Tips for jumpstarting "wee beasties" in terra preta?

[Michaelangelica]

Eucalyptus leaves are made to burn not to break down. We don't have a Fall we have autumn. The only thing that falls is tree bark in summer. What's water? We haven't been able to use a hose on the garden for four years.
I just mulch now. The only free stuff I can get is ribbony sea grass that is poluting the local lake. Quite often wiffy of SO2. I also buy bags of chicken manure and horse manure for $3 (AUD) and do a deal for a little free cow manure occasionally. Recently I went biserk with consumerism and bought an expensive bale of Lithuanian peat ($60) I use it mixed with my el-cheapo potting mix $3; and to help resolve some soil alkalinity problems I have.
At the moment I can't afford the $30 for a bag of charcoal. I keep seeing piles of wood left out by locals for the council to take away :sigh:
There must be a little smokeless charcoal maker I can do/use in the suburbs? (O yes TOTAL fire bans last month too)
Here is someone who agrees with you about using char and compost:-

Peter Schmidt First of all I would not make the contrast between composting and biochar. For me composting and biochar is something that belongs together. They are two things that are very important for soil. So we won’t replace compost for biochar. What we’re trying is to enhance the quality of the compost through additions of biochar. When we put biochar in the soil usually we do it with compost.
. . .
Just to give you an idea, biochar has 300 m2 per gram of surface area because of its structure, (depends on the way you pyrolyse). Compost has usually 1m2 per gram surface area. Adding 0,1% of biochar increases the specific surface of the compost already to 8 - 10 m2 per gram. We are starting new compost tests now with biochar concentrations from 1 up to 20%. You get ten to twenty times more surface area inside, not outside. Or a square yard, if you prefer, with a slight recalculation.

What!? That is incredible. Could you provide me a visual aid in understanding this increase?

PS Fold a 300 m2 sheet of extremly thin paper about 1000 or 10.000 times an you get it. 300 square meters… it is incredible!

And all that additional space is available for microbial and chemical activity.

PS That’s it. That’s the point.

Peter Schmidt on Terroir, Biodiversity, and Biochar | Reign of Terroir

[Michaelangelica]

Q- Tips for jumpstarting "wee beasties" in terra preta?
A-Feed them with mains power??

The researchers have determined that a single-celled microorganism, a type of archaea, uses electricity to convert carbon dioxide and water into methane. Sustainable energy expert Tom Curtis comments that the use of microorganisms, rather than conventional catalysts, is a plus. “There are no noble metals involved, so it should be very cheap,” he says. Of the energy put into the system as electricity, 80% was eventually recovered when the methane was burned – a fairly high efficiency. “You don’t get all the energy back, but that’s a problem with any form of energy storage,” says Curtis [New Scientist].

According to the new study, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, the microbe is used as part of an electrolytic cell. An electrolytic cell is the opposite of a battery – a battery takes two compounds that want to react with each other and taps that potential in the form of electricity. In an electrolytic cell, the electrons are pumped in and they drive the reaction uphill, so to speak. In this case that uphill reaction is CO2 turning into CH4 (the opposite of the downhill version, which happens when we burn CH4, or any other fossil fuel) [EcoGeek]. The microbe acts as a catalyst for the process.

Better Than a Battery? Here’s a Microbe That Could Help Store Clean Energy
Also
Wiki

Initially, archaea were seen as extremophiles that lived in harsh environments, such as hot springs and salt lakes, but they have since been found in a broad range of habitats, such as soils, oceans, and marshlands. Archaea are particularly numerous in the oceans, and the archaea in plankton may be one of the most abundant groups of organisms on the planet. These prokaryotes are now recognized as a major part of life on Earth and may play an important role in both the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle.
No clear examples of archaeal pathogens or parasites are known, but they are often mutualists or commensals. One example are the methanogenic archaea that inhabit the gut of humans and ruminants, where they are present in vast numbers and aid in the digestion of food.

Archaea have some importance in technology, with methanogens used to produce biogas and as part of sewage treatment, and enzymes from extremophile archaea that can resist high temperatures and organic solvents are exploited in biotechnology.

Also at
EcoGeek - Clean Technology

(sorry my browser (firefox) is being silly -again- and i cant get URLs! Why won't Google and Firefox sit down and talk!)

[maikeru]

Originally Posted by mavrickjohn

If you know your mushrooms and know the good eating ones here is an easy way to inoculate fresh hardwood wood chips, TP, and your garden soil. In perennial beds ( Strawberry's, Blackberry, raspberry, asparagus's, and herb gardens) lay down a 3 to 4 inch mulch bed of hardwood chips no older than 2 weeks old. Pepper the bed well with TP prepped with nitrogen. Get a fresh mushroom that you want to grow in your beds. Make a spore print of the mushroom on glass or paper with the mushroom covered with a bowl for small mushrooms. Large ones need not be covered. Leave the mushroom for 12 hrs. Use a dust mask when working with the spores and wash your hands before and after working with them.
A bucket filled with a gallon water that is not from the tap is next to make. The water should be boiled for 10 min. with 1/4 teaspoon of non-iodine salt and 1 tablespoon of sugar or light molasses. Let the water cool to room temperature between 50 to 80 degrees.
Scrape the spores into the bucket and cover. Let it stand 24 to 48 hrs shaking 2 to 3 times. Make sure the bucket has not contained chemical or milk products. Now pour the liquid into a clean pump sprayer and apply to the mulch bed you have prepared. Cover with a light layer of straw and keep the mulch moist.
Good candidates for the garden are Hypsizygus ulmarius (similar to oyster mushrooms) King Stropharia,Shiitake,Nameko,Lion's Manes,Shaggy Manes, and possibly Morels.
This method can be use in your orchard and on your shrubs. You can also put inoculated logs in the garden area buried 1/3 deep in the ground.
While I realize that there are many more non-fruiting mycelial than fruiting I personally would pref fer to start with the eatable ones first. Mycelial spores falling from the air can do the rest.
If you want to just kick start the Mycelial infection of your bio-char use some nitrogen to keep it from pulling nitrogen from the soil and soak the bio-char with sugar. to start off the spoors. Remember Mycelium wants sugars from the plants because that's what it needs to grow.

This is a great idea. I have thought about adding mushrooms and other edible fungi to my garden this year, and hope the biochar will benefit them. I've bookmarked your post. Great tips!

[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

[Michaelangelica]

Just grow your own custom-made bacteria???

Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic

PhDs have been searching for a solution to the plastic waste problem, and this 16-year-old finds the answer.
. . .
That was Daniel's question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.

The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them.
After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 % degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.

With 500 billion plastic bags manufactured each year and a Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that grows more expansive by the day, a low cost and nontoxic method for degrading plastic is the stuff of environmentalists' dreams and, I would hazard a guess, a pretty good start-up company as well.

Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic | MNN - Mother Nature Network