Effective Microbes?

I have invested in what I hope are Effective Microbes (EM). Allegedly this product can be used to spray on vegies as well as fruit trees. If I got the right stuff. The product is made by SCD, and is called Bio Ag. The label says to use this product with water at 1:1000 ratio. Would that be 1 TBL per gallon water? Is that even close to correct? My available method of application is a gallon pump sprayer.

To stretch this product further (20 times more of the culture), in the Holistic Orchard, Micheal Phillips writes, in a gallon container to take a 3/4 cup of "mother culture" (which I hope is what I purchased) and mix it in 3 quarts hot tap water (presumably without chlorine), and 1/4 cup unsulfured molasses, or blackstrap, well shaken, and topped off with lukewarm water. place container in an insulated box (cooler, hay box, etc.). At this point the goal is to keep the anaerobic brew at about 90-95 degrees for the first 2 to 3 days. Then it is to be fermented for another 5 to 7 days. (This must have the original mother culture as it's beginning as, over time, the balance of microbes shifts if the homemade daughter culture is used.)

Very abrieviated, this is to be sprayed on leaves, branches, and trunk to colonize good bacteria on the trees before spring fungal diseases can take hold... And foliar feed, as well as all the other stuff beneficial microbes are good for.

So, did I get the right stuff? Help!

Look up compost teas. No need to buy anything. Although im sure that stuff will work fine some soil from the drip line of an old deciduous tree will give you the same thing. Bubbleing the mix gives the microbes air to do there thing in the tea.
So what you need.
Compost home made is the best.
I use burlap sacs but ive also used landry bags.
Imurse them in the unclorinated water. I do it in a 1000l tank but a 50 gal drum works fine. Then get the bubbler going.
Most people have a air pump to airiate it but i use my air compresser.
Just compost works fine but if you want to get fancy.

Put in a shovel scoop of soil from a decidous tree.

Molosses/honey dont need much.

Rock dust

Kelp.

Mushrooms for the spores, oyster, shiitake, morels, any other wild or store bought ones you can think of. I perfer to use wild ones.
There is lots of videos on this on youtube look it up. If you use it as is pour is around plants or dilute as a foliar spray.

TeraGanix also makes one, they call EM-1.  

You can also make these at home very easily, look up Korean organic farming and bokashi as keywords.  The stuff I've made was using rice water and raw milk from cows fed non-GMO feed/grasses.  In the process, you make a sort of yogurt curd that is also quite tasty on it's own, and is a byproduct.

My husband and I found it incredibly effective for poultry/waterfowl housing.  Takes the smell away, FAST.  Like overnight.  And lasts a long time.  Same with horse stalls and cow pastures.  It also can make grass grow a couple times faster than normal, and animals fatten up much faster.  A group of us in Oregon started using the same type of homemade EM, and had amazing experiences along these lines.

It can also be effective against certain types of mold and fungi.

As far as how far one can dilute it...I never was very scientific about that.  But it can be quite diluted.

Keep us posted with your results!

Hi Joylynn, your Bio Ag is a type of EM. EM's are lactic acid bacteria, and the Bio Ag you purchased contains several Lactobacillus and a strain of Lactococcus, both of which are types of lactic acid bacteria.

I have one of Michael Phillips books and use one of his recipes for a foliar spray and while I have not made the mother culture to stretch it further, but when I use my EM, I always add a little organic molasses to feed the EM. It's the sugars and minerals in molasses that do that.

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:
The label says to use this product with water at 1:1000 ratio. Would that be 1 TBL per gallon water? Is that even close to correct? My available method of application is a gallon pump sprayer.  !

According to this website a 1:1000 ratio would be 3/4 teaspoon to a gallon of water.  See Table 4. Dilution of liquid ... at various concentrations


http://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=B931

Joylynn - It sounds like the right stuff.  Stretching it by culturing more is a good idea.  And once you use it all up you can make your own if you want.

Here's a link on how to make your own EM's.  Homemade Lactobacillis Serum

hau Joylynn,  yes you got the right stuff.

If you have a compost heap going, spray some of that over the heap, that will serve as a breeding ground for the microbes and give you superior compost in very little time.

The company states that this product is for spraying on soil. Spraying it on your plants will be good for them too, since they will receive a protective coating of microbes.

As someone else mentioned for a 1000:1 mix you only need 3/4 teaspoon not a table spoon.

Redhawk

The majority of soil-dwelling microbes die almost immediately when exposed to the ultraviolet light of the sun.  So spraying soil microbes on leaves isn't something that you'd ever see happen in nature.  Other than splash-back from the ground after a hard rain, there isn't even a way for this to happen.  My hunch is that if plants are reacting favorably to foliar sprays, it's due to the nutrients in the spray (nitrogen in particular) and not the microbes.  Thus, leaves are built to work with sunlight and air.
Roots, on the other hand, are effective at interacting with microbes, feeding them sugars and starches (root exudates) and forming symbiotic relationships with them.

Just as rain water contains nitrogen, and you immediately see things green up after a rain, not just from the moisture but from the nitrogen, so also foliar sprays seem to have that same effect.  

Feed your soil and you'll have all the microbial life you'll ever need.

Effective Microbes (EM) have been a miracle in my garden system. The most impressive use was conditioning my clay soil. I did a special compost bucket preparation with the EM, then buried it in the clay soil. It went from soil that refused to let anything grow, to growing giant potatoes-Potatoes!-, after one treatment. I love compost teas, but I don't know another preparation that can condition clay soil like that.

I also use EM to clean everything. I have a diaper-free baby and the EM has saved my furniture. Those microbes just expand to eat all the pee smells.

I have been keeping my mother culture going for about a year and a half, but now I think it's time to by a new mother culture. I brew it on molasses, according to instructions from the woman who sold me the EM.

Marco Banks wrote:The majority of soil-dwelling microbes die almost immediately when exposed to the ultraviolet light of the sun.  

I have to disagree with this statement Marco, it is incomplete.
There are three types of radiation in UV light, A, B and C.
UVa and UVb are long wave lengths and lack the energy needed to penetrate the cell walls of bacteria so they have little to no effect upon the bacteria.
UVc is a short wave length and is the only UV rays that can kill the bacteria, which it does by exciting the interior parts of the cell thus creating a mutanogenic state which is what destroys the cell.
Death does not come quickly enough to be termed almost immediately, this is why UVc radiation of Operating Rooms in Hospitals takes a minimum of one hour exposure.
While some bacteria would succumb rather quickly, most would take at least ten minutes or longer to be destroyed.

This paper by Michelle Furlong explains the workings of UVc light for sterilization Clayton.edu

Redhawk

Hilde Alden wrote:

I also use EM to clean everything. I have a diaper-free baby and the EM has saved my furniture. Those microbes just expand to eat all the pee smells.

I now have a pet stain. Grrr!

Can you explain your cleaning formula? The online info I dug up said that their EM solution would stain, due to the molasses. What do you do to aviod staining?

With so many harmful effects of introduced plants/species, I wonder at the wisdom of applying beneficial microbes that have been produced on another continent. With the promotion of Baikal EM1 concentrate here on Permies, I am especially concerned that folks who are working so hard to create healthy environments might get a detrimental result; maybe not even right away: introduced species often are not a problem for decades. Check out all the issues re the Great Lakes from species introduced with dumped bilge water. Thanks all.

hau, Barbara, Any time you can produce your own additives (compost, bio-active addins like EM, etc) you are going to end up with better soil. Many of the new products should, perhaps, be looked at more from the "introduction" of a concept pov where we can try something before getting into producing our own, localized products. As you sumized it is best to use localized amendments, including microorganisms and fungi. In my soil series I have provided some production methods that have been trialed and found to work quite well, by using the soil from the surrounding land you might pick up organisms missing in the garden spaces.

Redhawk

Develop your own “em” for practically free! Look up Korean Natural Farming and IMO (indigenous microorganisms) and LAB (lactic acid bacteria) all those bottled nutrients are nothing compared to what you can collect and step up yourself on your own land. The original EM-1 supposedly has “other” beneficials, but from my past 10 years everyone most everyone has said IMO and LAB is better.