This one is a really difficult question, and one that I'm not sure ANYBODY knows. For example, the Dr Ingham way of thinking is that the line in the sand is drawn between aerobic and anaerobic, meaning LAB is bad. However, there are techniques that use almost exclusively anaerobes, such as bokashi that you mention, but also Korean Natural Farming (Cho Han Kyu), Indigenous Microorganisms (which isn't necessarily anaerobes, but cannot preclude them), and most prominently the technique of Jadam (Youngsang Cho), which almost exclusively will breed anaerobes in the liquid fertilizers. The current thinking is that the breeding a natural fertilizer using anaerobes, is fine as long as the soil it is being applied to is well oxygenated (no-till gardens, or forest soils in heavy polycultures). You can place the anaerobic liquid, and within minutes the aerobic Microorganisms will outcompete the anaerobic ones. All that will be left is the nutrients in the liquid fertilizers and a culture of aerobic Microorganisms who eradicated the anaerobes trying to invade aerobic soils. So I think as long as your soils are healthy, applying anaerobic ferments like Jadam fertilizers or LAB like you made in one of your first videos, those are okay. However if your soils are damaged and compacted, you could cause major problems which may be difficult to reverse, as the anaerobes will now have "home field advantage". I hope that helps and isn't too confusing. It's a very complicated topic, and honestly I don't think humanity knows enough. Plants are VERY complicated. Here's another video of mine that explains just how little we know about plants kzfaq.info/get/bejne/b6uppZamupjPemg.html, if you are interested in more. Thanks for the comment weedy!

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy thanks for your answer Keith. It is what I thought also, so it was nice with a confirmation. Thanx for the in depth answer. Much appreciated.

LAB and FPJ and those types of inputs are best used by people who know what the signs and symptoms of going anaerobic is. Dr. Ingham states that with caution they can be used successfully, but that she's seen plenty of instances where it went wrong (due to specifically those anaerobic disease causing organisms)

​​​​@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy ​​​​​She did mention it specifically, I'll try and find a link where she says with discretion it isn't bad, and how she says she generalizes when referring to anaerobic bad/aerobic good (I've watched a lot of her content and she's only mentioned that once I can remember). She emphasizes that this is an Intro-Intermediate mindset basically and when advanced enough (microscopy identification techniques down pat I'd imagine she means) then can incorporate those inputs which are anaerobic. So she doesn't seem to want to say anaerobic are good when 95% of the disease causers are anaerobic and can outcompete if not incorporated successfully by someone with the knowledge/background to do so. Most people she is addressing will not have such a knowledgeable background so it def makes sense why she'd be so steadfast with her definitions most of the time. You were basically spot on with your answer, and lined RIGHT UP with what she's actually said without knowing she said it hahah very possible it was one of her newest videos!!

To be very clear. In order for all nutrients to be absorbed they will need to alternate between an oxidating (dry) and reducing (wet) state. In order to reach the required reduction state you will need an anaerobic soil. If you haven’t put lab and yeast in your soil you will run the risk of salmonella, e. Coli, or other nasties overpopulating.

Thank you so kindly.

For the layperson, this video did not help me.

it did for me, but ive been researching for about a year prior. soil is alive, check out epic gardening. they are more lay person style and will help further your understanding with stuff like this @@amcken

I love this. I was reading about KNF but decided I need science based evidence before I invest my time. Now I think I need to look into fungal inoculations maybe with fish and worm tea as a spray. You have certainly helped convince me to invest my energy into turning my compost pile. Thank you. I’m so inspired to learn more!

If you go through many of my videos, a lot of the best information is often contained in the video descriptions. Less so on this particular one, but often I'll post links to research for people to follow down the rabbit hole if so inclined. Thanks for watching :)

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy I've noticed, it's part of the reason why I look forward to new videos. Honestly over the past year your channel has been very transformative in how I view my lawn and garden space -- I've converted nearly 8000 sq.ft. of grass into a (very young) food forest heavily influenced by what I've learned here, so thank you!

Are the experiments increasing yield. Your speaker remind me of Dr Ingham presentations .

I'm honored friend.

Oh you did find your way here, fantastic! I'm actually watching your latest video now with my morning coffee as we speak. I've been so busy lately I'm 2 weeks late on it! I'm just so honored to have you stop by here David. Fantastic that we are in the same tribe, from the complete opposite side of the world. Keep building that army, and lets change this world. Thanks for the feedback. I know for some of my science heavy videos, it can be like trying to take a drink from a fire-hose. For the dog, I fear my kids have warped my sense of humor! Ha!

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy Ha ha. That´s funny, and thankyou too brother. Yes...let´s grow the tribe.

At first the dog was a nice breather. As it went on longer, I literally started laughing out loud, waiting for the music phrasing to signal the end.

This and Weedy Garden are my two binge watches.

LOL there are dozens of us! DOZENS!

When my local gardening friends post pics of garishly-colored petunias and impatiens, these receive over a hundred "likes." If I posted a pic of wildflowers abuzz with pollinators, I'd be lucky to receive 7 "likes." I've found only one local person with a wild permaculture property (he runs a nursery out of his tiny driveway) who talks non-stop soil/plants...that's part of why I'm here, searching for the rest of my tribe.

Yeah, it's the same thing everywhere. I can make a video or photo about unique "weeds" and their benefits, and get almost no "likes", but then the too posts are gardeners who pick carrots after 4 weeks and laugh about their "tiny cute carrot", and it gets thousands of votes. Kind of funny.

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy , yeah like the movie the replicators....lol.

@@formidableflora5951 but then you know that every like you get is not someone's muscle memory. Your likes hold true admiration and fan following :)

Ty!!!

Thanks for reading textbooks on behalf of all of us

I could've listened for another hour. Your videos are always informative and interesting, but this one is especially superb. I've read some of these references, and seen the original presentation on the chart in the thumbnail, so the concepts you talked about are familiar to me. But wow! You really brought it all together in a way that made even more sense, with several light bulbs going on, and the answers to a couple of questions I've had floating around in my head for quite awhile. Like the fact that plants don't need to be spaced out, if the soil is healthy and balanced. Plus, this video was punctuated with some very funny moments. In essence, you have a knack for digesting the academics, and feeding it to us in a way that not only makes sense to the average gardener interested in doing their part to rebuild the earth's permaculture, but you also give us practical ways to apply the principles to our little corner of the planet. I'm down in New Mexico, located in a mountainous region of high desert, with dead dirt. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but New Mexico, is quite unique in its climate and terrain. Of all the many places I've lived, and gardened, this has been the most challenging, and I've spent the months, just working on providing what the ground needs to begin the journey toward health and vitality. Yet, I watch all of your videos. Not just because you are enjoyable to listen to, but because I always learn something from you; even though you're in Canada. Thank you, for everything you do, and all that you share. You are much appreciated.

@@chachadodds5860 ditto. You said it perfectly.

@@chachadodds5860 Agreed! I'm down in the south of Africa and in a drought-prone, coastal Mediterranean environment, so couldn't be further from the Canadian climate - but this is my go-to channel for the right mix of information and inspiration. I do have moments of acre-envy and water-envy - but am learning to work with what I've got. Which is, admittedly, a lot more than desert! Having said that, I think the challenge of working in a desert/hyper-dry environment must be one of the most exhilarating of all - if approached from a permaculture viewpoint. It is the holy grail of restorative and regenerative projects. More people need to understand and promote the fundamentals of soil health - it is one of our most vital tools in helping stabilise our world right now.

Agree so much!!

Thanks 😊

INDEED, Im so grateful to have found Keith and his channel. So much precious knowledge. Thank you Keith

❤️

Awesome! That's what I was hoping this video would do for many people:)

Lol. Ditto!

Just wanted to also mention that producing such youtube information is time consuming. You also present topics well in a down to earth way. It comes in handy when you try to explain to someone e.g. the Soil Food Web (complex) & you can simply forward link to the above 😀

Totally agree.

So true. He is such a KZfaq gem!!

Best part is you can be doing something with your hands, like cooking dinner, while listening. 😊❤

This is a really good example yes!

Haha nice! My name is Keith 😀

Good luck!

Awesome! Glad to hear it, thanks for the feedback. This one took a while to put together for sure. I never know how "sciencey" people want the videos - actually I have a pretty good idea and the answer (for the average viewer) is not very sciencey at all. So a video like this comes at a risk that you put a hundred hours into it and it gets 1k views, no comments and even worse, people think "this channel isn't fun anymore" and unsub. It sounds silly but that's just the reality of hoping to grow a channel. The goal of this channel also isn't to solve any scientific questions regarding soil science. The goal is and always will be to inspire new people to take up gardening and planting more trees. I'm hoping that through this platform I can do more good on this planet by creating some kind of snowball effect off of what I did on my land - and that when I'm in my deathbed I can look back on my life and know I did as much as I could for my kids and the planet they will inherit. So when I say I appreciate that feedback, I really do. Like I REALLY do, because it tells me that all this work I'm putting in is worth it in some small way at least.

Awesome! You've got it perfectly correct!

Thanks Cate :)

Hello How are you doing today

Hey, welcome aboard! Enjoy the science 🌎 🌱

LOL

LOL

Yeah, great example lol

Glad it was helpful! Thanks for commenting to let me know.

Thanks Pat

LOL

Haha! You get a duck-on-a-bike sticker with a rainbow. :)

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy I'll take it! 😂

⭐

Lol cheers

Thanks! On your "PS".... Treat everything that I'm saying with the "drunk guy at a bar" methodology. I.e. if saw a drunk guy at a bar standing on a table ranting and raving about something.... except... it actually sounded pretty well thought out. You know, he's raving about some geo-political issue or something... but he's making a whole lot of sense. Treat me like that guy. You should be thinking... hmmm... that all sounds interesting... buuuuuut I think I'll verify the facts in the morning before I make any life decisions on what he's saying. I think that's a good overall attitude to have with any youtube information. On other channels and even on mine. So pick up some of these books, give them a read, pick up more books, give those a read, and get as much information as you can get before you decide something is true or not. Then never close your mind to the possibility that all those sources may be partially correct, but may not have the complete picture, and that science can always be improved on. Very little science is fully settled. And that's especially true in an area where breakthroughs are constantly occurring, such as soil microbiology. We're just starting to realize how important it all is, but that also means that a lot of what we consider to be fact is going to change as we learn more and get better a better resolution on the image we think we have.

Drunk Guy at a Bar analogy- I’ve never heard it called that but Ill probably use the verify and decide for yourself… now under a new heading. Much less clinical and more personable🤓😁

❤️

Thanks 😊

Those "um" cuts 😆

ums, dragonflies landing on me, me stuttering, me saying the wrong word and catching it in the moment, grasses brushing my leg making me think it could be a snake. Me making a video is like a drunk falling out of a tree, hitting every branch on the way down, then slamming into the dirt.

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy well you certainly edit it well then because I wouldn’t guess.

Only three a day?

@@Tsuchimursu Estimate was based on my subscriptions for last week. There are definitely a lot more unaccounted for but that's a lot of work for a youtube comment.

LOL

I've never heard her talks, I will look her up

Glad you liked it!

Thanks Robert. There's certainly always layers to all information. Each one of these little sub topics you can do a deep dive on. All the millions of different bacteria and what they do, etc. That's the fascinating part... the more we know, the more we realize how much we have to learn.

😊 thanks!

Just as an example of how complex this is... the USDA lists roughly 44 nutrients that plants need, 17 of which they consider "essential". Those are just the atoms though... Sulphur, phosphate, iodine, etc. Well take chlorine (extremely toxic) join it to sodium (extremely reactive) and they form together to make table salt which we can eat (relatively) safely. All these atoms form complex compounds. Right now, there are research groups trying to identify and catalogue what various COMPOUNDS do for the plant (and then potentially be useful for human health) and they are cataloguing literally MILLIONS of varieties of compounds that a plant carries around in it. An analogy to help explain this, is imagine an alien being comes down and tries to research and understand our language. It can't understand anything we are saying, but it has figured out 9 of our 26 letters in the alphabet. And it thinks, as long as I give these organisms these 9 letters, then they have everything they need to write a book. So give them another few decades and now they know that we put those letters together to make words, and they've figured out 1200 of our words that we use. They now think if they give us these words, we can write a book. But there are 171,146 words in the english language. Now think about how many different possible sentences we can make with those. How we can convey emotion and passion and information transfer with these "letters". They may understand the shape of the letter, but they don't understand the nuance of language. They don't understand how that conveys into emotion. Now consider that only some of us use this language, and many of us use completely other languages, even unspoken ones through our body movements and facial expressions. But these aliens think they have us all figured out, they think they know what we need to exist, so they sprinkle letters on us, dump water on us and think we'll grow. And we can kind of struggle out a meager existance based on this mess, but we'd really just like them to leave us alone and go back to their home planet. That's basically where we are with soil science right now. We know the rough shape of less than a percent of their numbers. Another example, root exudates. People think of root exudates as "a root exudate". However there are hundreds of thousands of different root exudates that the plant has access to in it's tool kit, and it selects which ones to produce based on the soil environment at the time. This is an ENDLESS avenue where we could research for the next ten thousand years and not uncover even a fraction of a single percent of what's going on in the soil. We think we're this super smart species, but when it comes to chemistry, the true master chemists on this planet are the plants. We may actually never understand what they are doing. I guess that's what you get when you have billions of years of evolution baked into an organism that is so dramatically functionally different than we are. Hmmm, maybe this would be an interesting video...

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy I was thinking that this would make an interesting video…..and then I got to the end 🤣

Hmmm maybe I should keep a more open mind to various gardening styles even if not science backed (yet)

LOL thanks! That's a great book, one of my favorites.

There is some crazy stuff that happens with certain plants when you get down to that level. There are some plants (you know the ones who grow on rocks and you are looking at them thinking... what the heck is that plant eating, there's no soil there). The plants have evolved a way to make the epithelial layer of their roots permeable to bacteria. The bacteria literally walk into the plant root but cannot get out, and the plant literally absorbs them. It's like, fully blown alien level of weirdness down in the wild wild west of microscopic soil life.

Cheers 🍻

Yeah!

LOL nice

Thanks Mallory 😊

Glad you enjoyed it!

Awesome! I know the feeling... I had it 5 years ago, and it snowballed into a life changing journey that I will never leave!

Thank you so much!

Thanks for watching :)

As a fellow engineer myself, openly stating credentials is just super critical. It's also important to express how, although we may not be experts in things, that doesn't make the things we say invalid, especially if what we are saying is repeated from experts, and cited from peer reviewed and critiqued research! I think many times people think they cannot ever be an expert in something because they don't have a degree in it, but given enough soaking time in a subject area, ajd the right diligence in their research techniques, we can cultive a very deep understanding of a topic, in a way that a paper degree isn't required. At the end of the day, it's just a piece of paper, and knowledge is obtained daily, and should continue well after one leaves their learning institutions!

Good luck in your field Connor! It's a very flexible field. You can work in so many different industries.

Awesome, thank you!

Couldn't agree more! I always think of it like a lens into an alien world. Super cool when you think of it like you just discovered an alien planet and get to observe all these weird looking organisms and how they interact 😀

Yeah it's much harder to deprogram someone than teach a new person! For the weeds, exactly (!!) even the specific plants which germinate (I.e. which weed exactly) can tell you something about the soil. Each year, it's a different set of weeds that have germinated in my wild areas here. First year it was thistles everywhere. Second year it was tons of ragweed. Third year it was lambs quarters. It's been a mix of various plants this year, wild sweet Williams, corepsis, so many different ones. The plants perform specific functions, and require specific circumstances to germinate. Our soils have tons of dormant seed just waiting to germinate, and each one wants something different, and does something different to the soil. People said I shouldn't sow amaranth because they will be here forever. I sowed them in year 3, and 3 years later we have no amaranth, but I know there are thousands and millions of seeds here (anyone who knows amaranth knows what I mean, those things make SEED). But they won't germinate because my soils aren't depleted anymore. I bet if I dug another swale and disturbed the soil and volatized all the carbon I would get Amaranth germinating the next week.

Do two gardens of exactly the same plants, but different techniques.... Let the results speak for both of you.

Glad it was helpful!

Awesome, one of us! One of us!

Much Love! That was so kind. :)

Haha thanks

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy , You must be influencing me because I went out and turned over the compost into the 2nd bin. Then taday I flipped it back into the first bin(only about half because both bins were nearly full). They both giving off loads of heat and I aireated the half left behind. Most of the half left of is turned into compost so maybe tomorrow I'll spread it around in the 4'/4' raised bed where I harvested the garlic.

Wow, thank you!

Cheers

Exactly right. They will regrow though, and you keep doing it.

I clicked on it to see exactly what it was, and I saw that wall of green. I can't wait for this season!!! I need more green as soon as possible

So not only size of the particles but also the shapes of each particles should be taken into consideration.

That's exactly the response I was hoping for! So many people see science as this barrier they cannot cross. I see it as door-opening, idea spawning, and this endless source of inspiration. Learn something new, and bam, you now think of all these new projects to try to use that information and leverage it into either doing things better, or reducing work that you do now which was actually hurting your progress (like weeding, tilling, etc).

My pleasure!

Look up Bokashi which is a Japanese technique and Jadam which is Korean. They are both anaerobic. When the PH gets to neutral, you can compost it. I suggest using worm bins to make vermicast. Worms turn coffee grounds into easily absorbable amino acids.

@@Horse237 Those are what makes me say what I said. Ingraham downright says Bokashi is crap in multiple videos and she is dead wrong.

That is amazing information thanks 😊

I see so much bashing of her and her work. I think it's important to remember she is still learning, too. She has changed her own mind on some things. She's been studying since the 70s and a lot has changed in the understanding of this field.

@@James-ol2fr I can appreciate that, but she has achieved a status where she is the definitive source of soil life in many people's eyes and many people accept what she says without question, so I try to raise those questions for public view. I can give her credit for the work she has done. I just think more care should be taken in some of the sweeping statements she makes.

It is, in terms of the microbiology, but all the byproducts are still there and the soil will also soak them all up. Some of them are very stable and will stay in your soil a really long time. Volatile siloxanes are a good example of this, which is basically volatized sillica. Hydrogen sulphide is a particularly nasty byproduct that will then contaminate your soils for a very long time. Acetic Acid (vinegar) is produced in a substantial quantity. Vinegar is often used as a weed killer because it kills plants. So although the soil microbiology will transition away from anaerobes over time, all those byproducts will get soaked up by the soil, and then put into the garden. The best way to convert even the byproducts is to apply oxygen to the liquid batch for as long as possible before it ever touches the garden. Another thing that can help is to mix biochar in, because the biochar will lock up many of these volatile compounds and make them inert (similarly to how toxic chlorine is bound up in salt (NaCl) and relatively safe). The only tricky part is that is the biochar itself must really be made properly so that all the volatile oils in the wood are burned off and recombusted.

Japanese beetles are brutal. Nothing here eats them, and they are always playing leapfrog.

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy I don't have grapes or raspberries but they're often on my pole beans. I'll usually pick off half a dozen on a sunny day from my 20ft long wall of pole beans. Which is not too bad compared to how many I've seen elsewhere. The cucumber beetles are harder to deal with for me because they're smaller which makes them harder to catch and see, and they're more likely to be hidden deeper in the vegetation while the Japanese beetles are at the top. What kind of nutrients to Japanese beetles return back to the soil? :P

@A R Meh, I have a decent amount of ladybugs and I'd be weary of introducing disease to my local ladybug population from releasing factory farmed ones. Also doubtful they'd eat Japanese beetles?

Thanks!