Rooftop Ecology's Blog

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.

Hi All,

Well here in Korea we have taken several steps towards getting a rooftop ecology up and running. Mostly I have been expanding my network. As you can imagine being a foreigner with little facility in Korean, getting something started here is difficult without friends and allies. Well I now have those friends and allies..

I have made friends with a senior civil servant at the Korean Department of Agriculture, Forest and Fisheries. Indeed, we are having dinner tonight.

Last night, I gave a presentation at Seoul National University (basically Korea’s Harvard) at the School of Architecture. Students from Kyung-Hee’s Landscape Architecture Department also came, so it turned into a bit of a conference. It went on for several hours and when eventually we had to break it up, I had students asking me for more information as I walked out the door to catch my bus. I should explain that I am an ecocity advocate so I don’t own a car and I don’t drive.

I have an architect who will help with the building work, ensuring safe roof loads and the like. He is a professor at SNU. His name is Dr. Peter Ferretto.

I have a landscape architect who has business connections and can arrange access to roofs all over Seoul. She is a professor at Kyung Hee University. Her name is Dr. Han Saehi.

I also have OECD links in Korea now, thanks to Dr. Kim Chang-Gil, one of the leading architects of Korea’s Green Growth policy and a senior researcher at the Korean Rural Economics Institute. He has been of invaluable assistance in getting agricultural research institute assistance.

Supporters outside of Korea include..

Peter Toensmeier, award winning perennial plant and forest garden author, Dr. Bruno Glazer, a soil chemist and terra preta expert at the University of Bayreuth..

In short, it looks like I need to start getting this system up and running so that I can plant my first rooftop ecology in the Spring.