Fetid Swamp Water Questions | The Survival Gardener this is what my wife uses.
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I use it too, mostly grass clippings.
Hold your breath while this stuff is digesting it is FOUL. After a while it stops stinking.
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First year I tried it. I have a 25 gallon garbage can that I half filled mostly with shredded mullein leaves just because we are over run with them. Then 2 gallons of urine. Sitting in the sun a week and yes it will stand you back gasping for clean air. Finally got some sea salt to add to it as per the JADAM system. I’ve been just pulling a few gallons at a time out of it to water the tomatoes. I have not diluted it further because I just replace what I use with fresh water and then add a little more urine. I’m anxious to see the results later.
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Not sure about nutritional value but composrt tea has the benefit of not smelling like death. We onve tryed chickhen dung. With the lid on the barrel. Wery, wery bad idea
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Should be the same nutrition, but none of the crappy anaerobic bacteria.
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Freeze drying Batch of morels and fiddle heads we picked today.
Cooked up some of the mushrooms and fiddle heads from last batch of freeze drying of mushrooms and fiddle heads we picked and they are like fresh, way better than frozen.
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Bio-digesters will use inflated air bladders across the input hatch as a valve. That might be a nice way to keep the smell down while adding green “material” to a swamp water setup. The output could be plumbed into a dripper system so the smell is mostly contained.
I’m genuinely curious what makes it smell so badly to human noses. I guess anaerobic breakdown was something to be avoided in our primal period. A quick read suggests sulfur compounds. Maybe biochar gets a second job as an odor absorber. Charcoal is pretty good at adsorbing hydrogen sulphide gas.
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Not an issue for me Anthony. My garden is a long way from the house. Actually it mostly smells like old urine when I lift the lid. Maybe it will keep some deer away. People would think that decaying food scraps would smell as well but I keep my worm bins in a little room right off the kitchen and there is no noticeable odor.
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Not just in a primal period (?). Things that break down organic matter where there is no air are dangerous, because inside you is organic matter where there is no air. 
no, wait, 
.
Rust (iron oxide) is really nice for absorbing H2S. You get iron sulphide. You can then flow air through the filter with the suphide and convert back to rust and sulphur. Repeat until you have a lot of suphur, which you can “harvest.” So save those rusty nails, but don’t step on them.
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Wait. Hydrogen sulfide reacts with iron oxide, to create iron sulfide. then oxygen reacts with iron sulfide to create iron oxide and sulfur dioxide, then react the sulfur dioxide with water and you get sulfuric acid. That is kind of interesting. I have to go check the reactions. kind of a nice shtf note though.
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You might be interested in the soil food web webinars.
They lean a bit heavy towards permaculture and sometimes to me they are seemingly light on information, trying to get you to sign up for their course. However, it is usually a good introduction and overview. I do tend to jump in a lot deeper and supplement with other material. They have 4 of them upcoming.
This link lists them all and gives a description.
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Looks interesting. For years I followed Geoff Lawton’s permaculture website. Lots of good ideas (like no-till ). What I find, now that we have the space, is a slight shortage of tools and dollars, and a big shortage of time and strength. My online time is spotty, so I tend to rely and DOW for energy and folks like you to point out useful stuff, and what might be coming down the road towards us.
Thanks!
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I have watch some of her youtube videos. All good information but generally longer than my attention span.
I have pretty much shifted over to the JADAM methods. They make more sense to me than other things I"ve experimented with. I watched the whole series of lectures. Probably 12 hours worth in mostly half hour videos. I could have saved myself a lot of time. I finally bought the book and it has even more information in an easier to understand format. Books. Not an obsolete technology. Way easier for me to absorb the information than listening to a lecture.
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Yeah. Gardening and Growing books. A whole shelfs worth of three generations collection. The Backwoods Home once Full-Shebang collection off to the right.
Some of those upper ow books were published originally before 1900.
Books. Books will endure long past anything electronic.
Books: candle light techknowlegy.
S.U.
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She is like the first microbiologist that put the soil biology and the plant health together. However, her techniques are more like permaculture, and kind of fly in the face of farming techniques, and weren’t necessarily scalable. So she kind of got blown off.
There are some newer groups with newer microbiologists that have a more uptodate methodology.
I am actually curious how they were able to get the techniques to scale to the 3000 acres in Montana. Her ‘recipe’ for the bacteria brew is somewhere in this thread. but it has like seaweed and fish emulsion in it, and I can’t imagine wanting to spend that much money for 3000 acres.
Edit. I found the guy
https://grassvalleyfarmsmt.com/about-us/
It looks like they are just using a ‘compost extractor’. They take a bucket of compost and wash it with aerated water and filter out the large particles before applying it. They actually drop some ‘biochar’ in the mix. That is dirt cheap. This is the diy version of that system.
This is the guys video
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This is a longshot asking here, but I contacted soilworks LLC, in south dakota and they only sell this stuff in 1000lb totes full of compost, and it is live bacteria, and will not sell in a smaller quantity. But look at this list of bacteria. What are the chances they are just adding a concentrate made by someone else to their compost pile? And if so has anyone seen a product like this?
The only hits I pulled up for bio5 were from Arizona State, which they may have developed it, and possibly sell it, and both south dakota and Arizona share low precipitation.
Edit1: https://ag.teraganix.com/ apparently has microbes for sale with 83 different microbes and someone from soilfoodweb who is giving the webinar on the guy with 1000 acres in montana, who got his stuff from soilworks has a review of the compost product.
Edit2: First email from Teragenix, paraphrased "we can’t disclose our proprietary microbe list, but include Lactobacillus’ response “Is this a joke? I can buy lactobacillus along with 14 other bacillus strains at walmart as a probiotic. Have someone knowledgeable email me” response “what is your phone number?” These people are bad.
I found https://holganixagriculture.com/ which has 800 species of micro-organisms and I believe it includes nematodes thus requires refrigeration. And it is cheap, almost too cheap. I emailed them.
I also found Wind River Microbes Inc SoilCare with 74 microbes. but they have a PO box, which to me is indicative of a rebranding.
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New no-till video discussing the pros and cons of no-till. This guy is a market gardener getting tremendous yields out of I believe slightly less than an acre. I don’t know if land is measured in acres in Europe but here it’s 206 foot square. Not sure how you would expand a no-till system into many acres.
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it is measured in hectares in Europe with is 10000 meters squared. Or roughly 2.47 acres. An acre is 43,650sqft.
As far as expanding it to many acres, you just plant right into the residue, you can strip till ie 2-3 row width enough for the seed, or you can do shallow <2-3" of tillage. You can plant a cover crop like winter rye, and roller crimp it to help suppress weeds if you want to be organic. or even mow it. Otherwise burn it down with like roundup.
He actually lightly brushed on most of it during his presentation. The only thing he really missed was cover cropping and using those to break up the soil and give the microbes more food, but I think he might have another video on it.
If you want a good market garden channel that gives a TON of information. These guys cover a LOT of information and numerous techniques as well as different philosophies. Not all which I personally agree with, or implement. It is always good to compare and what you implement is going to be your own system, based on your limitations (time,resources, equipment, budget, etc) and knowledge. Somtimes they have things you haven’t thought of. or go more deeply on how to implement something you have seen at a larger scale.
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