Are There Any Possible Substitutes for Black Strap Molasses As a Bacterial Food? I Was Wondering Specifically About Sorghum Molasses
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Lesson 6 Live Q&A Webinar From Leticia Oberley: Are there any possible substitutes for black strap molasses as a bacterial food? I was wondering specifically about sorghum molasses. Well, what we’re finding out is when you look at your soil, you’ll see that you already have lots of bacteria and hopefully lots of different species of bacteria as well and so adding the black strap molasses or any kind of bacterial food is a little bit unnecessary. So, if you put too much of a bacterial food into the tea then it’s really hard to keep whole tea aerobic through the whole entire brewing process. So we are really trying to encourage people to not be putting in any kind of bacterial food into the system. Doesn’t seem to be really necessary but let’s say you do have that unusual situation where there aren’t enough bacteria in your soil, you want to increase diversity a little bit. Then sorghum molasses would work as well. You just want to try to pick something that has a wide diversity of different kinds of sugars. And that’s why the non-sulfured black strap molasses is so good because it’s got a 150 different kinds of sugars in it. I’d want to know the same kind of information about your sorghum molasses. How many different kinds of sugars? And that should be easily found out. If you go to the website of the company making the sorghum molasses, how many different kinds of sugars, and it would be pretty good. Beware of the fact that they typically put a preservative into molasses. They put sulfur compound which is a fungicide. Almost all of our fungicides are sulfur based and so having that sulfured molasses means it’s got that preservative in it and that of course is going to kill your organism. So, try to get the food quality, human food quality molasses if you feel like you need to use a sugar. Another alternative is a fish emulsion. In a fish emulsion they have taken a fish hydrolysates and cooked it and the heat causes the oils to separate on the top, all the proteins in the meat and everything else that sit on the bottom in a container start to break down because of the heat, they get to be simpler and simpler compounds, so really good for growing bacteria. Not so good if you’re trying to grow fungi. And oils are usually removed and so fish emulsion tends to have very little oil in it and then for very few fungal foods. So that would be another possibility. Any kind of sugary material - fruit juices work well, just remember the pulp is good for growing fungi. The actual juice part, where all the sugars are - that’s good for growing bacteria. So which kind of juice? Well you’d have to test them and find out which one grows the kind of bacteria that you want. From Damian: How do different ratios of black strap molasses, fish hydrolysate and seaweed affect compost tea? Yeah, when you put more bacterial food in, so, more black strap molasses, you’re going to put food in, you are putting food in for more bacteria and so you’re going to grow more bacteria. If you put more fish hydrolysate in then you’re going to grow more fungi. Seaweed - depends exactly what quality seaweed you have but it tends to grow more fungi than bacteria. So the more seaweed, the more fungi you’re going to end up with, more nutrients go into that tea. So what are you trying to do with your tea or even your extract? If you’re putting these things in at the last minute to put out foods to feed your compost extract organisms once they arrive in the soil, so, you can do that too to give some resuscitation, some foods for these organisms when they go into soil. So how do different ratios? Think about your bacterial food, your fungal foods, you mineral nutrients, fungal foods. How do they affect your compost tea, it’s going to make it more or less fungal or bacterial. 1 | Lesson 6 Live Q&A Webinar From Petra: When buying fulvic or humic liquid, could I just run a quick pH test to see if the material is too alkaline or too acidic to be useful instead of having to brew a tea for 24 hrs before I know if it is good? A pH test might not tell me if it grows fungi well but at least it would tell me if I will kill my soil life. Yeah, you could stick a little bit of litmus or if you got electrodes to show you pH or you buy one of those little handheld meters where you put a drop on and it tells you the pH. Anyone of those would tell you if you had neutralized the preservative that they put into the fulvic or the humic acid and so you would know whether that was actually truly taken care of before you put the compost in. And so typically in a tea we’re putting these food resources into the water first so you’d have a chance for the water to neutralize the phosphoric acid or the potassium hydroxide or whatever preservative they have put into that material. Make sure it gets diluted out so it shouldn’t kill your microorganisms. So you put your compost in last after you’ve got everything else going in there. And so a pH paper or quick pH test of some kind would let you know if the preservative has been neutralized. It’s not going to tell you about the quality of the food or the quality of microbial life you’re going to see. You want to let it brew and then at the end of the brewing time or maybe halfway through the brewing time or a couple of hours into the brewing time, you could pull a drop out of your tea and take a look at whether you’re seeing that increase in the numbers of fungi or the lengths of fungi or the numbers of the bacteria. And that would tell you way earlier than 24 hours whether things are going right or not in the brew. From Damian: How does seaweed affect a compost tea - what are the benefits and what are the problems? It’s a – usually, it’s a fungal food. It’s typically going to enhance fungal growth, it puts some nutrients into the compost tea so you may be balancing, upping the nutrient content of the compost tea. Of course you’re going to be extracting soluble nutrients out of the compost so you’re putting those into your compost tea. But let’s say you want little bit more nutrients going out there for your plants, especially if we are doing hydroponics or you’re doing aquaponics. Sometimes we need a little bit extra of that seaweed, the kelp, to give enough nutrients so our hydroponic plants are getting the nutrition that they need and of course that’s got to pass the normal nutrient cycling system providing nutrients in a plant available form. The problems are if you put in too much or if the seaweed actually has a salt problem. A lot of these seaweeds can have very high electrical conductivity, and so you need to be aware of that and maybe read the label and see what the electrical conductivity and please be aware that it needs to be in micro so the little µS sign, microsiemens per centimeter squared. And if what it’s reading, giving you on the label is deciesimons or centisiemons or dS or a cS per centimeter squared, don’t touch it, it’s way too salty. So you want something that has electrical conductivity in the microsiemens range. So those are the problems that come to mind right away. From Collin Attard: Question about seaweed (Kelp) as a fungal food in the compost and compost tea. 1. Is any old weed coming out of the sea going to be suitable replacement to kelp? Our beaches have truck loads of seaweed washed up on them every year. It is not the same as kelp. It is paper thin and usually 1 to 2 inches long, about 1/2 inch wide and dark brown in colour until it dries. You have to look at the nutritional content of that material and the reason kelp has gained the reputation is that cold water kelp contains more nutrients in it than any other kind of seaweed or any other kind of kelp. Southern or hot water or warm water kelp doesn’t contain as much nutrients. So in terms of adding nutrients into the compost tea, sometimes if you’re going into a soil that’s got related nutrient value, you don’t need to worry about it. And especially as I’ve come to understand that all soils have all of the nutrients in it that your plant requires the reasons our plants don’t grow in a lot of our agricultural fields because we’ve destroyed the life. And so there’s no way to get the nutrients out of your mineral material and into a plant available form until you get the biology back into the system. So, right at first, the kelp, the seaweed might be kind of 2 | Lesson 6 Live Q&A Webinar hedging your bet a little bit.