Summary
Transcript
So, in full disclosure, on the first test that I did, back when I was living at the other house with the first raised bed, it was sometimes we were in rainy season, so it got rained on a lot, and then sometimes when I didn’t have that water, I used city water. Apparently, it still worked, so there’s that. On this test, you saw me use the hose for this first round. I hadn’t put any microbes in there, so I felt it was okay to water with city water at that point in time. From now on, I’m either going to be recycling the water that’s in the pans, or I’m not sure, let me see if I can get the video footage.
It does go over there. It’s over here in the corner. So, throughout most of Latin America, and certainly Puerto Rico, people have backup water supplies. This is a big container of water. Now, this water is filled with city water, but it’s been sitting here for days or weeks or even months. I’ve been leaving it a little bit open, so it does get rainwater in there also. So that’s the best I can do when I don’t have… I am collecting some rainwater, and I use that as much as I can, and then, as I said, I’m recycling the water that’s in the pans to just keep everything nice and moist, right? That way, any minerals or microbes that are in the water or the glyphosate will just continue to get recycled through the same soil.
That’s it, watering. This is especially important. I had a conversation. We’re working with one researcher with a government lab and had her with some of the developers of the microbes. She was like, okay, I’m going to get absolutely pure, sterile water that has nothing in it. He’s like, don’t do that. That’ll kill it. These are living things. This is a different kind of science here. This is biological science. This is not like you take it apart in this mineral and that part, kind of like pharmaceutical, drug care, health care, right? This is a living thing, and these microbes activate of the thousands of them, depending on which environment they’re in.
They respond to their living. They work cooperatively, apparently, so it’s a whole new way of looking at things. That’s the first thing, water. When you do this, and if you’re going to be doing experiments, by the way, please reach out to me. I want to know. I want to collaborate. That’s the first thing, and the second thing, which is a little bit more that kind of broke my heart. As you can see, the wild grass seed has sprouted here. I’m going to get you a photo in there to show it to you up close. It turns out that another aspect of this is they really need to be grounded and connected to Earth.
If you remember, in my first test, it was a garden bed that was just directly on the ground, maybe had a little cardboard in it, but direct ground connection, cardboard that deteriorated pretty rapidly, I’m sure. What I’m going to do here, I tried doing some crazy stuff. I’ve seen I could just run some wire through it or something like that. That’s not going to work. What I’m going to do is dump this soil out into a bin, wire this up with a bunch of wire in the bottom, and then ground it into the Earth.
That way, these minerals and microbes have grounding. I’m going to just show you how I’m doing that. This was kind of this ratty experiment here that did not work. I don’t know what I was thinking there. You know sometimes how you have that wishful thinking thing go on. That was not ever going to work. This is also a good time to show you if you didn’t catch it the last time when I did this. This is not just a straight bin. It’s got a bin with holes in it, and then I’ve got somewhat of a holy platform that it sits on, because I know there’s going to be standing water in the bottom, and I don’t want the water to be in the whole bottom soil to be so waterlogged.
I’m putting this in here, and what I’m going to do is just get a nice coil of wire. I think, ideally, in the really ideal world, this would be copper. This is definitely more of your low-budget world. This is more like the real world. I just went to the hardware store yesterday. Ferritoria, they call them here. I picked this up. I’m having fun figuring this out. I think I’m just going to put a big old coil of it in there with a long tail. So that I can take it out and tie it into a ground rod.
What I’m going to do is run it through one of these holes here and one of the holes in the bottom, and then just have it run out the back. There we go. There’ll be a little more. Here it is. What I’m going to do is put some of the soil back in there. This stuff really still stinks. I will get more grassy. To top it off, we lost about a week of the growth rate on that. It’s not too big of a deal, but it’s something. There’s a tail coming out the back. I will find a grounding rod.
Wow, a lot of water there. I’m going to keep it though because stuff can dry out pretty quickly. Let me wash this out, and I’m going to do the same thing for the other bin. I’m cleaning out this bucket so that there’s no possible cross contamination or whatever between the two. Here we go. Again, I’m poking this through a hole in the back here. Here we go. Let’s see, let me put this over here again. There we go. Now, what the heck? I might run a whole other ground wire in there just for fun. I’m just going to tuck that in under there as a secondary ground.
There we go. There we go. There we go. Okay, I’ll spare you the details, but I’ll go find a piece of rebar and pound it into the ground and tie these to it real good so that this is grounded. I think I’m going to do another application today. That is really a lot of water, so I will not need to water anything for a while. Don’t worry, everything dries out in containers, so I’m not too worried about it. Yeah, so we’re going to go onward and upward, and as I said, I’ll probably put some other grass seed or something in here just so we have something growing.
What is growing is kind of irrelevant. We just need plants for the root, the exudates from the roots of the plants to interact with the biology and the microbiology in the soil. So there you go, that’s your update. When you’re doing this, two things to be careful of is one is water, your water source, and two is going to be that you make sure that you have your pots grounded. I’m going to actually try to figure out how to ground that gigantic one over there now. Okay, this is Marjorie Wildcraft. We’ll talk to you later. [tr:trw].
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