using different soils for teas

Just wondering what everybody is using for their bacteria source.

I have been using a concoction of different soils as my base in my tea.

I have a half dozen coffee containers full of different soils on my shelf. I have a container of hardwood forest floor, some pine grove floor, some cold compost, some well composted cow/horse manure and some flower compost from a local cemetery.

I throw a little bit of all of them in my base tea (more manure and compost for veg) to get a wide variety of bacteria and fungus.

Of course I add other ingredients for whichever tea I'm making and a lil bit of humid acid and bubble with molasses.

Compost or worm castings. It's called "compost tea" for a reason.

SpicySativa said:

Compost or worm castings. It's called "compost tea" for a reason.

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That's weird, wondered why it wasn't called dirt tea.

Like I said earlier, I like getting a good diverse colony of bacteria and fungi.

I know a lower C:N compost is more bacterial dominate and a higher C:N compost is more fungal dominate.

Basically the 'woodier' the compost the more fungal it will be.

Hence the forest floor and especially the pine grove floor is highly fungal. Great source to cultivate root helping fungi.

The low C:N cemetery compost is mostly bacterial. As for my cold compost, its more balanced but tends to be a little heavier on the N so is more bacterial.

Why would you want to limit yourself when it comes to your microbial herd?

How do you know? What microscope have you used to assess this?

http://www.soilace.com/pdf/pon2004/11.Ingham.pdf

^ A good read about soil microbiology.


Check out the comparisons between total fungal mass in old growth forest soil versus compost.

Compost wins...

EWC, molasses, kelp, water - all you need for a great tea.

SpicySativa said:

http://www.soilace.com/pdf/pon2004/11.Ingham.pdf

^ A good read about soil microbiology.


Check out the comparisons between total fungal mass in old growth forest soil versus compost.

Compost wins...

Click to expand...

Thanks for the read, it's downloaded to my Kindle app so I can refer back to it at any time.

I have never worried about or even gave a thought about the biomass in the soils I use. The biomass in my finished teas seems to be where my concerns have always been.

According to your reference the total fungal biomass of an 800 year old forest soil has no close second, not even compost. I wonder why I would have containers of soil collected from two different sets of woods?

Also, according to your reference, the C:N of a compost clearly dictates whether it will be bacterial or fungal dominate, which I believe was stated in the op. Again, I wonder why I have containers of soil from different compost piles?

Now back to the biomass of the soils. I see that my backyard compost has a higher plate count, when tested against the soils of the woods. But again I'm not interested in biomass of the soil, but rather the biomass of my teas. I brew my tea to create the biomass by giving the microbiology the means to reproduce and build up the biomass. Having diverse soils, which hold diverse microbiology, brewed in a tea, produces a diverse biomass.

And yes, I see a lot of different life in my teas, shapes, swimmers, tails, rods, worms, eaters, flyers, of course these aren't scientific names, just what I've nicknamed them, so if you have a reference to all the different microbiology with pics so I can learn them, that would be cool, thanx!!

I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but you misread the tables in that report. The 800-yr old for forest had 80 ug/g active, 2,946 total fungal biomass. The aerobic compost had 92.6 ug/g active, 4,880 total.

I'm not trying to say that you won't get some benefit from brewing up those forest soils. Just saying that there's a reason compost is typically what we brew with. By all means, throw a bit of healthy soil in there, too, if you want.

Awesome that you're looking through a scope at what you're actually brewing. I hate it that forums on organics tend to attract a lot of the mystical type growers who make grandiose claims that could be either half-true or utter mumbo-jumbo and refuse to engage with the real science.

You're all good in my book

Is inoculating your home compost pile with your diverse microbe sources a thing? You could just sprinkle a cup of soil on top honestly, or grow some fungi cultures and/or ACT for the pile.

Thermo compost a very dif environment than forest floor so obviously some of the critters will not thrive, but some might.

Hey Spicy, sorry if I came across argumentatively, wasn't my intentions.

I went back and read it again and see your info is correct for the compost. I was reading on the next page where they sampled the 3 different composts.

At any rate here is where I am coming from. I mix about 10ml of soil sample to 30ml of water in beaker. Shake the living piss out of it for a few minutes, then let it sit for about 10min to allow the sediments to settle to the bottom. Use an eyedropper to get a water sample from in between the settled sediment and the floating organic material. Then it gets dropped on a slide and under the scope.

MY COMPOST, made in my backyard, just the way my grandpa did, is not the hot composting that is made today. I can turn my compost and still make out what was probably a piece of lettuce, or what looks like it used to be a peel of some kind for a cple weeks. It takes about a month or so for things to compost down enough that you can't make out any solid organic matter. I believe today's hot composts can accomplish the same in have that time.

I hold my COLD compost as being more of decaying organic matter, to which the C:N ratio dictates it being more bacterial than fungal.

Now head to head under a scope, the woodland soils have more life per slide than the compost, but going off the C:N ratios of each sample says that the life in the woodland soils should be more fungal.

With only one exception, I don't see the diversity in the soil samples as I do in my teas. Meaning, looking at soil samples I see less swimmers, tails and flyers than I see in a well brewed tea. The only exception I have here, is on one slide of compost, I seen some type of micro critter swimming that I have never seen before or since. I say critter because at 800x it was prolly 20x bigger than the single celled guys I usually see. It had the shape of a bug and swam through the fov so quick I had to move the slide around to keep it in the fov, maybe a cple seconds, then it was gone to never be seen again.

And Smokey, I have dumped tea on my compost, only when I have more tea than I needed, but have never done it for the sole purpose of innoculating the compost.

Julius Caesar said:

EWC, molasses, kelp, water - all you need for a great tea.

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Dont forget a commercial air pump!