and it seems to be working OK.

I use rain water when available, if not, tap water after sitting for a couple days. I can smell chlorine in the tap water. Once I had a hot compost pile getting dry and i spayed it with a hose. It effectively cooled the pile down. Another thing I am experimenting is to give the diluted acidic solution to my blueberry bushes. They are severely stunted at only 4" tall so there's nothing to lose.

I have been mulching my blueberries with dumpster citrus for years.
My blueberries were languishing and someone recommended fertilizing with urine, which worked very well.
I am fermenting some citrus right now, it's very very strong, to the point of burning skin‐I'm not sure what I'm gonna use it for!

We salvaged lots of fruit today, so the vinegar reactor/retort  is full.
Lots of banannas,  which should really spike the sugars.

I keep the trash can fermentation going for months with regular addition of water and leafy materials. It's turning into a perpetual pickle can now. I am going to bring some solution indoors in winter for bokashi and there's no need to buy solid bran for inoculation.

William,

Would love to hear how your experiment goes in battling black rot. I may do something similar for next year as well.

Since grapes would need multiple applications, having a barrel continuously aerating with sunchokes in it, then
1) adding some sort of molasses 24 hours prior to application to get the bacteria levels up.
2) dilute it and spray on grapes
3) Keep it aerated in-between applications
and repeat this cycle for how many applications you want to do.

Does that sound like the way to go or would adding molasses be overkill?

M

Maarten,  I didn't get enough grapes this year to make spraying worthwhile.
I did get a blight on the tomatoes and cucumbers.
That would have been a good reason to spray, but I've never had blight before, so I didn't know what the heck was happening!

Lactobacillus are facultative anaerobic organisms, so they tolerate oxygen without thriving in it.
Molasses or milk powder should work quite well, but I don't think aeration will help.

William,

Interesting, thanks.

I actually put a whole bunch of sunchokes stalks in a garbage can last fall and filled it with water (to see if I could spray it on bindweed and kill it), but never used it.

Plus some of my cantaloupe vines seems to be developing some blight

Time for an experiment

M