Gbiota Soil

Creating fresh soil

Creating soil is the number two challenge facing humanity, after climate change.

We know exactly how to do it – it has been happening for billions of years, naturally covering much of the earth in a layer of fertile soil.

Then mankind had this idea that the only purpose of soil was to hold the plants upright and that we could supply all the nutrients the plants needed.

This idea is not just wrong, it is one of the biggest goofs mankind has ever made. We need the microbes in the soil and our use of inert chemicals is at the root cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.

The snag is that the way nature created soil takes centuries – we need to do it in twelve weeks. This is not just a challenge for the chemists and microbiologists, it is an engineering problem of how to create the right conditions for the microbes to create the soil.

I am an engineer, so that is my job.

Soil – teaming with beneficial microbes and nutrients

The aim of Gbiota technology is to enhance gut health by growing plants in soil teaming with beneficial microbes and nutrients.

Creating soil is right at the centre, so I have written this post focusing on how we make soil in the Gbiota system.

Creating soil is about turning dirt into soil, and for that we need a combination of the fine particles in dirt and the creatures – from tiny to large – which live off organic matter.

Clay

Let us start with clay.

I have lived most of my life on yukky clay soil.

When it rains it turns into a super adhesive, grabbing hold of your boot, pulling it off so you are left standing on one foot, waving the other foot in the air while you try and extract your boot which is firmly stuck in the yukky clay.

When it stops raining it just holds onto the water, refusing to drain even on a slope.

But when it eventually dries out it turns into concrete, so hard you cannot get a fork into it.

The magic of carbon

Yet clay can be turned into one of the most productive soils.

Get the organic matter working as it should and the microscopic clay particles are coated in a thin film so the individual clay particles no longer cling together but form a loose aggregate with a friable texture.

Clay typically contains a good spectrum of nutrients but in their natural state they are firmly locked in so the plants cannot access them. But the soil creatures, particularly the fungi, can penetrate the particles, releasing the nutrients and making them bio-available so the plant can access them.

The clay, only suitable for making pots, has been turned into one of the most productive soils by the power of organic matter and the soil microbiology.

Food waste and the myth of surplus

I read estimates that between 30–40% of food grown is wasted (e.g. not eaten). Certainly there are vast quantities doing little more than create greenhouse gases.

If organic matter, meaning carbon based, is so wonderful, why not grow plants in this waste food? Nice idea, but there is a little problem of osmotic pressure which means that water will always move from a weak to a strong solution.

That is one mechanism that makes plants work. As the concentration, or strength, of the solution is higher in the roots of the plants than in the surrounding soil, water will flow into the root system.

If it did not, then we (and everything else) would be dead.

So if, for some reason, you wanted to kill a plant then putting a bunch of waste food into a blender to make a super strong solution and putting this around the root zone would kill off the plants by simply sucking the water out of the plants.

I have done this many times in my experiments with Wicking Beds by just letting the solution get too strong. We live in the era of fake news so if you don’t believe me just put a plant into concentrated chicken shit and watch it die.

Goldilocks got it right – not too strong and not too weak, just right.

Growth inhibitors

But, as the adverts say, there is more. As waste food decomposes, as it always will, it creates both liquids and gases which act as growth inhibitors. One of these gases is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas and growth inhibitor.

And if you are still not convinced, there is yet more.

Nitrogen

For organic matter to decompose it needs nitrogen which it sucks out from anywhere it can. You can see this as plants turn yellow from lack of nitrogen.

In my early Wicking Beds I used sawdust as it was readily available and pretty much free. I admit I am a bit OCD-ish about recycling, so I wanted to use this waste product, which I did very effectively by making sure there was plenty of chicken shit available to power this decomposition.

Recycling that works

There is a lot more to recycling waste food than tossing in a few composting worms and microbes to a box of food waste. I am not at all sure that we have found the best possible way – as yet – but I do know ways that work.

The religion of composting

Composting has become a virtual religion. Waste must be laminated with layers of green (nitrogen-containing material) and layers of brown (carbon-containing material) with an exact ratio of carbon to nitrogen and no foreign wastes like citrus skins, onions etc.

And have no doubt this works. The pile will start off with low-temperature microbes and gradually (and sometimes not so gradually) the temperature will build up as heat-loving microbes replace the cold-loving microbes and, when the materials get used up (releasing a lot of gases to the atmosphere), the temperature will drop and we have compost.

And let us face it, this is pretty good stuff even if it has lost a lot of its original nutrients and probably has the wrong sort of microbes for our gut brain.

Fungi, beetles and more

But let us get lazy and instead of this almost precision process of high-tech composting we just bury the food waste in the soil – what would happen?

Well first we would miss the nice smell of the compost. Well, I think it is nice but my wife does not, and neither of us are keen on the flies that it attracts.

But then a whole spectrum of life would move into the decomposing waste.

Fungi would come along, the citrus skins would go mouldy (that’s the fungi at work) and other creatures with teeth would also appear and chew on the hard bits.

Much as I love worms they don’t have teeth, they have a gizzard like a chicken which grinds up the food which needs to be broken down into a more digestible form.

So why bury rather than compost?

It is a bit slow and does not fit into our ideas of production line manufacture we have learned from the car industry – put the engine in at this station and the wheels at that station.

Continuous improvement

So how can we do this in the Gbiota system? The Japanese manufacturers popularised the idea of continuous improvement and this is my approach.

This is the way I do it now, and it works, but maybe tomorrow I will find a better way – who knows.

But I do have some preconceived ideas of what I want to achieve in developing this system.

Do it at home

The whole point of the Gbiota system is to breed the beneficial microbes which will form our gut brain.

But these microbes have a very short life so it is really much more practical to develop a system which people can do at home rather than a major centralised facility.

We now have a major food problem because we have a centralised food system which produces lots of food, but the food is not healthy food, so we have a major health epidemic.

The reason is that it is more economic to mass produce poor food rather than grow food which is healthy. We are suffering from a man-made food crisis – not of quantity but of quality.

The destruction of our soils and its effect on food production is only second to climate change as a threat to our species.

Some people care

But individual people care about their own health, so the aim of the Gbiota project is to enable people to grow their own food which is healthy for them rather than a centralised system which makes money for the mega corporations.

My aim is to give those people who actually care about their health, specifically gut health, an alternative that they can use for themselves and under their control.

We eat every day

It may seem easy to grow food but we both eat and collect food every day, so we need a system of continuous collection of waste and production of food.

It takes time to both create soil and grow plants so we must synchronise those together.

I think in terms of a twelve-week cycle. It takes about twelve weeks to process food waste until it can be used to grow plants and it also takes about twelve weeks to grow baby greens from seeds.

On the growing side – the number of boxes needed depends on the size of the family and the space available, but for a typical family we may be talking about six boxes, so we need to seed a new box every two weeks.

This is pretty simple. Every couple of weeks we just take a box that has finished its growing period, put a lid on it and flip it over. Load the base, no more than half full, with freshly processed soil, flip the previous soil back into the box, clean up and reseed.

Creating fresh soil

We now come to the big challenge – how to turn organic waste, particularly food waste, into soil teaming with beneficial microbes and nutrients.

Sounds simple, but it is not.

This is the best way I have found to date – it works and is pretty simple – but I spend my time trying to find an even better way.

That is what I do when I am not writing my posts.

As an engineer I would describe this as a dynamic problem as opposed to a static problem.

It would be a static problem if we just had a mountain of food waste and all we had to do was to turn it into a mountain of healthy soil.

But it is a dynamic problem with a steady stream of waste food being produced every day and us needing a supply of fresh soil to put into a fresh Gbiota box every couple of weeks or so.

Collecting the waste

Food waste is produced on a continuous basis – the remains of the apple we have just eaten, the coffee dregs that got us going this morning.

And that bit of chocolate that I could not finish in the evening – no, that is a lie – I am a pig and a chocoholic and would never leave a bit of chocolate. But you get the message.

What I do is to have a number of containers, typically old yoghurt containers, around the house to collect any food waste.

I empty these into a box which I keep on my patio. Actually I have two boxes because this is an ongoing process.

Initial decomposition – the first box

The first box is for the first initial stage in the decomposition process.

The last thing you want is a box of smelly rotting food on the patio – that will result in an earful from my wife (believe me, I know).

Food is a high-energy input – too high for growing plants – so I typically add a low-energy source like grass clippings or any vegetation that has been chopped up into little bits.

Nitrogen

Then I need to add a source of nitrogen – the decomposition process takes a lot of nitrogen. I use chicken manure partly because it is readily available and my boxes are outside on the patio so smell is not an issue for me.

It is possible to buy processed chicken manure but any microbes will be long dead, though there are other sources. Blood and bone is really good and can be bought in small packages with other additives.

Minerals

Now I add minerals in the form of crushed rock. The best rock dust is from volcanic rock which contains a broad spectrum of trace minerals and, if available, can be bought cheaply from a local quarry.

Bauxite, which contains magnesium – a critical mineral – is more widely available. The other two minerals commonly in deficit are iron and zinc. Trace minerals are available in retail packs but are expensive.

These are readily available in retail packs and can be stored and used when needed.

Inoculant

But now we come to the difficult one – the inoculant which contains a broad spectrum of soil creatures including microbes, fungi and worms and, more particularly, worm eggs which are less robust and less likely to die in transport.

I am looking to set up local breeders but at this moment I can supply directly in 4Kg packs which is enough for twelve weeks. At this moment these are only available in Australia and there are some quarantine restrictions in Western Australia and Tasmania.

I am looking for growers.

The best process is to set up the box and, when ready, order the inoculant (email me at colin@gbiota.com) which will be posted on the next Monday and will need to be emptied straight into the box.

Please note, and this is important, inoculant contains living creatures so cannot be stored.

I add trace minerals to my inoculant but I still recommend adding some bauxite-based rock dust which also adds texture to the mix, or failing that some regular garden soil or, yes, even clay which is actually nutrient rich.

It is important to keep the box moist. Hopefully you will have read the introductory article on Gbiota Triboxes and read the discussion between having a box with holes in the base feeding into a storage container and the swivel tube system.

For growing boxes I came out in favour of the swivel tube as it is so easy, but in this case I have a preference for the box with holes in the base as the last thing you want with labile (fresh) compost is it sitting in water and the holes in the base allow complete drainage.

Decomposition – the second box

The first box will get the decomposition process started but our aim is not to simply compost but to breed the beneficial microbes – a bit different.

Plants exude sugars from their roots which attract and feed beneficial microbes.

It is not really practical to grow plants in this first box, as we are regularly adding fresh food waste so it is not really suitable for growing plants.

But when the decomposition process has progressed, some material (maybe 15–25% of the box) can be taken out and placed into a second box with some soil. It is now possible to grow a green manure crop with plants like buckwheat, snap peas, alfalfa, mung beans, amaranth etc. in this semi-matured compost.

As the compost is taken out it is replaced by new food and organic waste. This is an ongoing regular process rather than a one-off.

There are pretty tough plants which can grow quite happily in this rather young, labile, toxic compost.

The breeding process will continue in this second box with the partially decomposed material feeding the worms.

Just make sure when you are transferring the material that you have a good supply of worms and don’t hurt them when transferring.

Worms may not appear to be aggressive but they have a long memory and will rip you to bits when you are buried – that’s bullshit of course – worms are very well mannered so wait until you die before they rip you to bits – very polite.

The growing box

Every couple of weeks or so some material is taken out from the second box and placed in the base of a growing box which is then re-filled with the existing soil.

The relay race

It is a bit like a backwards relay race.

A hole is made in the second box and the material used for a growing box.

The hole in the second box is then filled with material from the first box.

Then the hole in the first box is refilled with new fresh waste.

Difficult to explain but easy when you see it in action. Watch the video “The gut brain food cycle”:
https://youtu.be/ddlN47Hy2OY.

Not just baby greens

I have been promoting baby greens for the good reasons that they are the most nutritious and easy to grow without having to worry too much about the pesky insects.

But you are not limited to baby greens – any conventional plant can be grown even if it has a long life. I have a box of spinach which has been growing longer than I can remember.

But I am using the soil blood from the upstream boxes which both wets the soil and delivers valuable nutrients and microbes.

Great stuff this soil blood – one of the best things about the Gbiota system.