# Tools, Tips and Tricks

**URL:** http://forum.driveonwood.com/t/tools-tips-and-tricks/2624
**Category:** General Discussion
**Tags:** tips-tricks
**Created:** [July 18, 2016, 9:01pm UTC](http://forum.driveonwood.com/t/tools-tips-and-tricks/2624 "2016-07-18T21:01:13Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 1020

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![madflower69](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v2/letter/m/ebca7d/32.png) [@madflower69](http://forum.driveonwood.com/u/madflower69)
#### Post date: [July 20, 2023, 1:14pm UTC](http://forum.driveonwood.com/t/tools-tips-and-tricks/2624/1020 "2023-07-20T13:14:03Z")

</div>

> [@trikebuilder57](#):
>
> . Wife wanted a drum for manure tea( swamp water)

I like the handle. 🙂

Aerobic bacteria and microorganisms are typically better for plants and it smells better. Anaerobic bacteria are responsible for locking up nutrients and a number of plant diseases. She may want to aerate that before applying it to restore the aerobic bacteria with something like this:

> [@Working toward food self sufficiency](http://forum.driveonwood.com/t/working-toward-food-self-sufficiency/7226/106):
>
> Oh.. I think I found what I was looking for. He adds the fungus, and azospirillium (which is nitrogen fixing bacteria) and a bunch of other things. someone posted it was 345 dollars for the ingredients but this most likely makes several batches. But for liquid gold in the plant world this might be as close as it gets. I have to write out the ingredient list to see if there is a place to skimp or whether that is accurate. It doesn’t look like it replicates the mycorrhizal fungus, but the presoak…

You can substitute stuff in and out, and after he says something like that is the end of the Elaine Ingham of “soil food web” recipe, you can stop there. I think the rest is he was just throwing in stuff that was sent to him for free ie product placement. And he is incorrect, when he says it replicates the mycorrhizal fungi. It does not. But it does spread it out so it is applied evenly. Mycorrhizal fungi is great stuff because it attaches to the roots of most plants and gives them up to 20x more surface area, and trades nutrients and water for carbon with the plant. There are 1000s of species of it that have adopted to your area, which is why they encourage grabbing some from a forest or a compost pile with the white threads in it (the white threads are the fungi)

If you are growing grasses, there is a bacteria called azosprillium that fixes nitrogen similar to rhizobia bacteria for legumes.

Anyway, it gives her a rabbit hole to go down, and it isn’t that hard. And that will save her about 30 hours of trying to track down information. There are newer folks that explain the whole thing better but she has the right idea. Feed the microorganisms, because they feed the plant. You just want to encourage the right ones for a healthy soil. 🙂

---

_[View the full topic](http://forum.driveonwood.com/t/tools-tips-and-tricks/2624)._