captures their “soil blood”, and uses it to grow baby greens that feed your gut-brain.
Gbiota easy
We have known about our intelligent control system for some seventy years—going back to when people who were
deprived of food during the war later became fat, as their control system had been trained to store any fat it could.
Years later we find ourselves in a health crisis that starts by people becoming overweight. The classic advice is to
cut calories which, although well intentioned, still trains our intelligent control system to store yet more fat.
I try to make people aware of the importance of feeding our gut-brain. This message seems well accepted by a dedicated
number of home gardeners but has little impact on the bulk of the population.
I tried persuading people to form groups where keen gardeners help less advantaged people living in flats who do not
have the time and skills to grow their own gut food.
Well, if you don’t try you will never succeed—and this was a bit of a damp squib. So I thought I must try a new
approach and see how easy I could make it for people with no time, space or even interest in growing their own gut food.
The Gbiota stacked bin (tribox) is my solution: a lazy-friendly way to turn kitchen waste into gut-brain food.
The basic principle behind the Gbiota system is common to all methods, but there are many ways of applying this in practice.
A living soil is created (yes, we make soil) by breeding microbes in organic waste and minerals with inoculants
such as worms, soldier fly larvae, and a starter of living microbes.
Initially, water is flushed through this soil to create what I call soil blood (because it does a similar
job to our blood)—a somewhat yukky-looking liquid which, under a microscope, is full of an array of creatures large and small.
This is then flushed again through soil in another zone where plants are grown.
We eat the plants, which are natural pre- and probiotics, and feed our gut-brain.
Pretty simple.
The flower pot method
The flower pot method, using 40-cent flower pots, I described in an earlier post:
how-to-gpots.
It is the cheapest way I know of applying this method.
The stacked boxes I describe here are even easier to use, but they do need $10 boxes rather than 40-cent flower pots
(though you only need about half as many).
Stacking boxes
To make one unit (you will probably need about four units to provide a continuous supply of gut-brain food) you need
three stacking storage boxes—boxes that can be stacked with the one above fitting into the lid of the box below.
All the boxes I have seen in my local stores are stacking boxes and vary in size and price from a few dollars per box
up to about $15 per box.
Modifying the stacking boxes
The bottom box you do nothing with—this is the reservoir to catch the soil blood.
The box above is the breeding box. You drill holes in the base of this box and in the lid of the box
below so the soil blood can drain into the bottom box.
You load the breeding box with any organic waste you can lay your hands on. Kitchen waste is the obvious choice, but any
organic waste will do, including:
- your next-door neighbour’s cat which whinges on your windowsill at midnight,
- his son who arrives back at 1 a.m. on his motorbike and revs it to full bore,
- his daughter who insists on playing the latest Taylor Swift hit at 2 in the morning,
- and maybe himself, who mows the lawn at 5:30 a.m.,
- and let’s not forget his wife who screams continuously that she cannot think with all this noise.
Anyway, hopefully you get the message—any organic waste.
Then come the minerals—just dial up rent-a-volcano or buy a bag of rock dust if the volcano won’t fit in the empty house next door.
It pays to check that your rock dust has the right minerals. Most people are short on magnesium, women on iron and men on zinc
(one night of hanky-panky can exhaust a man’s store of zinc). Blood and bone is a good source of zinc and other minerals.
There are many articles on food and health on this web site.
Food and the gut biome
has a table showing minerals that are widely deficient.
Then add the decomposers. You can buy worm eggs; soldier fly larvae and other maggots just appear with household waste.
If you leave out some old slices of bread the local pigeons may supply you with some free pigeon manure—no credit cards needed—or
you can buy some professionally created inoculant for $2,000. But the pigeon manure has worked fine for the last two hundred thousand
years, so it can be classified as “showing promise”.
Again you drill holes in the base of the top box and in the lid of the box below. This top box is where you grow the actual plants.
You will need some soil for a starter. Most people, including me, hate clay—but it does have very fine particles that nutrients cling to,
and after a few cycles the organic matter will have created aggregates that give the soil a beautiful texture.
If all else fails you can buy a bag of potting mix from the supermarket, just to get you going.
Whatever else, this soil must be free draining. Trust me—if the soil does not drain freely you will end up with a
squelchy, horrible, pongy mess that will breed the wrong sort of microbes, like E. coli, which will test your immune system. So:
free draining it is.
After a while, the organic matter from the breeding box below should give you adequate drainage. If not, some fine driveway gravel may
do the trick (though it is really heavy), while Vermiculite or Perlite are very light and improve the soil texture.
But the most important aerator of the soil is our friendly worms.
Seeding
Now you need to seed. The whole point is to breed microbes, and different plant species emit different sugars to attract
different species of microbes.
As the name of the game is to create as diverse a range of beneficial microbes as possible, I make a mix of multiple species.
Currently my magic seed mix has some 26 species of compatible plants which create an excellent mix of baby greens—really the end product.
Cycling
A typical cycle, from harvest to harvest for a box, is about eight weeks. With four boxes you will be restarting a box every couple of weeks.
This is where the beauty of stacked boxes comes in. Whenever you have kitchen scraps you just lift off the top box and the breeding box lid
and toss in the scraps.
By the time it comes to rotate the box after eight weeks, you simply tip the old soil from the top box onto the decomposed waste, make that
box the new top box, and use what was the top box as the breeding box.
But don’t forget to move the worms back to the lower box—it is amazing how they will have bred up. You will need the kids to help you think
of names for them all—they are now your pets.
The best way I have found of watering is to collect up the soil blood from some or all of the box stacks and measure roughly how much fluid
you will need for the liquid to saturate the growing and breeding boxes so a reasonable amount actually flows down to the bottom water
reservoir box.
This soil blood will be used on the next cycle and will flush the root zone with fresh microbes and minerals suspended in it.
Gently pour this onto the soil in the top box so it floods. This will soak down through the growing and breeding boxes, mimicking the
flood-and-drain cycle.
This will expel the stale air, and when the soil blood flows down to the bottom water reservoir it will suck in fresh air.
I prefer to push a short piece of Ag pipe into the soil and fill through that so the soil blood fills from the base upwards.
It is basically breathing the soil.
This is not quite as good as a proper flood-and-drain system where the soil is totally flooded from underneath, but it is a lot quicker
and seems to work pretty well.
As long as you apply enough soil blood so it goes right down to the bottom water container, they all seem to work pretty well.
In the attached video I am reseeding and covering the surface with grass clippings in a vain attempt to fool the local pigeons who have now
learned my boxes are a good source of seeds. But they do leave a calling card of fresh inoculants, commonly known as pigeon manure.
Have fun flipping
Alternatives
There are some alternatives to this three-box stack system that some people may prefer.
The growing and breeding boxes can be combined into one large box. This has the advantage that the plants have a bigger root area.
The disadvantage is that kitchen waste is normally generated daily, but this cannot be put straight into the breeding area and must be
stored separately in some compost box or bag until the box is refurbished.
When the crop is finished and the box is being replenished, it is simply emptied and reloaded with compost on the bottom and the growing
soil on top. This is best if the box is flooded from below like in a normal wicking bed.
The best way is to have a long swivel tube so the box can be completely flooded from the filler tube, then the swivel tube twisted to let
the box completely drain.
A compost tube can also be used. Organic waste can be placed in the tube and the box filled by watering through the compost tube.
The tube can be moved to refurbish the soil and increase the time between full refurbishments of the box.
I have many boxes using this system and it is a good way of growing, but more complicated than the simple three-box stack.
If you want more details just email me at
colin@gbiota.com.
