Posts by drake

Understanding the Nutrient Cycle Theory is very crop dependent, as apples are different than pears or persimmons, so knowing exactly what you are growing and then tuning the theory specifically to your climate is essential, and you will get better season after season as you practice and learn.

In general, you can use the Maintenance Formula, which is composed of Food, Cleanser, Medicine, and Structure all the time to great benefit.

To get more specific, I can share what Master Cho recommends for each crop individually, though because I am in the tropics, I probably will not have personal experience with the same crops.

Bird bones are not recommended because of their frailty. By the time they are properly charred, they tend to burn and turn to ash, which is not what you want. There may also be chemical differences, but I do not have scientific confirmation of that. I have talked about the use of bird bones for KNF Structure on the Office Hours at the 43 minute mark of this episode.

Water is important, just behind air and sunlight in terms of how much it matters. The main thing with pond and river water is that it is not stagnant, and your nose will know if it smells putrid or gross. Typically flowing water is preferred, because as it flows, oxygen is brought into the water which will reduce pathogens, but also pond water tends to be full of Purple Non-sulfur Bacteria which produce oxygen and will again reduce pathogens. Purple Bacteria are also useful in KNF context.

Main thing is the water is not stinky. If it is, aerating it through stirring, vortexing or bubbling for several hours can tremendously improve the condition of the water and make the water more conducive to the type of biology that we want to cultivate in KNF.

Well, first off, this is not Chris’ discovery as chitinase microbes were known before he was born, and the cultivation methods of such have been used by several practitioners, again, preceding him, but steve and chris are popularizing the idea, which is great.

I went on a trip to Korea to specifically study GCM (gelatinase and chitinase microbes) in 2019. This was a specifically isolated and cultivated set of microbes that were hugely effective at mitigating bug and pathogen pressure, but also have their own set of drawbacks to use.

Making custom IMO is not a new idea, and what you add to the rice, such as insect frass, shrimp shell, or other materials in small quantities will affect the colonies you culture and collect. One can push the collection more fungal or more bacterial by using materials other than rice, but you will find at the end of the experimentation cycle that true peace comes from balance, and that the way these recipes were given to us is closer to that than most alterations you can come up with.

Keep this in mind and be wary of the ego claiming any invention or innovation, and the folks that promulgate such behavior, including one’s own self.

Soap’s ability to sud (or act as a surfactant) is significantly cut by vinegar, and I find there are diminishing returns of using soap in the Maintenance Formula. A light mist spray at the proper amount of 25 gal/acre will be absorbed quite well by the plants, and soap will only really benefit if you are over-spraying to wet instead of mist the plant’s surface.

In my practice it seems superfluous and an extraneous cost to use the soap for anything besides pest control. I think a better investment is getting the proper spraying equipment to put out the proper doses and making that job as easy as possible to do more frequently than trying to add more to the formulations.

Combining different microbes, again, is not novel. Folks have been selling EM1 which is a combination of Lactos, Yeasts, and Purple Bacterias for decades. This is also a very powerful combination, and when you combine independently very powerful microbes together they will and do work synergistically with each other to produce amazing results. Steve may be popularizing these ideas, but by no means is it his discovery, even if he did independently come to this formulation.

Spirulina is very easy to cultivate at home and with a small starter and a few inputs can be kept alive and grown as long as you maintain it.

Typically when you hear someone “invent” something it is because they are wanting to patent and sell it and thus hamper something that you can easily do at home, or they want ego aggrandizement which only leads to further suffering, but let them thirst for fame, which is liking begging for the blade of the sword.

I do encourage open source sharing, and I thank Steve for opening his work and sharing as he does, much like what I do, and we all need to support each other through peace and positive encouragement.

pH has little to do with soil fertility, ie “rich vs poor”. Plants and the microbes they cultivate will change the pH centimeters away from the roots where it matters and your overall (macro) pH may have a completely different reading, so trying to change or influence the macro pH is not a good way to go about managing the soil. What is a good way to go about managing the soil is to ensure there is adequate biology and organic matter/material. With that present, the natural processes will reach balance which enables the plants and biology to thrive the way they want to and reach their full potential in balance, which results in better produce in many measurable ways besides “just the biggest”.

Specifically in the cultivation of blueberries, it makes sense to include an IMO collection done in a blueberry patch (or several) if this is the crop you will be cultivating. It also makes sense to collect in other near by places to ensure that monoculturesickeness will not arise. Applying these IMO following the Soil Foundation Formula annually or semi-annually will also help the biology, as well as foliar applications of Solutions, and adding compost or mulch depending on your situation. Also encouraging a ground cover will ultimately help reduce your need to supplement as the farmer.

It’s not that you are overthinking it, it’s more that you have to approach it with the simplicity of a child. Children think a whole lot, but they are not necessarily polluted by years of complexity. Nature is not complex. Things like chemistry can get us so tied up with complexity that we lose that simplicity. There are many lenses to look at life, some are useful in certain situations. I always advocate knowing more, but the great sages always say that we always knew everything all along.

Azolla is a water based fern. One thing I have noticed about it is that it will put a little droplet of water above it to act as a lens to concentrate sunlight and will also use its deep roots in the water below to handle the extra heat as a cooling system, which I surmise is how it is able to grow so quickly.

Most azolla will just grow great with fish in the pond below that will create manure in a sort of aquaponics type of situation, but the fish can also nibble on its roots which can slow growth. So if you want to grow without fish then I suggest adding the Leaf Formula to the water on a weekly basis. This can be much more dilute than the usual ratios used for plants as it will float around and encourage other water-borne biology to thrive which will also create nutrients for the azolla.

The key is to get a diverse and healthy biome thriving in the water, and the azolla will convert sunlight into nutrients and the biology will make other things and get a positive feedback loop going. So, when you harvest, I recommend only taking 1/3 of the azolla at a time so as not to upset this loop once you get it going.