Smithers, release the hounds!
Ha-ha-ha... the Great Inoculum has begun. (All that's missing are some sponsor swag stickers to decorate this germination/inoculation cubby with!)
So this is me preparing 15 gallons of RD-Special Microbial Inoculant that will immediately be used to treat a full bail of peat/perlite (SS#4) - as seen divided between the large 'cooking' buckets, awaiting the spark of life!
Straightforward stuff here: top pic shows my medium-sized 17-gal tea-brewer, currently holding about 12-gal of pond water. Some black plastic laid on the lid eliminates even more light from entering and impacting the culture/tea. Good enough is good enough.
Underneath it is your basic 10x20 thermostat-controlled heat mat. I target 76-80-deg f.
On the left, also hanging, is a 30w air pump on a 5-min on, 15-min off timer, connected to a 5” dia. airstone in the tote. There's also a small waterpump in there to move things around even more, set for 5 min every 30 min., placed to prevent any settling, anywhere - something I was surprised to observe was possible with only the airstone employed.
The Water is sourced from my pond (see the pic), though often for smaller batches I have a distilled water 'brewer' I can use but it takes hours to make one gallon. I have very soft, very good tap water here so another method I employ is to chemically to take out the chloramine remainder with citric acid or potassium metabisulphate. The amounts required are so low you cant even read it on a TDS/PPM meter (chloramine is a chlorine-type byproduct of an ammonia-based civic h2o treatment that can't be 'off-gassed').
The pond water is, of course, a Pandora's box of unknown micro-life. However, it has appeared to work well in the past (using the end product I have seen certain indicators that my added microbes multiplied strongly and are at work in the planting medium) and I've chosen it for this batch.
Next, I stuffed some fresh RD-developed worm castings into and old sock and hung it in the water.
The casting are important to me, as among the ridiculous number of their benefits is that they contain protozoa, which are an important part of the ''microbial circle of life'' as it were.
Further microbial contributions come from the three packages in the bottom of the shot, they are Dynomyco mycorrhizae and NPK RAW's Grow and Flower microbe packs. The NPK RAW brand
Grow Pack highlight is the selection of helpful baccilus species, while also containing some myco spores, but at a much lower concentration than Dynomyco-C. The NPK is prolly not a suitable stand-alone myco product, unless you culture them up with some plants to increase numbers and harvest that (I work on this myself and it's awesome, plus it hugely stretches out your product and gives you living stuff to plant with)
It's my understanding that synth-fertigated soilless grows don't benefit a great deal from mycos, as the readily available nutrients prevent the plant from 'bartering' with the mycos and allowing them to develop their full potential.
(Got some serious environment issues in this tent/room as air is removed but not replaced fast enough. Seems to drive them to breath too hard trying to get what they need, causing necrosis on leaf edges and thin leaves. There’s a compromise in place but I’ve got a true fix coming now. When I remove a plant from here and place it 10ft away, in another room, after one day the improvement is obvious!)
The NPK RAW
Flower microbe pack is a super-star, containing some excellent phosphorous solubizing bacteria, which also in a synth grow aren't necc, however, I like to run relatively low fert PPMs and am always looking to make more small reductions where possible, and like I say, I do also run organic SIPs.
The potentially most widely useful microbe for Synth-SIPs here is Trichoderma Harazium which works a lot of magic in fully organic grows but is very helpful for 'soilles' synth-fert SIPs also by protecting seedlings from dampening off and protecting roots from harmful fungi like pythia by outcompeting it, and other hazardous fungi, thus it becomes a very useful rhizome microbe. To my knowledge, mineral salt-based ferts do not kill off microbes, they merely prevent the development of some species because the symbiotic benefit to the plant is not needed, so the plant will withhold treats they would otherwise barter for microbial benefit.
CFU's in the NPK products both are listed as quite high and I can tell by eye now when some the wee bugs have colonized a pot effectively. Trichoderma is the easiest with its ''cloud'' of tiny fibrous webbing. The FLOWER pack also contains 7 helpful Baccilis, 2 Paenobaccilus, 3 Pseudomonas, Streptomyces Lydicus, and another Trichoderma besides Hazarium, called Trich. Reesei. I've tried Great White before, which is a very similar combo that includes mycos as well, but this product is less expensive and performs very well - to my sense of things. It also has higher CFU's listed on the packs than GW.
To this, I add a 1/2gram/gallon of Green Leaf's Sweet Candy, some gardener molasses, leonardite-sourced humates, and kelp extract. Then it brews for 48 hours. Right before I pour and mix it all into the trashcans of peat/perlite I mix in some homemade fish hydrosolate (which doesn't smell) to keep everyone feeding in the bins - which are kept somewhere warm until use or mixed with further amendments.
Again, this peat/perlite is both an end-product used for stand-alone, synth-fertigated SIPs, and as one element of a super soil mix for organics-only growing.
Thank you to 420 for the space to occupy my mind, without which, at times, I’d be much worse off! Cheers to the mods, et al, you rock.
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