I haven’t had any problems with fruit flies Sean. Actually for the winter I have my bins in a storage area right off the kitchen. No issues, not a hint of odor. I don’t feed much vegetable scraps anymore. Mostly a worm chow made of dry ingredients. Speeds up production but requires more careful monitoring. I blend up food wastes for fertilizer and mix some in with the peat moss I use for worm bedding.
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Freezing fruit scraps first can help with the fruit fly eggs from the store. Freezing also helps the scraps decompose faster. Make sure to bury scraps under some of the bedding and castings to keep the smell down to keep from attracting flies. Not adding too much at a time helps with the smell and moisture levels too.
I don’t make or use a lot of castings from my small set up but I like the idea of making something useful from trash. It doesn’t take long for the population to grow either.
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I like this guys video’s and his whole way of growing. We have all been conned into thinking that being a grower requires a large parcel of land and a bunch of equipment. He gets paid for pimping the BCS stuff and maybe for his operation if is useful but definitely not necessary. I’m kind of obsessed with trying to grow as much as possible in very small spaces because commercially grown foods are poor quality and in many ways tainted. Providing for yourself is the best option. Trusted growers at local farmers markets is the next best. A hour a day spent on food production instead of TV is really all it takes to maintain a decent sized grow space.
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I like this guy also.
Grow as much as possible in small spaces… thats the key. Its the mistake l made for a long time. I cultivated to much (by surface area) and then you dont get to invest enaugh atention per each plant, productivity drops. This year, will only keep about 1/3 of the surface as a garden, but high quality, irrigated and mulched.
The rest of what used to be a feald garden will be planted for pigs to graze. Since we cant free range pigs anymore l need to find a nother way to feed them cheaply.
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The glitch in the matrix. Just as l share my thods on quality vs quantity, l see this guy just uploaded a video about that exact topic.
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It isn’t really new. all he is doing is intercropping and relay cropping. Then using a living mulch in the walkways. I thought he was pretty light on information as a teaser to get you to buy his book.
This lady is from Michigan and does suburban gardening, and her information is about the same.
But i kind of like planting in the clover… I need to find the -first- video.
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Nope, nothing new Sean. I first got interested in these things from this MEN article over 40 years ago.
And this was developed from the ideas of the Austrian Rudolph Steiner 55 years before that.
and it has all been experimented with and tweaked by countless growers after that. Still amazed after all these years that I can stick an almost invisible parsley seed in some soil and end up with two foot of food. One tomato seed and 25 pounds of fruit. All miracles.
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If you can afford to, go with the All American Pressure Canner. If you take care of it it is truly a multi-generational piece of equipment.
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I got my interest tweaked with companion planting back in the mid-70s when my grandpa got the two definitive books of the time, which were carrots love tomatoes and Roses love garlic. Some of it was proven to be wrong in both books. But the idea of companion planting, and intercropping stuck.
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Apparently SDSU had similar results to the Michigan youtube lady with the living mulch system. They are doing a multi-year experiment with various clovers as the living mulch with peppers and broccoli. And they year one results, weren’t good. I guess we have to wait for the year 2-3 results to see what they found.
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FOOD SCIENCE 101.
There is so much information on this site that it can cause you to suffer a data coma. Still it is a good idea to understand what is essential nutrition for health and where to obtain it. I don’t think you need 200 sources for dietary zinc, eg, but if you read down to the point where she starts listing them click on the link for articles at the top of the page and then pick and choose what you need to know.
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The harder part is getting the right nutrients in a form your body can actually use, and some supplements may provide say iron or calcium, but they aren’t in a form your body can easily use.
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Time to get growing.
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Talking about organic versus synthetic fertilizers. Letting the boogeyman out of the closet. A mineral is a mineral is a mineral. It’s all about quantity. The main difference for me is self sufficiency. What can I provide for myself. Making your own fertilizer is a process of weights and measures. Of course you can put some leaves and greens in a pile and wait for nature to break it down. Hopefully you can add some manure to speed things up but it’s still not optimal growing nutrition. We will discuss how to improve that process but first lets debunk some myths and create a better understanding of hydroponics in a off-handed way.
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He wasn’t completely accurate nor were the commenters. A mineral is a mineral but some forms of the mineral are more easily uptaken by the plant or microbes that feed the plant. Similar to needing iron for a project and your wife comes home with some rust she found. You can convert the rust to a form of iron you need certainly, but not easily there is a whole other process it needs to go through.
In organics and in general you are trying to increase the microbial activity because the plants are fed by the micro-organisms They do the heavy lifting of getting the nutrients in the right form. So if you look at his chart about microbial activity in the soil, organics have a lot more microbial activity. Now even if you have microbial activity, it may not be -beneficial- microbial activity. It could be anaerobic bacteria, and those tend to lock up resources you intended to put on your plant. For instance, anaerobic bacteria uptake the nitrogen you applied and don’t release it. So none gets to the plant until they die, which happens naturally if there are aerobic bacteria to eat them. 
As far as nitrogen, the ammonia based fertilizers create essentially a salt with water, so you apply ammonia, and it essentially sucks up all the water and the plant dies from dehydration. That is why it was referred to as a ‘hot’ fertilizer.
Then you should have the natural fungus in the soil that grabs various nutrients from like rocks and feeds it to the plant, forms symbiotic relationships with the plants and helps store and control water. copper sulfate is a fungicide. it will kill or retard the fungal growth you want. Also putting on the correct amount of nutrients, i believe potassium, retards the symbiotic relationship with the fungus because the plant can get enough nutrients without help. If you want to jump into conspiracy theory, by killing the fungus, then you end up being more reliant on their chemical fertilizers.
Some of it isn’t all applicable to hydroponics. Organic fertilizers are available for hydroponics and have been for like 4 decades. Some chemical fertilizers aren’t vastly or any different then the organic ones. And a large number of ‘pure organic’ people tend to take it to further then needed to a different extreme.
What your plant needs is:
hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, chloride, iron, boron, manganese, zinc, copper, molybdenum and nickel.
Now boron may or may not be needed depending on the plant. Some plants are sensitive to boron, and it retards their growth. Schultz makes a ‘all in one’ fertilizer without boron.
As far as the groundwater, too much nitrogen will cause algae blooms, but it is also converted to nitrites that will leach into the ground water and it does cause cancer. But I will concur with the guy that it isn’t all from agriculture. Another source of nitrogen comes from overapplication of fertilizer to lawns, and another would be from sewage sources like water treatment facilities or septic systems especially during a flood period. And some of it is even more natural like grass clipplings. I basically stopped the algae blooms in the pond from an unfertilized lawn, by alternately cutting the lawn in strips so the water was filtered by the longer grass.
And just because something is “natural” or “organic” doesn’t necessarily mean it is good for you or your plants either. Most modern medicines, and poisons come from plants, fungus, and microrobes that have taken on chemical warfare and ‘evolved’ over the years in co-evolution to fight off various attackers or attack.
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No argument Sean. I disagree with many things this guy says in his videos but the point about this particular one was about gardening fertilizers like MiracleGro and creating a balanced product. I used miracleGrow for many years without problems and always cover cropped my beds and amended them with new compost, and other “natural” amendments before replanting. Now I create my own amended composts and rely heavily on worm castings because I produce these fertilizers myself and am not relying on supply chains. However, right now I am concerned that the people who are not gardeners may well have to start providing as much of their own food as possible and they will need product like store bought fertilizers and they need to get them and stockpile them now. As far as hydroponics goes, I am only a novice and rely heavily on people like the MHPgardener for their experiences and that guy in particular, after much experimentation, has never found a nutritional solution from purely “organic” sources that performs close to things like Masterblend. I use Masterblend and it works for me.
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I get a bit concerned with the misinformation or even in this case partial information. I always find it ironic. someone is getting 200k views, trying to correct people and not having the knowledge to do it. Yet made good money doing it. I bet some people take his word as gospel and don’t even realize he isn’t quite right
It reminds me of the iq test video i watched and the guy goes through the whole thing shows graphs of how the iq test related to performance in things like school and at the end, shows a graph where there is no correlation between the iq test and income. 
I can’t fix the gardening issue. I can only try to get people aware of better solutions. And it may include some fertilizers, if they didn’t work no one would buy them. What they do when shtf, i don’t know. I don’t think they are thinking that far ahead. But even if they aren’t, a good healthy soil is much easier to work with and more productive.
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