Rooftop Ecology's Blog

A small study undertaken in Salt Lake City found that community gardeners had a lower body mass index (BMI) than their peers who were not community gardeners. It also found that community gardeners were less likely to be fat. 46% less likely for women and 62% less for men.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1112826643/community-gardens-produce-health-benefits-041913/

I’ve once again looked into how people overseas can get their hands on an original copy of the Natural Farming Handbook and this time I am making some progress. I should be able to provide the details over the next few days.

Here’s a wonderful video which shows how to make your own biochar. Biochar basically acts as a coral reef in the soil, increasing the soil biodiversity and acting as habitat, thereby increasing soil fertility. The charcoal also acts as a sponge, so there is no nutrient leaching.

The video here does most of the work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ttr_8nJ_E6w

One of the writers that I follow religiously and is the inspiration for a lot of my thinking on these subjects is Eric Toensmeier. He wrote Edible Forest Gardens, a bestselling book on permaculture design, with another author. He also wrote Perennial Vegetables, essentially the world’s first book on agriculture using plants that you don’t kill at harvesting. 

You can find out about his previous authorship here. He even has his own Amazon author page, which tells you something right there.

http://www.amazon.com/Eric-Toensmeier/e/B001JOZZD8/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1365679977&sr=1-2-ent

Right now, he’s trying to write a book about using forest gardens for carbon capture as a means of reducing the speed and effects of climate change. Unlike other geo-engineering experiments, this one works by covering the land with food producing forest gardens that also sequester carbon. There’s probably only a few people on the planet that know this stuff inside out but Eric is one of them and along with people like Toby Hemingway about the only guy actively authoring books on the subject for the rest of us.

He is trying to raise money with Kickstarter, a ‘crowd funding’ website, that helps people trying to make a difference in the world obtain financial support from lots of small investors so they can get done those jobs that need doing.

I’ve invested 50 bucks and will get a book and some stuff around 2015. More importantly, I will have helped get this knowledge out there, where it absolutely needs to be.

I figure it’s worth it just to buy the book alone, so I am delighted to be in a position to help fund something so worthwhile. 

If you want to know more, and perhaps contribute…. here’s the url

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1115575313/writing-toolkit-for-climate-stabilization-with-tre

Well, the Guro thing is making progress of a sort. Still haven’t got anything down on the roof yet, since I can’t find the components. It’s the kind of thing that would take me a morning in the UK, but its a massive obstacle here. So, I went looking for someone who knows their way around and can speak English. Found a guy from Kazakhstan who is interested in helping. Unfortunately for quick progress, but perhaps fortunately from a commitment perspective, he wants to see a complete business plan before he joins in. So  farm is again on hold while a write what promises to be a forty page document. I believe the word he used was brochure.. gulp. So, like the title says three steps forward two steps back. I don’t think this thing will go further without him, or someone like him, so it’s progress of a sort. Does anyone know the Korean for Black Soldier Fly? It’s really difficult finding a source for something when you have no idea what it’s called in the local language. Pretty much found out that there are things you cannot find out on Google. I am finding lots of examples.. Groan..

Recently, what with small son, full time job and project work, I’ve not been updating my blog as much as I used to. I apologize to my readers/subscribers for this. I think there comes a time when you have to put your ideas into practice and not just write about what you are going to do. I am presently doing this, which adds a little flesh to the project work mentioned in the introductory sentence.

I have acquired the use of a roof in the Guro region of Seoul. I am presently trying to find where to get the stuff to put on it, not an easy task when your Korean is not that great and the ideas/concepts are pretty complex. Needless to say, though I have just embarked on saying it, it is something of an uphill struggle.

Please continue to watch this space and in the future I hope to bring you videos, showing how I put this all together.

Stay happy, stay well, stay involved..

Ian

I like systems. I am also not frightened by complexity, which is just as well since systems tend to be well… complex.

Everything in the title is concerned with using what is to hand. Simple fact of the matter is that most of this will be waste. Korean Natural Farming uses waste of all sorts from seared bones to fish heads. The Black Soldier Fly is a beneficial insect, just ignore the word fly, that converts food waste (putrescent or not, meat or not, dairy or not) into chitin, fat and protein, which you’ll agree are all very useful (if you don’t believe me type uses for chitin into Google and see what comes up).  Earthworms take the leavings from your cutting board and plates (with the exception of dairy and meat) and turns it into worm poop, also called vermicompost (which is in my opinion the best growing medium on the planet). Biochar takes a wide variety of organic waste and unbinds the carbon from everything else in it such that you have basically pure carbon, and more than this, pure carbon in a form which does not degrade in the soil for hundreds of years.

It should therefore come as no surprise that I should start trying to link the various forms of waste management into something which then serves as a fuel, catalysts and habitats for soil ecology. However the more I looked into this the more I found..

When I emailed Tristram Stuart, the author of the book Waste, which details the mind boggling massive and universally prevalent waste of food in developed countries about connecting that waste to black soldier fly, his concern was the possibility of it smelling bad. I took that on board and mulled it over. However, from my reading it appears that the other uses for biochar is that it removes odours from the air. So, the biochar, which is a soil improver can also be used to reduce the possibility of foul odours coming from another part of the system, namely the Black Soldier Fly bins.

There is also some evidence that the worm bin functions better when you dump Black Soldier Fly excreta into it. This of course makes perfect sense in that worms often get to something after the flies have taken their best shot at it. Could it be that this is a natural synergy that we are only now discovering? So that links the biochar odour reduced  black soldier bins with the worm bin.

Biochar (charcoal essentially)  itself is basically a sponge. It has a huge surface area, basically lots of pits, holes, tunnels etc with each and every surface space on it (of which there are a mind bogglingly huge number) capable of latching onto something and binding it. Put another way it’s an empty lattice just waiting to be filled. Biochar traps water and nutrients in a form which plants can then unbind. So it’s a good idea to soak it before you put it in the soil, or it will just suck the water right out of your soil.  Now Korean Natural Farming inputs are all solutions which means that biochar and Korean Natural Farming inputs is basically a match made in heaven.

Therefore a system which connects Korean Natural Farming Solutions with biochar with vermicompost systems with black soldier fly seems like a really good place to start.

Oh and biochar can be used to remove chemical and metal contamination from water, which if you have heavy metal laden ‘yellow dust’ storms flying in from China is certainly something to consider. Also if you connect your garden to an aquaponics system, some biochar could come in handy for your water supply, while the Black Soldier Fly and Worms feed your fish.

Hi Guys

Took a long break from the blog to work on some things, which nevertheless did not work out. You’ll appreciate how difficult it is to get something planet friendly off the ground.

Anyway, should be getting a frame from my 37 inch by 27 inch fresnel lens this weekend. Then I will be making biochar by toasting it.

Here’s how it works..

Take a glass jar, punch a single hole in the lid.

Take coffee grinds and place them in the jar. Doesn’t matter if they are wet.

Attach magnets to jar using wire.

Get a basin

Attach magnets to bottom of basin, so that magnetism working through the basin will hold the jar submerged beneath the water.

Fill basin with water so that the jar is completely submerged.

Use the giant fresnel lens to concentrate solar energy on the submerged jar.

Watch as black coffee absorbs concentrated heat and chars in the absence of oxygen. Glass does not break as it is cooled by the water. The water does not heat up much as the energy mostly passes through it and the energy beam is unfocussed in the water.

Various gases will be ejected from the jar via the single hole in the cap. The temperature inside the jar should rise too about 800 degrees.

After about half an hour it should all be done. Cover lens. Wait for water to cool jar down to ambient temperature.

Remove charcoal. Dip charcoal in various Korean Natural Farming Solutions so that the absorbent char does not suck the water out of your soil. Add biochar to soil.

Warning: A giant fresnel lens is like an arc welder. The focus point can melt metals, incinerate wood etc. I bought my Fresnel lens with safety goggles. I will be wearing protective clothing when doing this as well. Oh and dont do this around kids.

The folk over at the Phillippines for Natural Farming Inc, have been telling me that they get used coffee beans from Starbucks, treat it with Indigenous Micro-Organism solution 2 and give it to worms to create compost. I suggested there might be a better way..

Step 1

Get used coffee beans from Starbucks. They have a grinds for gardens program where you just walk in and ask for their used coffee beans and they will give them to you. Most coffee shops will give them to you for free. Now fresh coffee grinds are really useful for a couple of reasons. First, they have no chemicals in them. Second, they’re pasteurized, which is to say heat treated, to get rid of microbes and fungal spores. So it’s clean in all senses of the word. 

Step 2. Combine with Oyster Mushroom spores and keep moist.

Since the coffee beans are already pasteurized there is a colonization window during which you can introduce your chosen fungi spores. They get a competition free start on the material before other microbes and fungi can get in there. Once your oyster fungi is established it is strong enough to keep most things out.

Step 3. Harvest mushrooms, probably (2x)

Providing you kept your mushroom bin moist but not over soggy you will be able to harvest the bin twice.

Step 4.  This is where it gets really interesting.

The used substrate (what the coffee beans turn into when fungi colonizes it) can be used as fodder for chickens, pigs and cows directly, no further processing needed. ZERO Emissions Research and Initiative (ZERI) projects do exactly this.

However, you can also take the substrate and following guidelines from Paul Stamets (basically for fungi cultivation what Dr. Cho is for plant cultivation) you can get two additional products.

If you soak it in cold water will make substance a little like the worm tea you get when you soak vermicompost. This tea is a nutritious fertilizer and a potent insecticide.

If however, you submerge the bulk substrate in hot water you will get a different tea, in this case a naturally potent herbicide.

The used substrate can be mixed with soil and will reduce the parastic nematode population in the soil. Basically the mushroom chemically stuns the nematode worm, spears it with a fungal filament and then sucks out everything inside.

If you add oyster mycelium to brassica crops, such as brussel sprouts and the like, the plant and the fungi form a symbiotic relationship which greatly increases crop production.

So there you have it..

Two inputs = free used coffee beans and purchased spores (you only need to purchase the once)

but with

But we have 7  outputs

1. Mushrooms

2. Animal fodder.

3. Organic Pesticide and Fertilizer.

4. Organic Herbicide.

5. A nematode control agent in soil gardens.

6. A brassica/mushroom symbiosis that produces bigger healthier plant plus.. 

7. Yet more mushrooms from the symbiosis.

Alternatively, you could dump the substrate into a worm bin and let the worms chomp on it. It might be better though to feed it to chickens in a shed over a worm bin and let the chicken poop become the worm food since this would yield eggs and protein faster.

And then since you have worms you could take them and use them in a fishpond, getting more protein. This is a little more involved though since you need to aerate the water to get good stocking densities, and since you’d be doing that you might as well invest some money in an aquaculture system.

So in some ways you can feed the worms better on vegetable scraps since the coffee beans are so ideal for mushroom production.