Contemplating soil fertility and plant breeding.

So the hail marry of planting time has come, and though we are in the midst of a massive rainstorm which has dropped nearly six inches of much needed rain, quite steadily, since late Friday night and I got many of the crops in the ground prior to the sky opening up, I know that come tommorow I will be wading through the mud with my reliable pair of muck boots planting more, spreading compost around others, and generally making the rounds required of a life lived on a small sustainable farm. It's overwhelming sometimes.

I had considered using todays rain day as an opporotunity to blog about a lot of "possibilities" for our farm in the coming years or even posting some more of my politically motivated posts but blogging about what I could do or what I am considering doing or what is going on on the farm at the moment is somewhat useless without pictures to accompany the excersize and since it's raining and muddy and the birds and plants don't look at their best covered with mud and seedlings in and of themselves aren't particularly the best expressions of what a plant is capable of doing and since facebook has given me the opporotunity to do a bit of political rambling on the fly I decided I'd just wait until the season progresses a wee bit to get into the depths of all of those crosses or describing all the cool things I'm growing this year, or how I am growing.

Instead I was just thinking earlier today about observations I have made this planting season regarding soil fertility. Five years ago I started raising red worms and adding massive amounts of worm castings and organic matter to the soil along with foliar feeding and soil feeding via compost tea as well as rotatins legumes into and out of fields, on their own and along with various other crops (most often corn in a three sisters combination).

This year the soil is looking better than ever and a soil test revealed that everything is remarkably balanced, I am noticing improved tilth the farm over and improved germination (both due to fertility/drainage as well as seed selection) and I've also noticed a lot of colinization of plant roots by beneficial fungi as well as fungi blooms (mushrooms) through the fields. The earthworm population has increased amazingly and now that we have a relatively large flock of turkeys and guineas ranging there is a constant cycle of fertility and a cyclical movement of feeding of plant to animal to manure to worm to soil to plant. It is a beautiful thing to see that my ideas and my research are slowly paying off. In coming years we will continue to add compost residues to our soil and not much else other than cover crops and a bit of dolomitic (powdered) limestone to the soil or sulpher where needed and depending on crops.

This year as opposed to spreading massive amounts of compost accross the fields we chose instead to use only smaller amounts, but more concentrated on/around the plants themselves, potting up all of our seedlings in a mixture (La Bonne Terre) of garden soil, worm castings, thermophilic compost, and sand. The mixture upon potting up containd a high amount of unfinished bits and pieces and was a bit rough but full of composting worms, upon planting out I made the observation that the La Bonne Terre had broken down quite nicely into a thick rich humous with lots and lots of fungal colonization around the plant roots. In the garden this is very helpful but now that we are planting an orchard as we go along we are also improving bits of ground which are not used for annual cultivation. We have been working in this mixtures and variations of it around our perrinial crops as of late as well and also rabbit manure and ocassionally a bit of turkey manure. The growth and the health of our plants is outstanding.

A lot of folks are having issues with bagworms on their trees this year, we have had no problem thus far, likely due to the free ranging nature of our turkeys and guineas, I can only imagine how much fertility has been provided our farm from these sources, fertility provided particularly to trees which would normally have been harmed by the very pressence of these worms but now which benefit from them. Of course there is also the added benefit of a cut in the feed bill for feeding the birds from this and the gain in human food that it creates as well as profit for the farm in the way of eggs for eating and hatching, new birds for selling, and or meet for family or for sale from the farm.

I've been thinking a lot about a few experiments I'm keen to work on in the coming years regarding some of the perrinial crops we are working with.

We of course now have on hand two seperate accessions of white blackberries which we plan on making crosses between and selecting from to introduce even more diversity into these snowberries in the coming years, including thornless varieties.

I've also been trying to search out and find the old Carolina White/White Carolina/Pineberry strawberry. One of the earliest known true garden strawberries, white fruited and larger than an alpine on everbearing plants. Recently this variety was re-introduced into supermarkets in Europe as the pineberry, but the companies that reintroduced it are not being very honest in their marketing of this berry. I know of one commercial source in the US, The Strawberry Store, but everytime I check on availability they are sold out. The pineberry was once a favored variety of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello and is spoken of highly in both his correspondence with other agriculturalists as well as in his garden book. It is the offspring of the very earliest crosses in a French Garden between Fragaria Virginia (wild alpine) and Fragaria Chiloensis (chiloneese/sand strawberry).

We have been tracking down some of the better flavored, more locally adapted, more productive, and larger type everbearing red strawberries to make some controlled as well as potentially uncontrolled crosses back and forth to our collection of about 7 white fruited alpine varieties. Selecting back for white fruited varieties that are everbearing, of amazing flavor, productive, day neutral, and of good size.

This week we will be recieving a shipment of Rio Grande and Eastern Wild turkeys as well for future selection towards our "Kiva" turkey which we spoke of in a previous blog post here. The kind of nice thing about this as well though is that we personally witnessed in the past two days a wild Eastern tom mounting a bronze hen of ours and there is at current count a flock of about 8 wild Eastern toms roaming the Southern flowing valley in our woodlot, meaning the possibility of obtaining some potential wild to domestic crosses this year is relatively high.

Anyhow, I feel better now that I've got a bit of phillosophy and some of my ideas down in digital format, hope you enjoy my ramblings, you'll just have to deal with the grammer and the spelling mistakes today as it is a lazy day and I don't want to spend to much time overthinking the basic ideas that are floating around in my head at the moment as there are so many things going on this time of year which must be done and or taken care of.

"La Bonne Terre" part 2!

Ok, so there are a few concepts here I wanted to expand upon. I will add some photos of my soil block set up as well as seedlings started in them in the coming days.


I was working yesterday and today with some soil of a slightly heavier type clay then what I have used in the past and I should point out that the ratio of sifted compost/worm castings and sand to soil along with lime will very depending on the type of soil you will be using as your base, so everyone will be a bit different.

For example, the soil I sterilized on Friday and used yesterday and today was quite heavy, a lot of organic matter, but quite a bit of clay base as well, in that case I used about 3:1 ration of castings to soil and quite a bit more sand as well, the sand is probably not necesary in the blocks but I use it basically as a way to amend the soil in the fields and loosen it some which it could certainly use.

I also failed to mention that when it is available I also make use of activated charcoal (bio-char/terra pretta concept) in the potting/blocking mix. I charge it using urine and break it into nearly dust sized particles and use it as about 3-5% of the base. As you all well know from my past research into terra pretta and your subsequent research this could most certainly have a great effect on the growth of the plant and longevity of the base NPK levels of the blocks which don't tend to need further fertilization until planting out (at which time I water seedlings in with worm casting tea)


Another concept I wanted to bring tot he forefront is the La Bonne Terre corn and high nitrogen crops fertilizer that I make use of.

I have access to literally a few hundred lbs of cofee grounds sans filters every year and thus it makes a great nitrogen base for corn and other high nitrogen crops. The concept is the same as before mostly, the cofee grounds become the base to which is added worm castings, lime, sand (for bulking and ease of spread) and sifted thermophilic poultry compost and wood ash for P. I should point out that for those with access to cofee grounds that used cofee grounds are almost always the exact same Nitrogen as composted chicken litter at 2.9-3.5 or so, if you keep them moist and don't let them dry down (1.5-2.0 for dry matter) they will actually be higher nitrogen than composted poultry litter and are usually free to the clever taker eager enough to aske a cofee house proprieter if they can have them! Of course to this I also add diatomacious earth. All of these fertilizers are either placed in the bottom of the planting hole for seedlings or seeds and covered with a quarter to half inch of soil (promoting root growth) or in the case of corn they are layed in the trench at a depth of 1-2 inches thick and covered with a quarter to half inch of soil and the seed is layed down on top of this and then covered. This keeps the tender seedlings from being burned by nitrogen in the high nitrogen version but also precludes insects from being attracted to rich organic layers atop the soil in spring to lay seed eating larvee. Oh, I should mention, sometimes I add bat guano too! I guess it's all about the baseline information and this info will give you an idea of where to go! Always soil test first, this will give you the baseline to make an informed decision in regards to your options. I will say, the more nitrogen you use, the more chance you are going to need woodash and calcium carbonate (lime).

Stay tuned, lots to come in the next few weeks, rabbit hutches, hatching turkeys, raising guinea keets, planting the raised bed greenhouse and so much more!

Humanure/Solar Shower Project And Composting Chicken Litter and Bread.

First up, some pictures from my birthday (Feb. 22) adding 600 loaves of out of date organic bread to the existing chicken litter compost pile. The temp outside was in the 30's but the compost was hitting 140 F!









Second, the new on site, "outside" composting toilet facilities/Solar Shower room complete with water catchment and "dug in" active and passive bins for composting (to catch and prevent leachate from entering groundwater




Just a quick update of on farm projects.

"The Wyrm": Modifications and aggressively harvesting worm castings

I've had to go back to the drawing board on "the wyrm" project due to some circumstances. In particular with regards to catching the water using plastic lined bins with wells. The issue didn't decide to make itself apparent while I was running the wood stove, presumably because the water was evaporating quickly due to the heat and I was watering on a relatively common basis. If your wondering what the issue that I am having is, it was a massive die off of worms. There are many reasons for this die off including an accumulation of stagnant water in the bottom of the bins coupled with a low oxygen environment, an acid build up due to using some composted chicken manure in an experiment and just overall a build up of issue upon issue of mistakes, including having to cut the power to the greenhouse and subsequently the heat during the coldest part of the year and only a day after watering, due to an outrageously high electric bill that we still haven't figured out (it was shocking to see the number on the bill to say the least and the electric company won't admit it was a mistake even though they admited there was a problem with the meter that they replaced, in other words the worms got cold and migrated deeper into the bin where the stagnant, anearobic, and acidic environment of the lower bin quickly overwhelmed the population.

Don't get me wrong, my friend Paul (my co-conspirator) has a great idea when it comes to reusing the water from the worm bins and it would have worked well for myself too if I weren't already in the habbit of watering my worm bins as though they had drainage and in a routine from my four previous years of vermicomposting here on the farm, when I find a system that works and works well I just have to learn to stick to it. The good news is that Paul now has access to the last four wooden bins needed to complete the infrastructure of "the wyrm" project. His help and friendship has been greatly appreciated!

Needless to say the last couple of days have been busy, I am slowly getting the first six bins emptied back out, harvesting the available worm castings, dumping the rest of the compost into a new pile to dry out and be used for field ready compost, and cursing.....a lot.

When I make a mistake I do a terrific job. Fortunately the remedy is pretty straightforward. Once the bins are emptied out I'll drill some drainage holes in the bin and fill the bins 1/4 full of new cow manure, something I should have done in the first place but didn't since I already had a population of worms living in an old pile of compost and used it to fill the worm bins near the top and topped the bins off with manure.....or as I call it now, mistake number 1.

I will then be placing an order with Tripple G Worm Ranch (a great couple and good friends) for an additional 10 lbs of worms. I will divide the 10 lbs between the first six new bins and re-establish a worm population relatively quickly (I hope) The worms will only be fed what they can consume in a two week period and over the next 365 days I will slowly build each bin and population and start opening up new bins, this time next year with any luck we will have an enormous population of worms and a large harvest of castings. From now until then we should recieve another three loads of cow manure from the neighboring farm. Though this did put an additional dent in the soil fertility plan for this season it can be made up for by using the abundant source of thermophillic compost that we have on the farm at the moment.


Which brings me to the next part of the two most stressful days of winter so far.....harvesting what was in the bins and sifting compost.

Since the worm population in the bins was dismal and some of the bins were made up of old compost anyhow and I have to empty the bins of their compost to make the necessary adjustments to my set up I decided to harvest off what I could for for sifted castings for use in seed starting soil blocks this season, a job made all the more difficult due to the weight of the wet material and it's physical properties when run through the Homegrown Worm Harvester. I run each wheelbarrow of material through the harvester twice and the leftover material that has been digested then gets limed and put into a pile for use in the fields this comming spring, at the same time I am also sifting through the conventional compost piles using the harvester to glean usable potting material from those sources. Needless to say, this process and rebuilding will take a bit, a week or two anyhow, so from time to time updates may be slow.

At some point I also need to start cleaning out the chicken coop and composting that material and starting on the Humanure project, but that's a whole other blog right there!

That is one big pile of shit!

By:Alan Reed Bishop
Bishop's Homegrown/Homegrown Goodness/Hip-Gnosis Seed Development





Ok, fair enough, to some the title might have been inappropriate, but since I spend so much time making sure to cultivate the freedom of my mind in a completely unhindered way, anyone who might be offended would just have to forgive me, besides, it's just a quote from one of the greatest movies/books of all time, Jurassic Park (have I ever mentioned that this was one of our first warnings about the danger of GMO's, Cloning, and in general tampering with nature).



Anyhow, Paul brought the next two bins for "The Wyrm" on Saturday, I was very glad to get those in and set up and ready to go in the next month, but I was getting concerned about obtaining feed stocks for the worms that would also make terrific fertilizer, fortunately the neighbors arrived right behind Paul with a dump truck full of cow manure! Paul and I went over and helped finish cleaning out the barn for about an hour which resulted in a second dump truck load of manure. It's now laid out in a windrow where it will compost for about a month before being fed (in any large quantity) to the worm heard. I'll also be adding more green compostable material to the heap to help fortify the nutrients and keep it limed pretty well to balance the pH.




I was going to try to find that particular still from Jurassic Park and spoof the pic with myself but I couldn't find it anywhere, so instead Paul and I took some picks, I made the comment that we should make the pics look like they aren't conceited (my mind works in mysterious ways) so we grabbed a pitch fork and threw some manure around, as it turned out, those probably looked goofier than just standing there with a big grin on our face, I thought I'd post them anyhow. I sent Paul home with three big soy bean seed bags full of manure for his herd as well.

The Wym: Alchemical Response To Soil Fertility!

For those of you who have been following my work on the new Vermicomposting facility we are erecting here at Bishop's Homegrown I thought I would do a quick progress/explanation update complete with some new pictures.

I didn't post to much here or at the Homegrown Goodness Message Board last week because I was pretty busy getting everything put together in "The Wrym" by retrofitting the greenhouse with a tarp, the boxes with their appropriate equipment, and moving the old equipment and worms from their previous building. Now I'm getting closer to caught up and thought it would be good to share what has been accomplished thus far.



The boxes were first and foremost on the list of things to be done as they are the container which will hold most of the life force and fertility of the farm and The Wyrm itself. The boxes have been lined with plastic and each box leans slightly to one corner where there is a well made of perimeter drain pipe from which we can extract the "juice" from the bins using a plastic container with holes drilled in the bottom and a wire handle along with a long "plunger", the liquid fertilizer is then stored in five gallon buckets with air tight lids for use later or for further fortification.





I came across this method via my friend and co-conspirator in the project Paul Shellenberger who uses a similar method in his worm bins. I picked up on it for several reasons, one of which of course is the recirculation or re-use of water resources but a second was due to our agenda of building "The Wyrm" in a way that could take advantage of as many "Eco-Logical" fertility solutions as we could and since it seemed a waste to let this fortified water go to waste instead of putting it to use as a liquid fertilizer the logical solution was to find a way to harvest it. As I was telling Paul, this method of vermiculture actually has a lot in common with Japanese Bokashi composting. Several uses for the liquid immediately come to mind, two of which that incorporate further soil fertility Alchemy. The fist and most obvious is to use it in conjunction with green composting as a microbial inoculate and since the green compost is later used to feed worms, everything feeds back into the system with little to no loss and tons of gain in the form of soil fertility. The second use of course is fairly obvious; as either a pure or diluted liquid fertilizer, the solution would probably benefit from being filtered through a bucket (with some small holes in it for drainage) of dolomite lime to bring the pH further into balance. Third is the method that I am most interested in however as it once again combines another method of creating soil fertility with the Thermophilic/Vermiculture/Bokashi composting mentioned above. This method centers around a topic I've recently been throwing around here on this blog with much excitement; the much lauded Terra Preta/Bio-Char. The basic premise being to soak the Char that we make in the stoves (which heat The Wyrm house with wood that has been downed by storms on our property, completely self sustainable) in this nutrient solution for a period of time before adding the char material to the ground. Here is the much lauded nutrient solution (one of them anyhow) that I have been discussing in my theoretical approach to creating Terra Pretta! See, I told you this was Majik and Alchemy (turning one thing of little value into something of great value! Bokachar???)





Of course, such a method can only be truly sustainable if one is practicing water catchment, fortunately we foresaw the need for such a system and are hard at work on that at the moment with both myself and Paul on the hunt for plastic rain barrels. We have a lot of ideas about how to link the barrels together and create the water pressure that will be needed to move the water from the main bank of ten barrels that will be located at the back of The Wyrm (underneath a rain shed built from cedar posts and used pallets and gutters)to the inside of the worm where it can be stored in and extracted from a number of barrels with the lids cut out of them. This is a work in progress and much more will be posted on it later....






Now we turn to yet another element of The Wyrm.......Aquaculture, Aqua phonics, Vaquaculture, and yet again Bio-Char/Terra Pretta.

Thus far we have located two fish tanks. One a fifty gallon and another a ten, both of which will be put to good use, but a few more will be necessary to create the amount of amonia rich water we need to make this experiment worthwhile and a good demonstration of how this type of system can be used to create food fertility as well as protein via fish. For the time being the fish used will be gold fish, the system will run on a single pump pulling water out of the tank, dropping it through a bucket of Bio-Char and then circulating back into the tank. The bucket of char will basically function as a medium for beneficial bacterial growth to clean the water for the fish as well as turn the ammonia into nitrogen which will become bound to the char, the char will later be used to create soil fertility in our attempt to re-create Terra Preta.





We are still several bins, fish tanks, and barrels short of our needed amount to finish the project, but between Paul and I scrounging around it will only be a matter of time before we are where we need to be. Of course there is more to the floor plan of The Wyrm than what I have mentioned above, one can't forget the Thermophilic composting bins that we built this past summer or underplay their importance in this project and in their ability to create consumable material for the composting worms, we will have a small mixing and green composting area located out front of The Wyrm and inside of The Wyrm as well, along with a sorting area, and a wash basin made from a barrel and an old fish tank stand.


As you can tell already there are many facets to this project and we still have a lot of work to do. I anticipate that the project will be 100% finished up come March or so in regards to creating soil fertility, there are however additional ideas I would like to implement in coming years which I will detail later.

Of course the Homegrown Worm Harvester, which we detailed in an earlier post, made the trip too and has been improved by removing the inside piece of 1/4" mesh and replacing the nearly worn out piece of 1/8" of mesh hardware cloth with a new piece.





As Paul often says:

With "Worm" Regards,
Alan Reed Bishop

The Wyrm: Full Swing Project

As of Saturday my friend Paul will have delivered to me two further bins, between the five bins that he has delivered and the two I can make of cinder blocks I will have accumulated seven bins in total out of the fifteen that will be needed to finish the project. The tarp which will block the sun from the worm bins and keep the heat at a minimum has been delivered as well and is ready for installation into "The Wyrm" along with two 50 gallon barrels for water storage/catchment and another 50 gallon barrel that Paul picked up for us along with a couple of small fish tanks to be used for Aqua-Char experimentation, yes I just made up a word, Aqua-Char, remember it, it may be important.

Wednesday should mark the final day for Tomato production in the two greenhouses (we will have tomatoes through December, but production will be finished up by Wed.) and Thursday will be spent installing the tarp and moving the existing worms to the new bins along with the two lbs of worms I recently ordered from some new friends in Kentucky and installing the first two water catchment barrels, by this time I also plan to have acquired a further six barrels for water catchment. We have also purchased the plastic and the PVC to line the bins with for compost tea recirculation and to also be used as a compost inoculate and fertilizer ingredient in Bio-Char.

All in all, things are moving along nicely. The fish will come in a bit later, big updates on all of this to come soon.

-Alan Reed Bishop/Bishop's Homegrown/Hip-Gnosis Seed Development

A Short Bio-Char Video

Here is a short Bio-Char video I found on youtube. It is interesting but not particularly informative in any way that may be useful. Two things in the video that I should point out. 1. It really seems that people are having a hard time realizing that char in and of itself is not at all a fertilizer, that fertilizer has to be applied to the ground or to the char so that the char can absorb and slow release it. 2. One of the speakers mentions something about growing bio-mass in order to make bio-char, I completely disagree with this idea in every way possible, it is akin to growing and using land that could be used for food production for bio-fuels. Now if you want to use agricultural residue, that is fine, but growing bio-mass just for bio-char seems to defeat the purpose in my opinion. Sometimes folks have to realize that they can't have their cake and eat it too.

And yet another new idea concerning Terra Preta!

I was replying to a post over at Patricks Bifurcated Carrots blog about his response to my Terra Preta blogs and decided I should probably post part of the relevant text here for others with an interest in this ancient technology to see:

Basically my new idea is; why bring the worms to the charcoal when you can bring the charcoal to the worms. In other words I will create my charcoal, soak it in a nutrient solution and then apply it to my worm bins in the new and improved worm house I recently blogged about. In this way the charcoal (which will be buried in the 36″ deep bins) will be able to absorb nutrients from the worm castings/compost and will also be inoculated by the beneficial soil microbes. Of course this will be applied in a two layer hill system as described in my original blog and will still entice the local endemic earthworm populations as well as the local endemic soil micro-organisms to come check things out but then there will be less waiting as the majority of the nutrients will be laying in wait for use by plants, as the nutrients escape the worm castings they will be caught up by the charcoal (which is slowly releasing the nutrient it was soaked in as well as the worm casting/raw compost nutrients), In such a way I will have created a time released version of worm castings/compost and implemented a very simplified form of Terra Preta on my farm.

I genuinely think I might be onto something with this. After all the heating of "the Wyrm" house will produce the needed bi-product of charcoal to place in the bins making it a one stop process in the digestive section of the new worm house!

Expanding my ideas and horizons concerning Terra Preta

Above you can see one of the buckets of newly produced char as a byproduct of our heating the two greenhouses. I'll leave it up to your imagination to figure out which high nitrogen all natural ingredient will be used to amend the finished product.

As you can read in a post from a couple days back that I posted concerning Terra Preta and Bio-Char I have decided to write down and expand upon some of the ideas I have regarding this valuable ancient technology.
(repost from http://alanbishop.proboards60.com)
Don't be too quick to think scientists and organic proponets know exactly what the natives were doing yet, no one has been able to recreate Terra Preta and where I think they miss the point is by not trying to fully understand how it is done (minus anthropologist and archaeologist who are working to figure it out), the bio-char folks simply took the simplest part of the method, the slow release of fertilizer element, and tried to make that into a soil science of it's own, one that in my eyes is mostly doomed to fail for anything other than sequestering carbon. Not that I don't believe that Sequestering Carbon is an important reason to explore this technology because it most certainly is, but if it's done on a commercial scale and garnering commercial profit it will be out of the reach of most ordinary people in the first place.


Here are a few theories I have thrown out myself:

-Accidental development of initial Terra preta by early natives. Using manure and slow burning plant material to fire pots which busted, successive generations of natives continued this tradition in the same area (large pot making industry?) sometimes pots would bust, fires are always built on top of old burn sites using old charcoal as smoldering material, activating a new layer of charcoal. Over time beneficial agricultural practices were developed by accident and happenstance. This would explain the presence of so many pottery shards, activated charcoal, and the manure for OM.

-Layering strata to draw in microbes and worms. Probably still by happenstance originally, un-needed material is dumped in trash pits, natives notice microbial and worm activity expanding and enriching soil, they then start to layer materials in such a way that will entice microbial life and endemic earthworm populations to inhabit and work the strata. The pot shards serve as a tilth mechanism? What are the pots made of? If they are terra cotta or ceramic then they are porous, will hold water and nutrients just about as well as charcoal?

-Perhaps expanding upon this theory we take the next step. Explaining the presence of large unbroken pots in the Terra Preta, we can look at them as a form of formulated sacrifice. Sacrificing a pot for fertility but in this case maybe there is more to that! Could it be that my second theory is right but instead in this case, they were brewing soil inoculate (beneficial microbes? plant tea?) in pots which could then be sacrificed to the terra preta earth as fertility? They could be broken on or in the soil (working as a aerator with bits of tile and ceramic pot) or buried whole to leach out over time? Either way someone was putting a lot of work into these pots, some appear to be in relatively good condition, this to me could show evidence of sacrifice for fertility.


These are just some of the ideas that I have. Either way in the next few years I will be experimenting with these theories and watching the understanding of Terra Preta technology (notice I didn't say bio-char for a reason) expand and then becoming disseminated as it should be to the general public.

I definitely encourage all interested to experiment, particularly if the charcoal can be produced or obtained as a byproduct of other necessary activities (wood heating and so on).

Terra Preta and the new "Eco-Logical" reinterpritation.

Terra Preta and the new "Eco-Logical" reinterpritation.
-Alan Reed Bishop/Hip-Gnosis Seed Development/Homegrown Goodness

Amongst the most important historical, anthropological, archiological, and agriculture discoveries of recent times is the study of Terra Preta (or Dark Soil), a type of soil discovered in the Amazonian River Delta area.

This soil has been an enigma in and off itself for centuries and is only now becoming well known and understood (to an extent). The soil seems to be man made with agricultural purposes in mind making us rethink just exactly what natural and pristine conditions are (man made evolutionary ideas, agricultural alchemy) in a place as isolated and as previously thought (due to poor and thin soils) uninhabitable as the Amazoinian basin. There is no doubt that there were large and herto undiscovered, agriculturally advanced, civilizations just as described by Francisco de Orellana (could the golden city of El Dorado actually exist? After all if you don't have to worry about feeding yourself you do have time to work on other projects! Could these high population levels and advanced agriculture have led to advanced civilization altogether? Atlantis?).

Apparently no one has yet to exactly discover, unravel, or truly understand how Terra Preta was made. We do know that it is a stable soil, more stable than any soil on earth, and that it does self replicate (living inert material? Indeed!). 1,000 years after it was deposited it is still just as fertile and active as ever, only needing to lie fallow for six months at a time (if at all, one farmer described farming the same plot for 40 years without break!).

Anyhow, there seem to be modern organic growers that are experimenting with bio-char (a fancy term for charcoal) and I have spent a good deal of my day researching all of this and providing links, currently my brain is formulating ideas about how this could work on a small farm like Bishop's Homegrown, I already have a good idea on how to create the active carbon charcoal I would need to start the process. 2009 will see trials with these methods on the small scale, I presume success, in which case the trials will grow into the large scale and eventually a soil amending traditional practice.

P.S. I have done some thinking upon this method today and I think I have a decent grasp on just exactly what is going on in the Terra Preta soil, I will be updating shortly with more information. I also did some rough calculations on the amount of land in the Amazoinia Basin that was converted to Terra Preta, it is mind blowing to say the least, roughly 63,031.5 square miles at a six foot depth of land was developed in this way, with bio-intensive type methods the poupulation support could have been stagering to say the least!

What follows are some of what I found on the net, the first is from NatGeo and I highly reccomend watching the replay of the program for more info:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081119-lost-cities-amazon_2.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_earth

http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehma....%20strategy.pdf

http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/terra_preta/TerraPretahome.htm

http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/

Vermiculture and Vermicomposting - Creating an “Eco-Logically” balanced and self sufficient farm based on the concept of wasting nothing!

Vermiculture and Vermicomposting - Creating an “Eco-Logically” balanced and self sufficient farm based on the concept of wasting nothing!

Written, researched, and developed by: Alan Reed Bishop of Bishop’s Homegrown and Hip-Gnosis Seed Development

Here at Bishop’s Homegrown we are always working to improve our systems of production, fertilization, and “Eco-Logically” managed, Self Sustainable farming. After years of natural observation we obviously realize the importance of eco-systems working as an Echo Mechanism. This is the concept that one plant or animal grows with the aid of something created or produced by another plant or animal, thus Echoing repeatedly back into the eco systems. Never taking more than needed and always adding more back to the mix. Of particular interest to us is creating our own on farm fertilizers, pest controls, and disease controls instead of relying on ordering them in from cross country and adding more to our carbon footprint. As such we have been experimenting with raising Esinia Foetida for nearly three years in our composting systems.

Esinia foetida, more commonly known as the red wiggler worm, is a worm native to Europe with an incredibly voracious appetite which is matched only by its ability to procreate at an expeditious speed of one capsule (egg) a week, each containing anywhere from 2-22 baby worms each (1.21 jigga-watts Marty!) ! These worms will eat and expel nearly twice their weight in organic matter each and every day and will even re-process already spent material further enriching it. The waste product of these worms is known as a casting, and is one of the richest sources of natural compost/fertilizer and micro-biology in the known world. These castings have an excellent balance of the three essential nutrients N, P, K and a number of micro nutrients, as well the micro-organisms of the type that make up the very soil web of the earth which we till and add much to the soil texture and tilth, as well they are encapsulated in the mucous of the worms that expelled them making them a terrific slow release fertilizer that will add up in the soil over years of treatment. As well, the fertilizer is mild enough that it won’t burn even the most tender of seedlings, and with a little bit of research into feeding and watering methods, the contents of this natural fertilizer can be modified to that of a custom type for specific crops. There has been very little scientific work that I know of done in the area of soil sciences and the effects of micro-flora on the plants that inhabit land rich in them when compared to the research done with synthetics during the green revolution, what is known is that these micro-organisms help to break down and enrich organic matter, mineral and water uptake and keep diseases to a minimum while all the while constituting a terrific organic soil treatment that will blow any synthetic out of the water in both terms of production, safety for the consumer, and cost. Short of saying and describing our results I can say that I’ve seen some amazing turnabouts with the use of vermicompost.

One of the many things we have observed here on the farm is the halting of fungal disease dead in their tracks amongst tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and squash, including some of the most common fungal diseases associated with gardening in the Ohio Valley. We accomplished this with nothing more than a foliar spray of vermicompost tea and have seen, only in the short two years I’ve been working with the worms, an amazing drop in the occurrence of disease in the fields treated with these castings and teas and a large drop in the occurrence of mineral deficiencies in our crops. I have also seen improved seedling vigor and growth as well as improved fruit set in many plants.

As mentioned above we put to use vermicompost “tea” quite often in our operation. Particularly within the greenhouse with respect to both seedlings as well as full grown tomatoes which we grow throughout the winter and spring in our two largest greenhouses.


The red worm is fairly easy to “cultivate” in a bin system, requiring very little care at all short of bedding, a bit of lime to correct PH inconsistencies and plenty of food. Our systems are the most basic design available and consist of nothing more than rubber made storage totes with some drainage holes drilled into the bottom. We us spent sphagnum moss from the winter tomato growing for bedding and feed our worms with a mix of kitchen scraps (no meat or dairy, though egg shells are fine and reccomended), rotting produce, and the occasional laying mash to increase size and productivity as well as upping the nitrogen content of the end product. The bins are filled with anywhere between six and twelve inches of bedding and we feed about once every two weeks, never feeding until the old material is finished off. Moisture is kept to that of the consistency of a wrung out sponge, and we usually water, feed, and throw a couple of hand full of lime into the bins at the same time (Ag-lime, or powdered lime, never palletized or hydrated which will burn the worms). We prefer to cover the food with bedding to deter pests such as red mites and rodents which can be a real problem in worm bins. We keep our bins aerated or turned every couple of weeks prior to feeding to keep them from becoming anaerobic and allowing the bedding to become to acidic, a task accomplished with an old potato fork, this also allows us to keep an eye on material that the worms are finishing and to take note of when we will need to harvest.


We currently maintain twenty five 30 gallon bins of red worms and harvest castings once a month by simply scraping the top inch of material off of the beds. When we get behind due to the workload here on the farm we have come up with a bulk harvesting solution by creating our own worm harvester made simply of a large trash can cut in two with a piece of 1/8” hardware cloth connected in between the two sides. The barrel is hung at a 40 degree angle on a frame with a piece of pipe work through the middle so that it can rotate, in this way the finished material falls through the holes while the worms and unfinished materials come out of the other end ready to go back into the bins.

Every 6 months we end up with about 60 five gallon buckets of finely sifted vermicompost which will find its way to our seedlings or fields or will become compost tea.


Making Tea:

To make our compost tea we simply take a couple of hand full of vermicompost and wrap it in some cheesecloth which we then tie shut and attach to a string which we suspend into a five gallon bucket of water along with a fish tank aerator. Forty-eight hours later the tea should be “brewed” enough for use as a foliar spray or a root soak and is never burning to even the youngest of plants.

We have used this tea extensively for foliar spraying of seedlings, full grown tomatoes in the greenhouse and also amongst our field crops with almost an immediate reaction amongst the crops within about twenty four hours. We also obtain terrific results amongst the greenhouse tomatoes with a good root soaking of this solution.


Use as a granular:

We often also use the compost as a soil amendment for potted plants as well as seedlings and also as a top or side dressing for larger crops. Since the castings are contained within a mucous membrane it makes them an excellent slow release fertilizer and we often top dress the potted tomato plants in the greenhouses with this solution. Shortly after watering there is an immediate reaction with the plants which perk up, seem to grow overnight, and often turn a much darker shade of green.

We also plant squash, beans, sweet corn, okra, watermelon, and muskmelon and transplants with a small handful of these worm castings for a kick start in fertilization. We also hypothesize that the fungi associated with the breakdown of organic material in the bins into a food product for the worms may in fact colonize the roots of these plants and provide them with beneficial effects such as fixation of certain minerals and water when needed.

Manipulating fertility in the bins:

Food and bedding sources as well as watering conditions can play a major role in the fertility of the finished product to be harvested from the bins. We find that feeding rotten sawdust as well as leaves or using these for bedding is a terrific way to up the micro-nutrient content of the vermicompost, for trees can reach minerals not otherwise available to plants given the extensive and deep running root systems. Many of these minerals are still present in leaf mold and definitely in rotten sawdust which the worms will over time break down in their beds along with any food added, these minerals and micro-nutrients then become available to any plants with which the vermicompost is added as a soil amendment or fertilizer.

Green materials equal high nitrogen and lying off of the lime and water for a few weeks will also add a higher percentage of nitrogen that will become available to plants which are amended with vermicompost. You do however have to be careful with this as too much acidity will burn the worms and they will literally “melt”. Also the smell is not pleasant. You should only feed green, compostible materials to one side of the bin and never mix them with the bedding as they will heat and can kill the worms. If you feed only on one side of the bed the worms can come and go to the heat as they please. Also, when watering more infrequently one must be careful as if the bins get too dry the worms will not be able to breathe and they will expire. If one looses an established bin of worms it is nothing to fret about as the eggs are very tough and will hatch within 21 days (unless frozen) and can survive extremes of freezing (for years) as well as heat extremes.

We have also often used the pure castings for potting soil. While they do fine as a potting soil and will provide all the fertility that one needs for any plant they do have a tendency to crust over and should most likely be mixed with a more porous material such as sphagnum. A fifty-fifty mix is excellent and we had much success with it when used for potting up the micro-tomatoes from our 2007 and 2008 trials.

Of course red worm cultivation or Vermiculture as it is called also has its other benefits. One major benefit we have found is by adding worms to our potting mix for greenhouse plants, the worms offer and provide more fertilizer and the further breakdown of organic material into usable fertilizer for the plants while also adding tilth which is not often found in container gardening. Another advantage of raising red worms on a small farm is the added profit margin provided by selling excess worms for fishing bait or to other interested Vermiculturist which has become a major factor of our financial success here at Bishops Homegrown.


Any farmer, particularly those interested in “Eco-Logically” sound methods, should look into raising red worms which are amazingly easy to take care of and feed. They will recycle materials that are normally considered waste and create amazing fertilizer out of them and are a terrific step towards self-sustainability.

For more information feel free to contact the author: Alan Reed Bishop 1-812-967-2073 or
bishopshomegrown@gmail.com