Using Microbial Innoculants in the soil & garden

I am going to be at the Tempe, Arizona Whole Foods Market on Sunday April 20 from 12-3pm for their Earth Day Celebration. I will be there to do demos and answer customer questions on PRO EM•1® Daily Probiotic Cleanse, Dr. Don's™ Antioxidant Oral Hygiene Products, and, of course, EM•1® Microbial Inoculant.
They will have face painting and seed planting. I have been doing this for three years now. It is always fun to get in the sun! Can anyone from DG come? It would be great to meet you!
Eric

Gee would be neat if we could get a get together going on when you are in Texas and have ya join us and explain stuff to them.
not sure what is being planned in the different areas yet.

Phyllis

SPRAYER CLOGGING UP? A solution is a simple stop at a major contractor's rental center. The answer is to take your two gallon sprayer wand with you. Ask them to rebuild the wand to include a 30% nozzle as used in the concrete treatment application business. I may be off on the percent but they will understand your request if you use concrete curing application nozzle terminology. The nozzle will then pass 30% solids.

Several things will happen if you are spraying living biology. One the spray pressure will be less because of a larger opening. This will save the lives of your biological players. They do not fare well being squeezed to death in spray situations....literally. As important your plant leaves will not be bio and mineral blasted while the living biology will better survive the trip from can to leaf surfaces. In fact you will place more biology faster because the flow is softer and under less pressure. The additional run off goes to the soil and this is good too.

This is very good to do if you are spraying the higher forms of life above bacteria and fungi like amoba up to nematodes. In any event you need not strain as carefully and you will hardly ever clog up when exercising just a little common sense.

If you are a small one sprayer can operation you may want to start with a new hose and buy everything up to the nozzle. That way you can change the set up easily. Understand that your service person at the rental center will have to perform some magic because no two sprayer companies make the nozzle threads and sprayer parts the same. I and several of my friends have done this at several different rental centers in different areas.

Sorry this goodness is going to cost some bucks. Anything good always does. This is the least expensive way I know to achieve this set up. Do not even think of buying the heavy duty all stainless commercial stainless tank and wand.

Phyllis,
How far is Flint from Austin? I am leaving on Monday, the 2nd of June... in the morning.
Saturday is booked with the Wellness show. My partner Dwayne, the EMA President, is likely coming as well. I'll be getting up on stage to talk about EM Technology™ and the benefits to health and green living.
Sunday has been planned for some one-on-one with a new distributor in the Austin area. However, if it's not too far, setting up something for later afternoon is not out of the question. We'd need a place and to send some notice. I'm always up for a lecture/workshop!

EM gets good marks from me. I give even higher marks to Eric who really seems to be on the cutting edge with the increasing use of this and similar products and techniques.
It is not a new entry at all. I seems to me that this or similar products are what they claim to be. Nothing presently has the eye of well experienced and some well known organic speakers and writers as this movement.

All of the techniques that introduce or in some other way increases the beneficials that in turn take charge in your soil biology to balance the good guys in charge to the point that any bad guys you may have are dominated. We have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that we can not succesfully poison the problem players without also knocking down the good biological players. All poison does is kill enough of the players that you think you have done good. Not true! Using poison knocks them all down about equal. When and if that soil recovers all that is left builds back up to give you perhaps even greater problems and you are tempted to add even more poison. This simpley makes soil worse with each cycle of poison. We are all better building up the organic content and building the balances of healthy soil. EM and similar techniqies will build the healthy soil. The plants will do the rest.

I happen to have gone through this building process for fifty years. My present method is the use of aerobic compost tea with earth worm castings being a part of the brew as an added factor and as found in all good quality compost. To get where I am I purchased a bag of proven tea quality compost to insure that I had all of the good players of EM plus the higher forms of life from amoeba to nematodes.

EM was not even heard of when I started. Today I would surely use a product like EM to innoculate my soil and my compost with known good players or I would start with proven tea quality compost from which I would insure excellent good players were being expanded by the aerobic process.

To support Eric for all of the fine coaching he has given I will say beyond a shadow of a doubt that good EM would be great for any user. If you or I would add an overdose the contents would simply die in place. They are still good even after living.That is the natural process. They stay alive in relationship to the total good soil building practices you have working in your patch.

To achieve the greatness this technique and EM products profess we must increase our basic soil building using manures, added trace minerals, compost and lots of the elements of compost in the fall. This is totally improved by a cover crop and mulches as you are growing. It amazes me to hear of some folks tweaking and building without even a soil test. All serious builders test for PH and organic content as a minimun testing. For a few bucks more you can test your trace minerals and make adjustments based on known facts. This should be done every year for awhile. Later when you understand what is going on in your patch you may resort to occasional testing just to check up on yourself and your practices. The basics never change quickly if you once arrive at an excellent ballance. This applies to all soil types. They all improve as you get a handle on good organic management.

My program was to apply aerobic tea once a week for one year. Once a month the second year and three times a year the third year. My PH is now 6.8 - 7.2. The organic material in the soil is an average of fifteen percent. I could root and grow broom handles in the soil I now have to work with. Well.........almost. :)

There is but one garden plant commonly grown that would not like the PH as high as I maintain mine. I use to offer a free coffee for the identy of that common plant. Can't do that anymore. To many of you know because we are all learning more and more as we get into the organic trends. I'll let one of you identify that one or two plants.

Thanks again to Eric. We hope you will hang around for all of the good reasons including making a few bucks. ]:o)

Wow! Thanks for the Kudos!

Broom handles. That is funny.
15% organic matter is amazing!

In reference to compost tea:
After the aerobic cycle, add some EM1 Microbial Inoculant at a rate of 50:1 (tea to EM1). This is what we have several golf courses doing. It give you the best of both worlds.

Here's a picture of me with Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, at last year's Raw Spirit Festival in Sedona, Arizona.

Wow Eric!

Not only are you smart, you're handsome too!

Pat

potatos?

BINGO...............FOR SALLY. :) You can however raise them by row or side dressing organic ferts for acid loving plants. They will get scab in a netrual growing medium or soil.

Pat................except for maybe one or two missing genes I may have looked like Clark Gabel. ]:o) My other problem was I waded barefoot in the cow barn one time to many.
I just cant imagine what a shot of EM and a pair of boots from day one might have done for me. This does not account for being broad sided more than once watching mother put a squirt of raw milk right in the cat's face.

Here's a rose that I had growing well a year ago. I need some fertilizer that I am brewing.

I stumbled upon this thread while looking for a trumpet sprayer to apply aerated compost tea.Very interesting, didn't know about EM1. I went to a lecture last week on how to make it and was told pressure sprayers more than 50 psi will kill the organisms. Anyone know where to get a trumpet sprayer.

Google for one online, bananna18. Or if you have them in your area, Tractor Supply.

No wonder I couldn't find it when I searched. It's called TROMBOME, not trumpet. Any how, most of them have pressure up to 150 psi, so I don't know if it's a good idea. I do like the idea though.Thanks for your help.

Bananna I use the sprayer like you use for spraying with miracle grow hooked to the garden hose since
Dh has used the big sprayer we have for brush killer to try and get rid of poison ivy since I don't get along with it LOL

This has been a long but fascinating discussion. I'm just getting started with the idea of Bokashi for food waste. I look forward to learning & practising more in this school of thought, so maybe I'll work with MN & not against her. I have ordered the basic kit for Bokashi set up & I'll make a container as I get going with the first. I have a small amount of the bran coming with the kit. What will be my next logical step as far as needed product. AEM1, make my own bran, EM1??? Although an awesome thread and great material being presented, I get confused when I go to order what I need, the products all seem to sound the same. I can be overwhelmed easily & have dropped out before I see results. Help me not to sabotage myself this time. This looks really important.

If you write to the people at www.emamerica.com they can recommend specific products. I started with a gallon of EM1 and used part of it to make bokashi with sawdust (no bran available here). It came out fine and worked well and that has encouraged me to use the liquid on my plants and to make weed extract. The bokashi is very easy to make and it works so well on what would otherwise be smelly garbage that I think it's a good way to start.

One really great thing about this is that you really mess it up too badly. If it doesn't come out "right" (for example, if it had a bad smell) you just bury it a little deeper!!

And nobody here will tell you you're doing it "wrong." We're all learning as we go.

katiebear

Eric is the best to answer but I started out with just the bokashi and used my own bucket and got the EM 1 and extended ans activated it out with the directions that are on the site.
You can put pretty much everything from the kitchen including leftovers in the bucket I choose not to put meat in though as the dogs like to find the spot I put it in outside and try to dig it up. ...we cover it with fencing till we are ready to plant or I add it to the compost pile.
Anyway start with the bokashi....put a lil in the bottom of the bucket then as you add the food layer more on top of the food...I usually do it once a day depending on how much food we put in ...so it would be a starting layer of bokashi, food , bokashi and so on till the bucket is full.....then you let it sit to ferment everything (about 2 wks) dig your hole and empty the bucket into it, wait 2 wks then you can plant and start again.

If you are getting EM1 then you can extend it to make it go further and I use mine to spray my yard and plants with along with on the compost pile.
When we moved her last July no one had done anything to the property for over 12 years other then mow the yard.

DG members can get a 10% discount at www.emamerica.com using the code DGarden (case sensative). Don't know how long this will last.

katiebear

Oh Glory...I wish I had found this thread when I started reading about EM1/Bokashi on some other threads... I had so many basic questions!!! So after an aborted failure making Bokashi with peatmoss, I finally found some Bokashi for sale for an arm and a leg (16$ per pound), got it made to see if I liked the proceedures and I started processing my kitchen waste. I got so excited about it, I investigated more and more, my husband (the skeptical Chemical Engineer) is 100% excited about it and we just did a work shop here to teach my Master Gardener class about it...they are all now making their Bokashi.... It is coffee season now, so we have 'a lot' of coffee pulp...that's going into a 50gal. rubbish bucket with the bottom cut out...and it is buried in a pile of greenwaste from the garden and sawdust from a small saw mill. Next spring.......!!!! I cannot imagine anyone not getting totally turned on by it...an organic farmer friend of mine was there and he is getting into it!!!

My next thrill will be spraying my labrador, Thelma, after she has rolled in a dead frog!!!! No smell.

Eric...thanks for being there...answering the questions and broadening our minds!!!!

Carol

Gotta love those labradors and their sense of what makes a good cologne! LOL!

I have been reading that CSI site and kinda sorta following their proceedures for planting new seedlings... Talked to the EM distributor here and he said it is just kinda sorta like using EM .... anyway....I mix up the Fish Fertilizer, the Molassas and throw in some EM or just the Bokashi Juice and those puppies grow!!!!

CSI Hawaii? Planting seedlings? Did I miss that episode?

FUNNY!!! Nope...CSI just anywhere!!! Down here in NZ I am starting my friend on inocculating her soil.....am going to look for EM.

Interesting!!!

I had not heard of bokashi method but I do compost meats which is a big no no at the other composting sites because of smell and might attract rodents.

i have 3 homemade composters and add baking soda to deter the smell. I do have my composters away from the house and neighbors and been composting for years.

Belle

bananna18,
I just saw your post about a trumpet sprayer. I don't know what they are ...but...

I have a trombone sprayer that I located on Ace Hardware's web site. I checked with my local Ace store and had them order it for me. It cost about $50 but I like it because it sprays higher and farther than my pressure tank type sprayer. Since you just put the liquid into any plastic bucket it's easy to clean when you're through by filling the bucket with clean water and spraying it out until the sprayer is clean too.

Good luck.

Paul

Thanks Paul! I am always looking for an easier way .