Over the weekend we spent several hours collecting microbes and feeding them.
Why?
The organisms in soil are the key to how I can farm the way I do - plants depend on those fungi, bacteria, nematodes, flagellates, cilliates and microarthropods to get the nutrients they need. When a plant has the nutrients it needs, insect pests and diseases aren't able to attack. (Mammal pests, on the other hand...)
At our old property, I had this fairly well dialed in. There were spots I needed to work on where botrytis attacked the strawberries, but it was less than 5% of that field. In our new location, I'll be starting from scratch. Which is why we spent several hours collecting microbes from the forests around Wrecking Barn and mixing them with several hundred pounds of rice bran, molasses and rock dust. This mix is currently fermenting in 55 gallon barrels. In a month, we'll pull it out and use some of it to inoculate compost, some to make foliar feeds, and we'll feed the rest more rice bran, molasses and rock dust to keep our microbe colony strong. These microbes will become a key part of our soil health work, and we'll depend on them to keep the plants healthy and producing!
