Posts by drake

Yes, guinea grass will work well as a substrate for the floor of a chicken pen. Make sure to cut the grass so it is ~4 inches in length. If the grass is too long, it will mat up and the chickens will not be able to turn it.

I use a mower to shred the grass clippings before adding them to my chicken pen, and use the wild grass that grows around here in Hawaii.

The recipe provided by Master Cho is designed to create as diverse of a family of LAB as possible. Closed ferments limit the diversity.

I use a Maruyama MS75E Sprayer when on foot, and then I use a 50 gallon Gearmore Sprayer with a diaphragm pump on my tractor.

By the time the solution is diluted, there should be no problem of the pump degrading from salts. Especially if you flush it out with clean water after use.

I just had to replace the diaphragm on the tractor sprayer, but that is because it ripped after nearly 10 years of use, and I also had to do some work on the Maruyama to clean out the exhaust screen, but no issues with the pump unit at all as long as they are not run dry.

Jadam uses a method call putrefaction, which leads to many disease causing bacteria to be present. Will it translate to your plantings and be harmful for consumption is based on dilution and time of consumption after application. I do not recommend eating food that has been treated within two weeks.

Not all anaerobic bacteria are bad, but our bodies have developed mechanisms to detect them, such as horrible smells and wicked tastes to avoid our consumption of them to err on the safe side of life.

Mulching it and concentrating the wood chips in the area you will be growing in is what I recommend. Even though it has toxic sap, that will quickly be broken down by microbes and will not inhibit the effectiveness of it as a mulch. You want to be careful not to scrape up too much of the thin soil you have, so adding a thick layer of mulch will help build more soil where you need it. Also be careful of erosion after clearing, and the subsequent weeds/grasses that will thrive when the land has been cleared.

I also recommend going slow and steady, and instead of clearing the land and getting rid of all the trees, doing it slowly, clearing only what is necessary at the time, and planting in between your existing cover, and as those trees grow, clearing out the christmas berry. This is a huge carbon store for you, and if it is all dropped at one time, it will quickly (within a year) be gone and then you will have to grow other things or import mulch to keep up the fertility of the area.

Also, think of the christmas berry as a resource, as I mentioned today in the Office Hour, Richard Perea used to use the christmas berry very effectively when he was living out in the Kau region.

No, agar can not be used for collecting IMO. The reason is that the agar is selective to the microbes. Soil microbes are diverse and will not culture well. You will get microbes, but they are not the microbes you want.

Heating the vinegar to pasteurize it will stop the fermentation process.

I just looked up kefir on wikipedia, and it says that “The kefir grains initiating the fermentation are initially created by auto-aggregations of Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens and Kazachstania turicensis, where multiple biofilm producers cause the surfaces to adhere which form a three dimensional microcolony.” 

So, it looks like kefir has lacto in it, albeit maybe a more narrow family than the KNF recipe would culture?

Further down the wikipedia article it says “A complex and highly variable symbiotic community can be found in these grains, which can include acetic acid bacteria (such as A. aceti and A. rasens), yeasts (such as Candida kefyr and S. cerevisiae) and a number of Lactobacillus species, such as L. parakefiri, L. kefiranofaciens (and subsp. kefirgranum^[20]), L. kefiri,^[21] etc.^[9] While some microbes predominate, Lactobacillus species are always present.”

Which sort of validates what I was saying, but then with kefir it looks like you are also getting KNF Cleanser (acetic acid), yeasts, and perhaps more, which are all useful and used in KNF.

Overall, I’d say that kefir is great and should be used in a way very similar to the KNF Protectors. It’s worth reading the whole article on wikipedia, because it has a lot more information and can help you understand how it fits into KNF better than this brief answer.