Brian White

Well,  I am still working on the Azolla project.  On and off.   I am going to tweak the miracle mix, to get more phosphorus, iron and sulfur,  and a lower PH.   A professor in Germany was very skeptical about the whole idea, seemed to think it wouldn't work at all.   Growing Azolla with wood ash as the nutrients DOES work,  but at PH 9, the plants are suffering,   and have a pale yellow colour.  The professor suspected that the yellow is Iron deficiency.   Growing on dirty water, they have a rich dark green.   It is hard to miss the difference!  I now have a big aquarium, a small aquarium,  an old wet saw "basin" that is about 3 and a half inches deep and they are all growing azolla with wood ash as the fertilizer! I weigh all the azolla every 10 days or so, harvest some and put enough back so that it quickly covers the water again.  I also have a 4 inch wide eavestrough in one of my greenhouses,  it has a 10 ft long run of azolla in 3 or 4 inches of water.  The airlift pump is set to drop some water into it every hour or so.  It takes the water from the "sump well" in the greenhouse. And the water flows and drips out at the other end of the eavestrough.  From there, it returns under the plants to the sump well.    This means that my "nitrate maker" is a closed loop in the greenhouse.   In this one, I am only going to harvest and weigh what I harvest. (not the total amount). I am dropping the harvested azolla around my cucumbers where it rots and molds up quickly and hopefully delivers its nutrients directly to their roots.      So, what is next?  Well, I thought ash was a good idea, but it has a  lot of calcium magnesium and potassium and that drives the PH up too high in the water.  Plus, volatile stuff is driven off when wood burns.  Plus it doesn't have as much phosphorus as I thought it would.  SO,  I am going to make up a new formula.   There will be rusty nails (I take apart pallets to burn and do my projects, so I have a lot of kg of nails!)    Azolla needs Iron, and wood ash doesn't have much.   Epsom salts for sulphate,  and I have found bone meal that is about 13 percent phosphorus and just 2% nitrate.   I have gooey yellow clay under the ground that probably has little nitrogen in it, and I will muck it up to be like butter and add it to the azolla water in the aquariums and in the wet saw tub. That will probably provide any aluminum that the azolla needs.  And hopefully trace elements too.    So, anyway, that is the plan.  Some bone meal and rusty nails  at the start of the eaves trough,  some epsom salts into the sump well.   And a mix of clay, epsom salts,  bonemeal, wood ash, and rusty nails in the aquariums and the wetsaw tub. I am also going to try to make "soil" using masonry sand and azolla.  Some I will try just mixing the azolla and sand, and some,  I will boil or steam the azolla.  Maybe in a mason jar with the sand.  This is just for faster rotting and faster soil making. I will try to add screenshots of the various azollas when I process some video.  Thanks   Brian

Elizabeth Horsley wrote:I'm just learning how to spin and am paying around $30 USD per pound for wool. Granted that's good quality washed and carded wool, but still. The idea of wool rotting in a barn somewhere while I'm paying that price makes my wallet hurt.

As someone who's sold crafts before, I'm sure the $30 per pound is reflective of the cost of producing and shipping a niche product like wool for spinning. I'd like to connect with a farmer who has that excess wool. I'd be happy to pay a fair price, pick it up locally, and process it by hand. I just want to clothe my own family and friends by doing a little spinning and weaving in the evening.

Wool is so cheap on Vancouver island, (the farmers get so little money for it) that a company is pelleting it and selling it as a soil amendment to gardeners. It's crazy.   Meanwhile there are  world famous vancouver island Cowachen sweaters being hand knitted.   And I bet those ladies are paying top dollar for their wool. Something just isn't right when the farmer loses money shearing his or her sheep.

I found this a while ago.   It makes the case for harvesting azolla wherever you see it.  Azolla isn't simply growing in all sorts of new places because of climate change,  it is also growing because there is a lot more phosphate and nitrate in the water.  It is a symptom,  (and if you harvest it,  a cure,)  for too much phosphate in the water!  If you leave the phosphate there,  and kill the azolla in place (people use herbicides) then you create the ideal conditions for toxic algal blooms that will kill all the fish in the water  and low oxygen in the water as the azolla rots.   This video explains it better than I can.    

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Interesting experiment! Aquatic plants are known to be high in nitrogen, which is why they stink to high heaven when pulled out of the water and left to decompose.

Azolla is listed as an invasive species in some areas. So it seems that experiments require some caution -- not creating any situation where it could ever get into natural water bodies. (Think about 100 year floods and such. That's when things get away from us. Flushing down the toilet isn't a confirmed kill either. End of speech.)

Edit: I am also interested in potential toxicity from the cyanobacteria symbiant (if that is the correct term). Much potential, many questions.

No worries on the prairies, the winters are much too cold for it to survive. Here in Victoria, it has already successfully invaded.  Actually I advocate for them to remove it in the local pretty Swan lake, because when you remove it,  it removes excess phosphorous too,  but so far swan lake nature park just lets it build up and later rot. Azolla is a standard "crop" in Kenya, the Philippines, etc. as poultry and animal feed.  So yeah, across most of the USA and Canada, it is much too cold in the winter for Azolla to survive. There are lots of videos online about growing it. Until about a decade ago, it didn't survive Victoria winters, but it has warmed up and now, I see it a lot more. Excessive phosphorus in the water is the main reason that it expands its range here, I think.  Mine is the first video about growing it in water enriched with wood ash.  Farmers put chicken poo or cow poo in the water to make it grow faster.  But in that case, it isn't fixing nitrogen, it is just absorbing nitrate from the chicken poop.  In the winter when there is mass starvation, it might be better to grow azolla over wood ash and save the chicken poop for the vegetable  fields.  They find cooked azolla is better for poultry.  

Brian White wrote:

Anne Miller wrote:If I understand this, you are making fertilizer to water other plants.  Super great idea.

 No, I am making green manure,  from ashes, to use as a nitrogen rich mulch or soil additive on other plants. It says on the internet azolla contains about 4% N,  0.5% phosphorus and about 3 percent potassium.   That is the N, P and K in artificial fertilizers.  When you grow Azolla on wood ash, the entire amount of N in it is fixed from atmospheric nitrogen.  And that is pretty cool!   I will actually be topping up the water and changing the water  from time to time and adding a little more ash,  so, yeah, I will be using the water on plants too.   But the water won't be high in nitrogen.   Thanks Brian.  

 I don't think there is much heavy metal in wood ash.  

Anne Miller wrote:If I understand this, you are making fertilizer to water other plants.  Super great idea.

 No, I am making green manure,  from ashes, to use as a nitrogen rich mulch or soil additive on other plants. It says on the internet azolla contains about 4% N,  0.5% phosphorus and about 3 percent potassium.   That is the N, P and K in artificial fertilizers.  When you grow Azolla on wood ash, the entire amount of N in it is fixed from atmospheric nitrogen.  And that is pretty cool!   I will actually be topping up the water and changing the water  from time to time and adding a little more ash,  so, yeah, I will be using the water on plants too.   But the water won't be high in nitrogen.   Thanks Brian.  

Wood ash is full of minerals, lots of P and K but no N,  it has zero nitrate.  So if azolla grows in water above wood ash,  it has to fix nitrogen from the air,  there is nowhere else it can get it!  The Iran war has stopped 30% of the world's nitrate production so we have to fall back on the natural world to fill the gap and it simply cannot.  I read somewhere that Azolla can fix nitrogen twice as fast as any other higher plant, so it has that going for it!   On 28 April, i put 50 grams of wood ash into an aquarium (surface area 1127 sq centimeter, along with 25.9 liters of water and 30 grams of azolla.  I also conducted the experiment in a larger aquarium. In that one I added 100g wood ash, 51 liters of water and 111g of azolla, its surface area was 2250 sq cm.  The big aquarium was in a more sheltered area.   I didn't even know if the azolla could grow with that much wood ash, (it makes the water pretty alkaline). There were a few things swimming when I added the water but by 2 days after, I didn't see any animal life in either aquarium.  Probably killed by the alkalinity or maybe toxic stuff in the ash.  About 2 weeks later I weighed the azolla. In the little aquarium it had more than doubled in weight (2.93 times  on may 14th), but was still not covering the surface. In the big one it covered the surface but had only increased from 111 to 254 grams,  2.28 times the amount I started with.   So I harvested some and filled both aquariums with Azolla again, (almost covering the surface in both of them.)  Anyway, next stage is to harvest some every week (1/7 of the surface area, I guess) and get it to a steady state of growth.  I plan to expand the experiment to several shallow containers too.  Small scale farmers across Africa and Asia grow azolla, but their ponds are often fertilized with chicken manure, or pig or cow manure, which contain nitrates so this means their azolla is probably not fixing so much nitrogen, because the plant gets it from the water if it can. (it takes less energy to suck it up than to make it!)    Anyway,  my experiment shows that Azolla can survive with that much ash in the water.   Maybe in the future other people will grow azolla in Ash ponds?   I think it is a good way of converting the ash into a full spectrum  fertilizer!  And if you don't want to spread the azolla as a mulch, you can always feed it to your animals or fish as part of a varied diet.   I think I will harvest some azolla, solar cook it, and then mix it up with pure  sand in a pot, then grow some plants (not legumes) in the mixture.  I will probably mulch it with azolla too too.  So whatever grows in the pot, its only source of nitrogen is the decomposing azolla in the pot.       Here is a brief video about the Azolla experiment.  Please don't be shy and leave a comment.  The haters are usually not shy, and they freak out at new (to them) ideas,  so help balance them out.      Thanks Brian

The situation is bleak,  forget oil,  because nitrates are the biggest  problem,  I believe Canada and USA can be OK because there is lots of oil and gas here, and they make nitrates and urea from natural gas and it isn't that difficult.  But we all import a hell of a lot of food that we could grow ourselves. This food supply will stop.   By the fall, there could easily be mass starvation across South America,  Europe,  Africa and Asia, because of the Nitrate problem.   Think about it,  natural nitrate is produced across the land and oceans by mostly blue green algae, beans, peas, legumes in general, alders, azolla, and  lightning   and that is it!    Scientists have measured natural nitrate production across the globe and manufactured nitrates from humans and it is neck and neck, with the humans producing slightly more.   So 50 50,  and the human produced stuff all goes on agricultural land, meaning that it has an enormous impact on yields and we cannot simply replace it with natural nitrate because it can never be produced in such a huge  quantity.  So what to do?  I  actually have a bit of a plan for this.   I have a Tracking solar reflector (about 600 watts) that runs when the sun is in the sky.  I steam sterilize soil layered with chopped up weeds in a 14 liter pot.  (chopped by running the lawn mower over them).  Roughly 2.5 hours for 10 liters of soil.   That skips the composting step, the composting is done in the soil.  Chopped weeds rot quicker than unchopped weeds,  and you what rots quicker than chopped weeds?   Cooked chopped weeds!  So there will be a period when the soil bacteria and fungi come back and go into overdrive, and plants might struggle a bit, but once that is past, it should be good times for the plants.  I'm going to try to automate the soil steaming, so there will be a hopper, that I fill with soil in the morning, and an auger that will be switched on and off by a thermostat, to bring soil through the hot zone as soon as it is fully steamed,  kind of like pasteurization.  So, end product lots of steamed soil (hopefully). If you are worried about the soil biome, there is a solution,  just use the steamed soil as a 4 inch layer as a heavy mulch.  The bacteria and fungi will come up from below.   I also use it to run a solar dehydrator.  BUT, it needs a fan, to stop stuff from burning.  Even so, I dehydrated a lot of stuff last year and solar dehydration beats the freezer on running costs big time.      Another thing is Azolla.   I was reading up research findings over the last couple of days,   Azolla fixes nitrogen roughly twice as fast as beans!   You cannot beat that.  But azolla has something in it that makes animals  and chickens not thrive so well.   Drying or cooking the azolla seems to reduce this anti-thriving factor but doesn't seem to eliminate it.   Pretty amazing to me that they have not exactly figured out what the problem is in all these years!  My goldfish love duckweed, they mildly dislike azolla. Azolla grows in shallow water and it  can double its biomass in 4 to 10 days,  so I plan  to grow it with wood ash as fertilizer,  have it pull nitrogen from the air,  layer it with the soil and steam it in the solar cooker, as a complete organic fertilizer.    If I have too much azolla,  I will steam it separately and  both try to feed it to my fish and use it as steamed mulch.    I'm also pushing an idea called the "well trompe",  Trompes in "wells" at low head hydro sites along rivers,  to collect and remove sediment, to strongly oxygenate the water, and provide areas where river shellfish and baby fish can shelter.  The trompe produces low pressure air,  which is not useful for electricity, so I am talking to the Lego air engine guys, to try to get them to make tesla turbines,  and di Pietro engines that will run on 3.5 psi air.  And then we CAN use the well trompes to produce electricity!   (Currently governments are getting rid of river hydroelectricity to allow fish to migrate.   This includes small hydropower because the turbine blades slice up fish and that isn't great when they migrate).   But a trompe doesn't have a turbine!  And hopefully that makes a difference to officialdom.  Here is one of the best Azolla videos that I found yesterday.  Lets all try growing and processing azolla!  They grow  a lot of azolla on a shallow lake and they pellet it for chickens!      

I'd like to grow a pomato or a totato,   A potato where you can eat the berries like tomatoes or a tomato with stem tubers.  Back in Ireland tomatoes struggle outdoors while some years the potatoes have enough potato berries to stink up the ground at harvest time!  Apparently the potato is the result of a cross between tomato and one of its relatives millions of years ago.  The stem tuber was a huge advantage as it climbed the Andes  mountains.  So if this cross happened once in the wild,  it might be possible again.  By the way, my Neighbour in Ireland, Harry Kehoe,  was a potato breeder.   In Ireland his most successful potato is the Rooster variety.   We used to grow "scarlet pimpernel" (a Dutch variety, and golden wonder, and 3867-7 (an early trial variety that got scrapped because it produced potatoes too close to the surface and so would never be commercial ).  3867-7 was awesome! It was extremely early, and you could just find the potatoes with your finger, and pluck them there and then while letting the plant continue to produce. I was working for Harry the day he scrapped the trial and he gave me a bag of them.   I kept them going for 4 or 5 years.  Can't remember how we lost the variety, but it was definitely a shame.  Harry had other successes too.  His greatest was Cara.   This is a dry climate variety.   It had good in dry east England and great in Cyprus, and the horn of Africa.  Harry got awards in Kenya or Ethiopian or both because Cara saved lives.   I grew it 2 years in Ireland,  a dry year and a wet year.  It did not taste good in a wet year, but in a dry year, it yielded more than double of the other varieties and they were big and tasted great. Cara would be perfect as one of the varieties you grow,  anywhere the summers are very dry, like on southern Vancouver island.  

It looks like it could make a great solar cooker or hot solar drier.   Direct the light in through the screen from the bottom and insulate the sides.    What is the screen made of?  Just fine wire mesh?   Thanks,   Brian