This Organic Pest Protection Can Stop Bugs From Attacking Your Plants

Alright! This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. Today we have another exciting episode for you, coming at you from our beautiful front yard garden here. And today we got a special guest, Josh from Boogie Brew. And today we're talking about a very important topic. We're going to talk all about frass. No, it rhymes with ass, but we're talking about frass, which is insect frass. And there's many kinds of frass, but today we have four unique types of frass right here that we're going to explain to you guys, and we're going to share our opinions on which one is best. Frass is, in my opinion, essential for your garden and super important that you use frass in your garden, especially if you're battling bugs, right. The frass, among many other things, can not only help feed the soil, nourish the microbiome in the soil, the rhizosphere of the roots, but more importantly also give your plants some pest protection against certain pests. So Josh, why should someone use frass in their garden? What are the main benefits, especially some of the testimonials you've heard from some of your customers, that you've sold your black frass product to? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I couldn't summarize it better than what you just said, that it is a powerful weapon in your own soil system, plant, bio, root, and garden zone in the battle against pests. And I've had customers contact me in tears, tears of joy. I had a dude from Illinois, yeah, crying tears of joy because he's in the middle of the corn belt with all this monoculture, chemotocracy crap farming going on around him, the GMO zone, and he'd had all these pests forever. And he tried everything. I mean, all the natural integrated controls. We already know the unnatural, the synthetic ones don't work. The bugs develop more resistance to the ever-escalating chemical assaults that are part of our chemotocracy. But in any case, no amount of all the other natural pest control methods put together had accomplished for him in his situation with the particularly stubborn population of bugs what frass, insect frass, black soldier fly frass in particular, B.S.F., let's just call it B.S.F. now, and frass, B.S.F. enhanced, B.S.F. enriched compost teas accomplished for him. Hence the tears of joy, Josh, I've had a bug-free year. So it's the chitin connection. And frass is the only, insects will harvest for you, it's the only actual plant-derived form of chitin. And unlike other animal manures, the insects are digesting this chitin-rich, it's coming from plants is my point, you know what I mean? This is plant-derived nutrition that's gone through the guts of insects, and it really isn't so much the poop as it is the total exudate exoskeletal package, it's the pupal stages. So there's this unique marriage that bugs are doing for us in nature as we all just pursue this battle against the bug, you know, madness, right? And not realizing how much they are our allies, and how much bugs perform for us, including the fertilization aspect of the soil-food-web-microbe cycle. It's like a complete full circle of bringing plant matter back to plants in the most beneficial form imaginable, you know, spiced up with the only plant-form available food of chitin. The only plant-source of chitin, I mean, you can get it from crustacean meal, and of course, I think hair, I've heard horse's hair, I could be wrong, it might be a protein. Nails. Nails, right, okay. Yeah, I mean, I've got it, I'm pretty tired, I had a long weekend, and I don't have it all mapped in my brain, but we have a really powerful document, a propaganda piece on frass, post the link down below. Link down below, and pinned in the first comment and description. Yeah, it's a really good PDF, it attracted the attention of an Israeli lady that, you know, plant scientist woman that wanted more info. It's a legit doc. Thank you Big Jim for editing it, and putting out a lot of good scientific literature about the BSF benefits. So I'll just read some parts about it, especially the chitin connection I keep talking about. So, chitin triggers a plant's immune response system, which causes the plant to then defend itself from pests and pathogens. It's a natural biopesticide known to kill the root-eating nematodes and their eggs, along with the fungal pathogens that can be in almost any soil. Now when plants sense chitin, and its associated microbially digested enzyme chitinase, in the vicinity, then they think that they're being eaten by insects. And so the plant protects itself by strengthening its cell walls. You know, there's this like, it's wonderful, it's just a strength, you know, cell-strengthening substance right here. I'd say it's like a bio-stimulant, because it's stimulating the plants to do a certain thing, and you know, strengthening cell walls, but also probably increasing nutrition at the same time, because it also has, you know, small fertilizer value. Right, and yeah, that's, I was about to get to that. You know, it's insect poop, but unlike bat guano, you know, bird poop, or worm poop, or even worm, well, castings, well, okay, well, it's similar, you know, there's a real similarity there, because I'm going to say that insect frass comes from plants. But yeah, it's coming, but it's coming from the plants that the insects are feasting on around the other plants. It's coming from the food forest, you know, for insect or plants or food forest. So, the food forest is feeding itself by its relationship with beneficial bugs. In this case, BSF, black soldier flies, because in nature, there is no better composting creature than the black soldier fly, I mean, it's the ultimate digester. So unlike, you know, bats or birds, insect frass actually comes from plants, and in an all-natural ecosystem, where there's no man-made chemical pesticides nearby, the insects will feed naturally, feed on naturally, and digest the vegetation around them, and then they'll give it right back to the plants in the form of nature's perfect, in this case, plant food. So plants are benefiting the insects, and the insects are benefiting the plants. And this is so overlooked with mankind's relationship with bugs, or non-mankind's disconnection with bugs. From nature. Yeah, from nature. Because the goal from bugs is just to spray some pesticide, you know, to kill them all. Yep. So, you know, the chitin will then fortify the plant from the inside out, an autoimmune response is then created, this is a signal, the plant produces its own natural toxins, which then fend off its natural enemies, like, you know, aphids on trees, and so on. And also against the fungal pathogens. Now the EPA backs us up on this. The EPA says that chitin and chitosan, you can see, read more about what chitin and chitosan, the chitinase connection, it's so scientific, defend against botrytis, powdery mildew, early and late blight, fungal pathogens in the root zone, i.e. root rot, and root-eating nematodes. Insect frass does not cause a plant to kill beneficial bugs. It actually attracts beneficial bugs, or beneficial nematodes. Again, you'll get more of the bennies and less of the bad guys. It's not classified as a pesticide. It's part of a powerful component in the entire IPM program, though. It's not classified as a fungicide, but it does appear to aid in the suppression of nasty mold spores, botrytis, root rot, etc. One more thing before we go back to chatting is, I'll read from the document, and like I said, link below, how and why does black soldier fly frass work so well with boogie brew? Why are we particularly… With compost teas, any compost teas, boogie brew or otherwise. With workhorse teas, yeah. Well, we presume that the BSF connection, as we call it, to the good guys, both your beneficial insects and your beneficial spores, is derived from a super-healthy, soil, microbiome, food web of life environment. That gets contributed to in no small part, John, by the massive chitinase levels that are released from frass with tea. Now here's where the tea, where the digesters in the tea come in so handy. If you wait, here's the thing with the tea. You have to wait, from what I understand and from what we've seen in our own in-house testing with the final, like, how earthy, sweet, and good does the tea smell? You have to wait for a tea to mature, because the frass has what we call dominator species in it that will attack all the bad guys. But while the tea is still reproducing, it's… And young. Yeah, and young. The population hasn't grown enough yet. Right. The population is very diverse, but it doesn't have the peak counts that you're going to get in a more mature tea. It can be non-beneficial, if not destructive, to add the black soldier fly frass, or insect frass in general, to your compost tea in those early stages. So always wait for a tea to mature. Now the digesters that are in your tea are going to welcome these chitin snacks, because they can handle this without the dominators that are in here overwhelming those delicate younger microbial populations. So it's all about timing. We learned this stuff from you all, from our own tribe of permacultural brewers. So we're happy to use insect frass, black soldier fly frass, as a valuable added-on component to a tea campaign. So one more thing. I'm sorry, I know you want to cut in, but I'm just, I'm tired, I ramble a bit. So we believe… Now what we've also seen is, like, when you pour this stuff around the plants and let it just sit there, it kind of works. It does work. We've seen aphids, like, scurrying away, you know, from grass that had it, and you sprinkled this on, and they hated it and ran. And we know it releases, nice and slowly, a lot of good nutrition to the soil. But it's also, apparently, somewhat easy to overdo it with frass. It's very rich. So what happens when you take a rich food and you digest it, all of its richness is more available without the taxation on the digestive system. And we believe that's what's happening with the magical relationship with black soldier fly frass being introduced to an actively aerated compost tea with the right timing. And then you get a much more benign frass. It's both rich, powerful, and yet less harsh, in a way. Does that make sense? It softens the impact, if there is such a thing. It's certainly, this is a very hard material. You add it to a tea, you're going to, you know, break it down really efficiently. So anyway, that's the non-sort of scientific mumbo jumbo. But there's a lot more info, like I keep saying, like a broken record, in this awesome propaganda piece about frass, and you should run a link below. Alright, Josh, so the question I have is, say you're brewing a five-gallon bucket of tea, at what hour do you put the frass in, and more importantly, how much? Depends on the tea. In Boogie Brew's case, which is already quite a rich tea, and an active tea that's ready under ideal conditions in 24 hours, so you'd add it at hour 18, I would use the same amount of frass as you did of your compost tea ingredients. So in Boogie Brew's case, it's one cup of tea ingredients, add a whole nother cup of the frass at hour 18, and then brew for another six hours. But if it's what we recommend people use more, their own workhorse tea recipes, simple vermi tea recipes, those take longer anyway. So that would be at hour 36 to hour 40-ish, you know, with another, you know, if it's a full two-day brew, get a day and a half, a day and a half in, and then onwards. Actually, sure. Yeah, links down below to the workhorse tea recipe, as well as the open source Boogie Brew compost tea recipe, I will disclose that I use the Boogie Brew, because I'm not going to mix up compost teas, and I'm just going to use what works, and what's worked really good for me, so definitely you guys want to look into that, too. But no matter what, any tea you make, you definitely want to add in the frass, for sure. You know, you really do. I would say, like in years gone by, when frass wasn't in Boogie Brew, because now we are adding a small amount to our Boogie. Not to overload it, though. Yeah, we add it to our Boogie base now, in small quantities, and that's just that, because it helps keep our base healthy, too, you know. We mix up a lot of base, we get, when we get our hands on good ingredients, like the Calijuana castings we got, took advantage of that, bought up a bunch, and now it's sitting in a perfect environment up in Humboldt, in the right temperature and everything, and maintaining great moisture levels. But guess what else is helping it? The wee amounts of frass, you know, three to four percent. We got to revisit open source compost tea. There's been some little tweaks, some tweaks, yeah. But in the quantities that I'm saying, it becomes therapeutic and beneficial to definitely frassify your teas, yeah. It would be an equal amount. So same with the vermi-tea. Vermi-tea would be that you're going to use more, you know, Boogie brew is very high octane and doesn't need as much volume of ingredients, so in a vermi-tea if you're doing, let's say for a five-gallon brew, maybe two cups of castings, another, whatever, quarter, half cup of my favorite sugar, the Sucana, or your molasses, whatever your carbohydrate you want to use. Of course, the catalyst ingredients, which are optional, which pretty much everyone uses, so maybe they're not optional, but some rock dust and kelp. Then in that, yeah, I would only go for like another whole cup, maybe, of the black soldier fly frass at the correct time of that tea's finishing, you know, maturation cycle. Yes. Cool. Alright, Josh. So, I mean, we had lots of rains here in California this past year and I know some people's grounds are really wet and especially TD, for example, I heard he's adding actually multiple types of frass to his soil to actually prevent some of the rot, root rot, actually, because the soil is so wet. Will that work? Absolutely. That was under our, we implored him, under our direction because his ground is soaked this year. Soaked. He's still sticking his moisture meter into that wood chip, you know, top layer that's in all the videos, and he's getting a 10 plus reading, you know, and they're going gangbusters, so we were worried, hysterical, because he liked to jump the gun and get started as early as possible, had really healthy starts outside, and was ready to put him in the ground, and I kept, and I smelled that dirt and I was just like, oh man, I'm just a little nervous. The potential is there for root rot. No plant likes to live in wet soil. So again, getting in there, sprinkling modest quantities of these frasses into his soil will just help that, and he did some neem seed meal, he did some worm tea, some vermi tea recipes, just an overall integrated blight control. Prevention versus like, and that's always best, guys. Prevention is worth 10 times more than the cure, right? So don't wait until you have a problem, do some stuff so that you don't have a problem in the future. Like, you know, I mix frass into my, my raised bed mix that I top off my bed with every year, so it's automatically in there, of course, I also add it to compost tea, you know, in the last few hours when I'm brewing it. He's really excited, he's dry farming only this year, John, and again, the frass was used as an armor plating early on, so they wouldn't get root rot, like I said, it's still really… And also bring up the pest resistance of the plants during their whole life, of course. And his, dude, the whole thing I just read about, you know, fortifying the tissue that's in that document, the chitin, literally like strengthening the cell walls, you know, of your plant's tissue structure. My God, like TD's plants this year, we've got some updates that we've been working on. It'll be coming soon. I know you always tell me, get a channel going, get a channel going. He's got a channel going, check it out down below, guys. It's not a channel, it's like a hit or miss, you know, I rely a lot on just appearing with you, you know, for getting, not exposure, but just the audience I crave, but, but yeah, we do have some updates that are pending, a little mini-series, you know, of what his plants have been doing and the dry farming reports this year. We're taking bets, how many waterings he's actually may have to do at the very end, you know, I'm saying no more than three to five, like supplementary waterings. But he's really excited. I mean, and you should just see, dude, the size of the stalks, my, I mean, it's stalk century there, it's, woof, I mean, you know, they always say the buds are as dense as the stalks are thick, you know, like that's a really good sign. All right, Josh, let's get back to the frass today. Yeah. So as you guys know, we have four different kinds of frass. So Josh, you want to explain the different frasses and tell us which is best? We have three kinds and a blend. Well that's the fourth one. Right. It's a different kind than these three. So we went from famine to feast with frass. We did. I mean, we ran out of our best frass vendor, couple of years worth. We always had to get large amounts because they were in Canada, in Terra, and Terra are no more. It's a sad story. Produced a great product, thermophilically composted, finished, final, plant diet only fed black soldier fly, like scientific formulated diet and production facility. Unfortunately, they went into it so big it'd be like Boogie Brew trying to go in big, go hard or go home and invest in a whole bunch of equipment, which unfortunately they, you know, anyways, it's their overhead of their equipment loans and everything. I'm not here to discuss why a business failed because they certainly made an amazing product and we were really bummed to lose the Canadian BSF. So you know, the famine was suddenly we didn't have any frass and we were starting to get hysterical. Now one of the reps at Terra said, Oh, one of our customers is setting up a black soldier fly farm in Texas and we'll let you know when that's available. And such a shame. All the research that they did, because our chemotocracy doesn't want this stuff to exist. You know, it's, it's too good and they can't make money off of any chemicals when an insect manufactures better ones for you for free. So or next to nothing if you buy this package version, right? But we went from that famine to a feast, to a black soldier fly feast of biological goodness. And you played a big part in it because I was calling my bro John, you know, crying on his shoulder, but people keep asking me, they've gotten their gardens just love the frass so much. And you found one of these, which one was it? I hooked you guys up with the red one. Yeah, I like that red kind of reddish. Yes. It's got a, it almost has a rooibos tea color. It does actually. Yeah. And they all smell a little bit different. Oh, they smell quite a bit different. Actually that one to me doesn't smell too bad. That one smells stronger. And then the third kind. Oh, that one smells the strongest, man. That's yeah. Yeah. It smells not the best. So you turned us on to this one and this is a company called EnviroFlight. And they're, they've already been selling a composted black soldier fly frass to the feed market. Guess what? This is a protein rich animal feed too. And when frass is, we had farmers, we had cannabis farmers in, in the Emerald Triangle, like up in Laytonville in Mendo, whose chickens had been suffering digestive disorders and dying. And they supplemented the chickens with the frass because a big part of chicken's diet is supposed to be soil grubs. And a lot of people don't give their chickens enough of that component of a chicken's diet. It's not just grain. What is it? Three items that are supposed to be fed for healthy chickens and grains like corn and so on that gets thrown out, you know, I mean scattered around and, and then bugs and one or the other. And grit. Grit. Stuff that go through their. Not grass maybe. I don't know, man. So yeah. We're, we're, we're, we're clueless because we're vegans. But anyway. Yeah. Educate us please on the three facets of a healthy chicken diet. And I know that frass can bridge that nutritional gap and it's very popular in the feed industry. For so this is a feed grade. This has actually been thermophilically gone. Anyway, going back to famine to feast. So oh, now we found a great frass, hit it off with the company. Took a minute to negotiate, figure out, you know, we had a bad winter getting a truckload of this from Kentucky. Wonderful product. I was very satisfied with the samples. Happy with the price. Happy to try, you know, tried this out finishing in tea. Great product. Wonderful replacement. Every bit as good as that which we had enjoyed from Canada earlier. Yeah. Well, around the same time, one of our best vendors ever, if not our best vendor, honestly down to earth loyalty over royalty, they too had a black soldier fly frass now in bagged form that was available all of a sudden. And that's this one. And this one's quite light in its weight. If you feel the weight on this and then you feel the weight. Yeah. Go ahead and feel that. Yeah. You just pick the jar. Wow. Yeah. The density like this is a lot more dense, a lot more heavy. This is more airy. Yeah. I would say airy. And this is kind of in between. Now, part of that might be that there's some more, a little more moisture. And this is also ground up. It's more fine. Whereas you've got some more bigger particulate, maybe some shell fragments or whatever they are. You know, the exoskeleton body things are lighter area, fluffier, denser, more protein rich, more of a food. And then this one, what do you call this? This has the most moisture content. This has the most moisture content and the most smell content by far. By a mile. By far. The one that really is the fresh smell. That one definitely smells like ass. Like ass. Yeah. Absolutely. No question. Sorry to use that French guys, but there's no other. Yeah. And this is, you know, a little bit more moist, a little bit like the denseness is actually in between these two guys. Actually, if you kind of combine these two, you're going to get this one. So this is the down to earth and this is also thermophilically composted. It has to be. I'm not a hundred. Don't quote me, but I'm almost sure. Yes. Because it's a approved label and everything. And I believe for them, Oregon Department of Ag or whatever the ag agency in their state probably requires these to be thermophilically composted, which is a shame. Well there's pros and cons. Pros and cons. Yeah. You're losing the fresher microbial population. Some of the microbes that are going to get damaged due to the high heat. Right. From when you compost. But then you end up with super microbes. And it's more digested. More digested. It's more digested. More broken down. Available for the plants potentially. Greater bioavailability. Of course. Yeah. And then this guy here. Which one is, how did you find this Josh? And what's this one? This is amazing. We just call this FF. Fresh Frass. This came to us. It never rains. It pours. A lady called me out of the blue from right here in Sonoma County. And she's a lady that runs a food distribution for poor people, a volunteer food networking campaign. And her part, her component is going around to get all the produce. She comes across more, you know, on the cusp of being spoiled. More throwaway produce than any person, you know, that I've met. I mean she showed me the mountain pictures of the mountains of stuff she gets. To the point where a lot of it is just, they can't give it away anymore. So what do you do with that? In your case you'd put it in compost bins. Well, she does and she gets an insect poop out of it. So she's set up her micro business. Part of that is not the finished frass itself, but is the pupae that are feedstock for animals. For which animals? For insects. Yeah. For insectivores. So for people with, educating, with amphibious creatures. I mean probably like you put like a thing full of mealworms out there, man. Like reptiles. What do you know? Probably like chickens. Like all these creatures that just peck in the ground to eat stuff, man. For the whole grub. They're going to love that grub thing. The whole lot. And she sells them. I mean technically we could eat them. She's, they, and. I wouldn't. But you could. If you're starving, I'd eat them. If you're in a survival situation, there's a lot worse things to eat. Absolutely. So yeah, her, whatever micro business she's made out of it is, at this point, as far as I'm aware, catering to the, that side of the business. To the people with their lizards, their amphibian, reptilian creatures, forgive me for sounding clueless. I've never kept any pets like that. But those people are very serious about the health of their pets. And so the whole skeletal remains, if not the living one, don't quote me. I don't know anything. I just. Yeah, you could do both. You could feed fresh mealworms or dried mealworms. I mean, I do know some things. It's kind of like dehydrated fruit or fresh fruit. Right. Oh, there you go. That's a good analogy. Yeah. So I said I don't know anything. The more we know, the more we don't know. So, but I certainly don't know anything to begin with, with, you know, the diet afforded to those kind of creatures. But I do know that the byproduct of that, this product is fantastic for your soil, for your plants, to everything we discussed and a whole bunch more. We could talk all day. So we're trying to be short here. Yeah, right. Good luck. So Josh, this is FF, fresh frass versus the thermophilically composted frass on this one for sure. And potentially this one. So why, you know, I know the living soil community wants the fresh stuff. They don't want the, you know, pre-digested stuff. So so what's up with that? Which one is better, Josh? Apparently Seth, you know, he does some social media for us and, you know, he's got his finger on the buzz button, if you will, of the living soil movement. He fields a lot of questions from Instagrammers and the word on the street is everybody wants the fresh frass. I'm going to say this now, you're going to be having to make your fresh frass yourselves. I think we got lucky getting a source of fresh frass from this lady. She's local and small and maybe we can keep the FF connection going. But I think due to legalities of selling, you know, packaged, labeled, registered products, because when you're with a fresh product, there could be naturally occurring levels of E. coli in this. The fact that there are all these dominator species that will outnumber, which is a pathogen, right? There could still be pathogens in here. Now we all know it's like a Bulgarian culture, you know, yogurt or a cashew yogurt. It's good and bad. You know, you got more good than bad guys. I mean, that's just nature. Like the soil, you know, has good and bad guys. Our guts got good and bad guys. Get a microbiome test. You will see that inside your gut. Hopefully you have more good guys and bad guys and some commensals that may go good or bad depending on who's hanging out down there. And if you look at gut health, there are people whose guts get so messed up and their intestinal wall malabsorption syndrome is unable to digest anything that the only thing that heals them is, I know it's gross, but it's an FMT, Fecal Microbial Transfer. Right, right. A fecal. Transplant. A fecal transplant. Is that what they call it? A fecal microbial? FMT. FMT, man. I thought it was FCT. A Fecal Coli Transplant. FMT. They made it sound a bit sexier. It used to be Fecal Coli Transplant. So you could, you know, look at it that way where that's the only way to colonize the gut with. Some good poop. With enough of those dominator species to now protect that gut. No amount of conventional. Probiotics. Or any. Fiber. Right. Antibiotics by, you know, pushed by big pharma. No amount of, yeah, conventional medicine. Antibiotics. You get in there. C. diff. Yeah. Rewrite the biotic map in the human gut with one of these fecal transplants. Well you, you know, you could, I always say you're, you're what you absorb in your gut. You're not what you eat. And it's the same with your soil. With that microbial web of life and what it then in turn feeds the plants that happen to dance in such a happy soil. If you do what Stephen Cantwell says and you invest in your main cash crop, which is your living soil, then you can't afford not. If you're serious about living soil, you can't afford not to use frass. Again, ideally make your own fresh frass. Yeah. But these, these are great products. This one I've noticed, you know, with all these loose bits in it, John, tell your audience why Lucy Goosey is quite good in soil, the particle size. Aeration, man. Like, you know, if everything's clumped together, you're like the water can't flow. There's not as much air pockets in between there to feed the good bacteria and whatnot. So actually this is kind of cool. Plus there's different particles, particle sizes. So like different, like if you are a family, right, maybe one kid like pizza, the other person likes hot dogs, you know, or like maybe some people like apples and spinach. Yeah. But like basically every person will like a different food, different bacteria, like things of different sizes. They don't always want the same food, you know, studying the microbiome in the human anyways. I've seen that like, man, just eating a different kind of fiber and changing out your fiber resistance starts makes a huge difference in your gut. And I don't even want to boggle the mind on how the, the soil microbes go to town, some like bigger size, some like lesser and each different particle in here with a different size is some other different component of it. I don't even know. B-S-A. Bacterial surface area. Yeah. And it's the same like in a tea. I don't want all the microscopic ground up. I don't want all the most fine sized particles in my tea. I mean some of the ingredients in Boogie Brew are just by their nature, like the soy aminos, you know, those are a spray dried product. So of course that's like a powdery consistency, very soluble. But the pillow of ingredients doesn't breathe if everything's just this compact, compacted sticky mess. So same in your soil. You know, that B-S-A, that bacterial surface area and different particle sizes of these chitin flakes. That's what I'm going to call these. These are chitin. These are jars of chitin flakes. Here you got corn flakes. I don't know. It's more than just chitin though because you could just grind up crab shells and have chitin flakes. But you see, this is, I would say activated chitin flakes because they've not only been broken down, they also have some biology in there for sure. Oh, so. And you know, I mean there's, there's so many different, there's several components of what I think makes this work, Josh. So getting back to these ones, like this is more loose, this is more tight, and this is like the fresh stuff. Yeah, and this one. What's better, man? Which one should people buy? I mean, I do. What would you say? I love the down to, I mean, down to earth is, you know, they have good buyers. They know what they're doing. I mean, that reminds me of like a loose leaf tea stuff, you know, that you'd add to fruit. Right, right. Yes. It's all, it's very dry, which is, makes it easier to ship. Nothing wrong with that. Certainly once it's reconstituted, you know, in, once it's, once it's put, put in contact with moisture, its characteristics will change. This one you can tell, they, they're pretty serious about feeding their flies. And getting a very consistent product. Very consistent. Very consistent product. Yeah, but there's still a lot of nice little. Yeah, I mean, there's some bits in there. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's, I mean, it's like a smaller than a ground coffee, in my opinion. Yeah. They were serious about the feed aspect of it, okay. And the labeling authorities are telling them, oh, you're going to have to call the feed version Envirofeed and the other one can be called something for soil, you know, come up with an agronomy name. So for a minute, they were going to call it EnviroPro for the, the soil food version and Envirofeed for the feed grade for animals version. But now I guess the labeling authorities have changed their mind and have told them, ah, you know, just call it one, one product. So anyway, La Petite Functionnaire, Petty Bureaucrats, whatever. Yeah. And now this one is just beautiful. I get why. Yeah. I mean, you, you'd smell the strength of it. It's like by smelling it. The richness. You're just like, whoa, this stuff is, is happening. There's a lot. There's some stuff going on in there. It's like. The humid, the humid content. It's like, yeah. It's like dark. It's very obvious. Very dark. And it's also a mixture of small particles and larger pieces, but not quite as airy as this guy. Maybe because the moisture content, a little bit higher. So we took your advice. You know, we went from famine of no BSF, no Boogie Black, like down to our last sack of Boogie Black. And now a feast of frasses that became available to us. We bought a whole bunch of this. So of course we're motivated to, to move the Envirofrass. Down to Earth are one of our best vendors and we're, we love this product. We can't make our minds. We really can't. So we decided, we conferred with John and he's like, you know what, Josh, what's better than this? A single. Right. Yeah. What's better than a single? What's better than a single is to basically combine all three of the right ratios. And then that's what they got now. Another new Boogie Frass, the newest Boogie Black is a blend now. Is a blend. Yeah. So like you're getting the best of both worlds. You're getting the denseness of this, the aeration of this and the freshness of this because it's not a thermophilically composted into one. And that's like my friend, you know, Don Weaver, when I asked him, Don, what's the best rock dust out there? Because I'm figuring there's only one, right? He's like, John, the best is combine all the different ones because this rock will have these minerals. This rock will have these minerals. And it's kind of like that in this. I mean, there's three main components that I did. I can figure of the different brasses. You know, maybe there's like a skeletal. So when the little larvae like leave the thing and they leave the, like the little shell, I'll call it a shell. It's probably not the pupae or whatever they want to call that thing. I don't know the stupid terms. Then you've got the composted matter that actually went through the bug that they pooped out the poop. So they're poop. So they got the shell matter of the poop. And then you, maybe you got some bedding material in there. I'd say all these three play a factor on how it's going to benefit your garden. Which one of these is the best? And what I've learned as I learned more in life, I learned as more I learned, the more I learned, I don't know. And then I'm like, and then I also see a lot of variation in a lot of the published science about many things. And there's not every year of only one type is always best. And a lot of scientists are like, man, the best is to have a varied diet. Don't just eat only meat. Don't just eat only fruits, man. Have some fruits and vegetables and grains and have a well-rounded diet. And that's what Josh is now going to do with the frass with mixing some of the three different best kinds of agricultural frass on the planet. I mean, I'd say if you were going to summarize the content of each of these, okay. And they all have, you know, all of the properties, but I'd say, I'd say, I'd say, but overall, you know, just my field base, not scientific response to what I think are in these. I'm going to say chitin, protein, biology. Ah, combine all three and you got the best of all the worlds right there. This to me. I'd agree with you, man. This to me has the most skeletal, little airy dried pieces of, of pre pubescent fly bone bits. And I think this has the, you know, the most amount of like carcass, so to speak. I'd agree. I mean, I've seen some fresh carcass in the bag you gave me actually. I call it carcassy. This is carcassy if such a word existed. This is food. I mean, this is a, a very protein rich food for, I would say that's kind of more like concentrated. Concentrated. This also has some. Browned up. It has, it has chitin for sure. Yeah, of course. Chitin for days. Um, a wonderful smell. I can tell it's great in teas, you know, this one. And then this one is just stupid. I mean, it's just, it's just so rich. It's just, wow, that, you know, foods can be too rich. So I think in a frass blend, there shouldn't be a whole bunch of this, even though I can virtually get this for free. I don't know. I, I want to help this lady. I'm not here to, you know, profit off of her enterprise. I'm here to help her. Maybe she'll turn this part of her business into its own frass product. Great. Oh, I love to support my vendors more than they, you know, they've done me a lot of favors like scratch each other's backs and all three of these are coming from great sources. So I'm very happy that this happened, you know, now we have a frass bonanza. Yeah. No. Instead of just a singular frass, now you're combining the best of all the worlds into, you know, and there's no other company out there that I'm aware of is combining frasses. They all have single source because it, I'll tell you guys, it's a lot easier to just buy a truckload of this and not even worry about having to source this one or source this one. And then also not even talking about that, talking about mixing it and having the workers, you know, your workers, you know, bless their hearts, like mixing it up and then bagging it up for you guys so you guys could have the blend so that you don't have to do yourself and buy this frass. And some of these frasses you can't just buy a bag of. You got to buy a truckload. Yeah. You might not even be able to know the person that, you know, makes this stuff because they're local and you know, they're not going to have an endless supply obviously. I mean, I, I'm one of those workers. I still mix tea. It's still a small business. I'm trying to keep it that way. But I think as frass gains in popularity and awareness, as the beneficial properties of bugs in general become more aware for humanity, I think we might see that happen. You know, I'm just taking your advice and running with it. Just like you told me to make the CBC, the Kaliwana Vermi Chow. It's funny, we have no sponsorships, no like economic relationship, you know. I come, I'm supposed to come and help him here, but the key word is supposed to. When was the last time that happened? You know. Been a while. Yeah. So, um, but he's, he's got a good business mind and you know, why not take his advice and do, do a blend, you know, and, and sell it at an honest price, which is honesty is our hustle. You know, we, we only sell on it. You got to raise your rates, Josh. I've been telling you forever, man. He's always complaining and shipping is going up. He's absorbing a lot of these costs, man. And you're like, dude, everybody else is, I mean, the whole economy is raising the prices on everything, man. You got to, you got to step up, man, so you can stay in business, man, and not work yourself to death. We, we, we are shipping a little slower now. It's not so much priority mail as it is just parcel select and no one's complained. So that's helped us keep our prices down a little, but yeah, it's getting ridiculous, but that's a different topic for a different conversation. The emotional reward I get out of selling products like this to intelligent permacultural minded people is the, is much better than any bank account I don't get to keep at the end of the day. You know, as I have always said, the more sales I seem to do, the more back taxes I appear to owe, but no government agency can take that emotional bank account that folks, your tribe, the GYGers have really, it's, it's wonderful, you know, to be in this journey together. I've learned so much about my own products from you all. This is a big open source bed of information and we've got to keep sharing it. Money's like manure, spread it around in the right places. The same with this knowledge for us to transform our world using whatever natural means we can. Absolutely, and just basically giving people options to make their plant's health stronger without having to buy the chemicals and all the different products that people spray that actually hurt the soil, hurt the animals and plants on the planet and hurting the microbes more importantly and just screwing up the world. Yeah. So Josh, I mean, you're doing definitely a good job to get these natural products. It can be quite hard to find. I mean, not, you can't find these at like a big box store, maybe even most nurseries don't even sell this. Maybe some hydroponic stores will be likely selling one kind or another and in some cases some of those frasses are actually really not good quality in my opinion because they're just like mealworm frass, which I also get and have videos on. So Josh, to sum this video up, you know, last question for you is, you know, what's the final words of wisdom you'd like to leave with people today about the frass before we sign off? The final words of wisdom on the frass, low and slow, just like Chris says in one of the Soil Life Summit series that Seth has adopted that low dosage, slow digestion release, but definitely frassify your teas. Use regularly, integrate it into your total integrated, not just pest management, but soil food web, soil food web feasting program. That's yeah, frass is indispensable. It's become that way. That's it. That's my final word on it. Absolutely. And what I'd say is I put it into every transplant hole when I plant a baby seedling. So link down below to my video where actually I make up my batch with the frass in there and all that. How do they do with that? They deal with it okay? Yeah. Small amounts. I mean, I'm not putting a ton of this stuff in there because I do. I do worm casting, some, some soil blend mix that I fill my raised beds up with, rock dust, and then usually some of the frass, man. It's small amounts. It's pretty rich. I know. Yeah. I know. So less is more. Yeah. Don't add too much. But yeah. Anyways. And Josh, if somebody wants to get the hookup deal on the Boogie black frass, how can they? Wait. We still give away about as much as we sell, you know, if you add a note at checkout, please add a sample frass. And you'll get a free size like this, right? Yeah. Whenever we, whatever. Well, yes and no. If it fits. Yeah. If it fits, it ships. You can add a note, you know, to try some. And yeah. Well, of course we have it available. And if you want, I will do, I haven't done a video with you where there's some sort of special GYG deal in a minute. We'll do a boogiebrew.net slash GYG. All right. We'll get it on the, we will. For the special Boogie brew hookup price for you guys. I think there is boogie black is on the GYG page. So yeah. Check the GYG page boogiebrew.net slash GYG. Of course, you know, don't, I mean, don't expect us to always be able to just give it away for free, but you know, it didn't cost us a fortune for this stuff. Why not spread some of the love? I like it. So they can, people can see the results. They're going to get like, wow, I got to keep using this because I mean it works. It does work. And that's what's going to happen. It's like when you get a Costco and you get a little sample of something and then you buy it. You can, yeah. Just add a note. I want to try your frass if it's available, but we don't want to over promise and under deliver. And if we're unable to get it in there, but just, you know, it might happen, might not. It doesn't hurt to ask. And I don't mean to sound fickle. I'm just being realistic. All right. It's hard when you run a small business, I wear many hats. All right, Josh. So great episode today. Have you guys out there in YouTube land, love this episode. Hey, please be sure to give this video a thumbs up. The more thumbs ups, the more it'll help out the YouTube algorithm. Get this video out to more people so that they can learn about the natural alternatives to pesticides by making your plants health stronger. More importantly, share this with other people that are organic gardeners into living soils and into growing their own herbs, vegetables, and fruits so that they can increase the health of their plants and get rid of some of those toxic pesticides and other products that are normally being used in those industries. Also be sure to click that subscribe button right down below so you don't miss my new upcoming episodes. I'll be coming out every five to seven days. You never know where I'll show up or what you'll be learning on my YouTube channel. Make sure you click the little bell to get notified as many videos come out. And finally, be sure to check my past episodes. My past episodes are a wealth of knowledge. Over 1,700 episodes at this time on this channel dedicated to teach you guys all about growing your own fruits and vegetables in the most natural way possible. So with that, my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. We'll see you next time. And until then, remember, keep on growing.