Tiny garden in the green Basque Country
Tiny garden in the green Basque Country
It's time to get positive about negative thinking -Art Donnelly
The next five methods are from an excellent video with Josiah Hunt from the Growing Your Greens youtube channel:
1.) Mix equal parts fresh green grass clippings and biochar. Mix together thoroughly and evenly. Cover and let cure in a dark moist place until grass is mostly composted (~2 months).
2.) Equal parts biochar and worm castings. Then 5% or less of any flour, corn meal or molasses. Cover and let cure for at least 2 weeks.
3.) Toss biochar in chicken coop bedding. This helps deodorize the coop and it gets inoculated with food scraps and chicken manure. Keep adding biochar to coop until it is time to clean out. Then pile up biochar and let cure.
4.) Pee on it. Seriously. This works. You can use a 5 gallon bucket with a few holes in the bottom.
5.) 4 parts biochar, 1 part micronized rock powder, 1 part worm castings, 1/2 part flour or molasses (microbe food). Mix together thoroughly and evenly. Cover and let cure for at least 2 weeks.
"Every organism on earth is intimately and irrevocably connected to every other and to the nonliving elements of the planet. We unite with our environment to form communities and ecosystems, whether we know it or not." -Edible Forest Gardens Vol 1 pg 26
Dave [surl='https://richsoil.com/diatomaceous-earth.jsp' class='dashed' title='diatomaceous earth article wrote:de[/surl] Basque]
--What to inoculate with? And how much?
--How to do it exactly?
Here's how I do it. I make a lot of "tea" out of comfrey, nettle, and any other dynamic accumulators I have on hand. I just compress the plant matter in a 55-gallon plastic drum that has a small hole in the bottom. I add NO WATER. I want the "tea" as concentrated as I can get it. The leafy matter eventually decomposes and liquefies. The "tea" dribbles out of the hole in the bottom into a basin, and then is poured into two-gallon jugs. I use one part of this to 20 parts of water, in a couple of five-gallon buckets, to quench my biochar burns. I burn my char in 55-gallon steel drums. The quench inoculates the char immediately. I don't worry about "how much" the char has been inoculated because it all goes into the compost anyway. I get that your needs are different.
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Dave de Basque wrote:I'm getting ready to put together about 25m2 (250 sq ft) of raised beds and am planning my biochar strategy.
My big questions are:
--What to inoculate with? And how much?
--How to do it exactly?
I live in the Basque Country of Spain, so climate is similar to Pacific Northwest of the States, with variable weather that usually includes a lot of rain. Late tomato blight/mildew is our arch-nemesis here and growing healthy tomato plants with a minimum of inputs would be the local holy grail. But I will have a very diverse vegetable garden with a lot more than just tomato, a little bit of everything. No trees or shrubs allowed in this community garden though.
I'm planning to mix 10 or 12% biochar mixed in with maybe equal parts bagged compost, sand and aged sheep manure. Sound like a good mix?
Inoculants for my biochar -- good idea?:
--SDC BioAg (similar to EM)
--Some kind of endo mycorrhizal fungi (the kind for veggies) -- does it matter whose brand? Or should I forget inoculating and just put the powder on the roots of my plants and on my seeds?
--CustomBio/BiotaMax combo of supposedly beneficial bacteria and fungi
(Bacteria are (Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus laterosporus, Bacillus licheniformus, Bacillus megaterium, Bacillus pumilus plus Paenibacillus polymyxa and fungi are Trichoderma harzianum, Trichoderma viride, Trichoderma koningii, Trichoderma polysporum)
--Actinovate (streptomyces lydicus bacteria)
--Sea Crop sea minerals, minus the salt
--Unsulphured molasses to give all the little critters some lunch
Planning to just mix up a couple gallons of water with the package-recommended doses of all the above for treating soil, all in the same batch, and spray down the ground-up biochar, turning it often to soak everything well. Then just mix it in with the dry compost, wetting it down some with the same stuff as I go, the sheep manure and the sand. Spray, mix, turn, spray, mix, turn.
Any experience with any of these inoculants or opinions about my "cocktail" and planned means of applying it are welcome.
Another detail -- I can't afford to wait weeks while my biochar charges/settles/whatever, I need to get planting pronto!
Thanks
NON ASSUMPSIT. I am by no means an expert at anything. Just a lucky guesser.
I remember before the flying monkeys became such an invasive species. We had tiny ads then.
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