Posts by drake

I know I have a video of it somewhere. I have been working on transcribing all the videos to make them searchable for myself.

In the mean time, I can describe the basic process

1. 1-3 weeks before transplanting
   1. Spread IMO and Soil Formula in area to plant
2. 1-3 days before transplanting
   1. Stop watering the tree – this will make the plant thirsty
   2. Turn the tree 90 degrees in it’s pot – this pre-stresses the plant
3. Transplanting time – best in the late afternoon
   1. Do not amend the hole with anything.
   2. Soak tree roots in Soil Formula liquid for 15-60min – the thirsty plant will absorb all the good nutrients
   3. Bare root the plant – knocking off the soil encourages it’s readiness to be a new environment
   4. Trim tap root 1/3 (leave 2/3) – will force more lateral root growth
   5. Place tree
      1. Spread out lateral roots
      2. Brace to keep upright if necessary
      3. Bury lightly and do not compact soil around roots
   6. Water soil lightly with soil prep solution used for soak above buried roots – do not over water. this encourages the microbes to plug into the tree for nutrients and the roots to reach for moisture.
4. 24 hours later
   1. Mulch around tree in donut shape
   2. Water normally
5. A few weeks later – the plant should have taken root well
   1. Remove the bracing
   2. You can amend on the surface in a donut shape to encourage the lateral roots to reach out

The hole dug for planting should look more like this -> |…:i:…| where it resembles a pyramid in the middle. The edges should be about 8 inches deep and the center rising to about 6 inches. This is a shallow hole where the lateral roots can naturally spread out and remain close to the surface where they want to be.

Folks will mistakenly dig a grave for a plant that looks more like this |__| that is much deeper than it should be. They will amend the hole and soil with tons of nutrients. This is like placing a baby in a grave with lots of food. The food will rot, the baby will die, and if somehow it manages to live, it will be spoiled and never reach out to find it’s own nutrients or establish healthy relationships with the microbial community.

The point here is to give the plant somewhat of a rough start. Make it forage on its own, but place it in a way that it can take care of itself. Do not spoil young trees. Make them work for nutrients by applying them just further out than the drip zone and make them have to grow into them.

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.

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.

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.

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.