Science Forums 2

[Michaelangelica]

Making microbes
Dennis Dierks, host:
Dennis has been working with Gil’s micro brews for over a year now, and says “I haven’t been this excited about farming for 25 years.” His customers tell him his vegetables taste better and last longer.

But first you must have the microbes. And that, hours later, is why we are in the barn, rather cold after sitting here for so long, but patiently learning how to Cultivate Beneficial Indigenous Microorganisms.

The act itself, in all its variations, might take 15 minutes to demonstrate. It’s a basic formula: Set out carbohydrates to attract microbes from a place—its air, its soil, its plants and animals.
Feed the microbes sugar so they’ll multiply (or in the case of Lacto bacilli, feed them milk to encourage a specific population). Dilute the potion and apply it to whatever needs help.

If sheer diversity is the objective, then the microbes are collected from the wildest place one can find. The owner of this farm, Dennis Dierks, has wilderness at his doorstep, and so collected his microbes from the woods behind Carandang’s stage.
Where there is no forest, the objective is still to find the place with greatest diversity. This could be even on the farm itself—a wild area behind the compost pile, or a healthy hedgerow.
In fact, the closer to the farm, the better, as the most beneficial microbes are those naturally adapted to the ecosystem.

As the microbes are attracted and arrive to eat the carbohydrates, they go from invisible to visible, but just barely. Forest microbes are collected using cooked white rice, and success is marked by the appearance, after a few days, of mold.
Lacto bacilli are heralded by the curdling of milk, other microbes simply by a sour smell to the liquid they’re in. Add some sugar, though, and the transformation is mind-blowing.

Last year, I saw Dierks’ brews as they came to life in his potting shed.
They weren’t pretty, mostly soupy brown liquids in jugs and buckets, but the life inside them was astonishing. He went to give me a smell of one, labeled “Root Brew,” only to find the bottle cap had been sealed on by liquid seeping out from inside.
He wrenched the plastic bottle between his hands, pulled, and bang! The cap popped off and liquid exploded all over the shed.

We stood there for a moment, our bare arms and faces and shirts brown and wet, Dennis holding what had become a sated volcano, calm but still dribbling out lava. “If this were chemicals we would be totally poisoned right now,” he said, “not to mention out of a lot of money. But that’s the beauty of it. Instead, your skin feels soft. It feels alive. And it’s free. I haven’t been this excited about farming for 25 years.”

Later in the season, several of Dierks’ long-time customers commented that his produce tasted better than in years past, and was keeping for longer.
Meanwhile, Diane Matthews, another local farmer who had learned Carandang’s techniques, was using her own microbe brew to fight off the Phytopthera that was decimating her raspberries.
“The plants were supposed to die,” she said at the workshop. “I didn’t know what would happen, but I figured I’d try the forest microbes. What happened was the Phytopthera disappeared. I got a crop at Thanksgiving! The berries were small, but their taste was excellent.”

The specific power of Lacto
Carandang explains that one can also home in on specific microbes for targeted results. The most useful is Lacto bacillus. This microorganism is. . ,.

More at
Using the ordinary to cultivate the mysterious power of beneficial indigenous microorganisms | Rodale Institute