Why Worm Castings Work Real Farm Results Science Explained

Alright, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, today we have another exciting episode for you. Today I'm once again at the Lion Fruit Farms. This is a regenerative farm here in Homestead, Florida, where it's like zero waste, guys. This is one amazing farm. I'm just showing you guys an element of the farm, which is the worm castings, and the worms, which is really the primary source of nutrition they use for their farm to increase their yields, increase their harvest, and this is just not hearsay, guys, this is proven by science. So that got me even more excited making this episode for you guys, showing you guys the benefits of using worm castings that I've been preaching forever, guys. But now, in this episode, we're going to have a special interview by a doctoral candidate that literally has written her master's thesis on worm castings and the benefits it can make in your garden. So first up, let me show you guys how they grow the worms here at the Lion Fruit Farms. Alright guys, so you guys can see the worm farm behind me, literally it's like a barn style structure with just the overhang, so it can't get rained on, it is protected from some of the elements, but it has open sides, it's on a concrete pad, very clean, very nice, and they have basically like 8 of these, just about 32 feet long, I think 2 or 24 foot bins, where they basically make tons of worm castings, right. This is probably the largest worm casting producer in Florida, with this caveat, made for agriculture organic uses, right. They've done studies here using these very worm castings that will increase growth, increase plant nutrients, polyphenols and all these other flavonoids and different compounds in plants so that they can be more nutritious, and they've proven it with these worm castings, right. They sell this for a very affordable price, a dollar a pound at the local farmer's market or for agriculture, you could buy in larger quantities. In addition, besides the worm castings, they also make a worm casting tea that actually they pump into their irrigation system to water this whole farm, which is completely amazing. So, next up, let me go ahead and show you guys how these worm bins operate. Alright guys, so you guys can see this worm bin, it's basically a long bed, it's like 4 feet wide and I think this one's like 32 feet long, and you can see they've got basically like these sprayers on the outside, I think they're just going to come on any is in this bin, they basically feed the worms, finish compost, very important guys, like they don't just put food scraps in there, if you feed food scraps directly to worms, you could get bugs, flies, all kinds of different things happening, maybe the E. coli and seeds may not break down, which would not be good for the castings, so they compost everything first, one of the trade secrets here, so I want you guys, if you guys do have a worm bin, compost your food scraps first, let it go through the thermophilic cycle, and then feed that to the worms, now besides just the fruits and vegetables scrapped and farm waste that they feed to the worms that have been composted, they also add mycelium, or the spent mushroom blocks that are from their mushroom farm in the building next door, which is amazing, and when they started doing that, it upped the game of the castings, made the castings even better, so you guys can basically see this whole bed, and I want to show you guys how many worms are actually in this bed right now, alright guys, so I want to show you guys how many worms are actually in here, there's a lot, I mean you can see they have a nice cover, there's like a little bit of cardboard on top, which is really good to feed your worms, but if I just move this to the side, I want to show you guys a close up on how many worms are in here, when I just move that stuff to the side, there are tons of worms in here, this is insane, alright check it out guys, I can move this to the side, and look at that, there's just tons of worms all moving in there, there's just like so many worms, they probably have millions and millions of worms in here, they eat their weight in food a day, and they're all near the top where they basically get fed, so many worms growing here at the farm. Alright guys, so one of the most important things when keeping worms is to have the right climate and right environment, right, so earthworms like pretty much the temperatures we like, we don't like it too cold, we don't like it too hot, and the earthworms like it cool as well, that's why they have this literally under shade here in South Florida, and the other thing, very important is, whoa, I'm getting sprayed, the other thing is keeping the humidity right, worms got to have the right humidity, and check it out, they miss this, this is a nice humidity man, I'm cooling down in the hot Florida sun, the worms got a nice day here, staying nice and humid, this comes on 8 times a day so they can stay cool, also have the moisture level they need, and if you scrape this back you'll see they're mostly in the top where it's really moist, right, they're not where it's super dry, because they're going to dehydrate if they're too dry, the other thing, as they add food in the top layer, the worms migrate to where the food is, right, and that's so that the bottom layer is free of the worms so they can actually do their harvesting. Alright guys, so now I want to share with you guys more about these special bins that are literally designed so they can literally just scrape off the first couple of inches off the bottom to harvest, all the harvest can go into this tray, which sometimes they do do, but more often than not they will use this tray to collect the leachate, which then very important guys, if you want to collect the leachate from your castings, this is what when you run water through your castings, it creates leachate, this is not the same as compost tea or casting tea, you should heavily dilute the leachate, like 10% leachate, 90% water, and then put it on your ornamentals, they don't even recommend using the leachate on food production crops because there can be E.coli and other things that didn't get broken down in there, I know, you know, in the past I've visited places that do put it on crops and stuff, but my personal opinion is that I would not put leachate on my crops that are important to me, I mean if you got just landscape trees and stuff, yeah fine, but once again make sure you dilute it down, I mean they did germination studies and if they had more than 10% of the leachate, the seeds did not germinate, so that tells you a lot, the leachate tends to be very acidic, anyways I want to show you guys what it looks like underneath here, and inside this machine there's like a motor that basically pulls a pulley that has a blade that is underneath the, like it's basically like a stock panel that basically just skims off with a knife, like the bottom inch and then it falls in, that's one of the ways they harvest here, and when they need to harvest a lot of material at once, they'll basically just scoop off the first few inches off the top, which contain all the worms, and then they'll just harvest the whole container, so they can have lots of worm castings, and I'll show you guys what was harvested just recently out of one bin, anyways let's take a look underneath this worm bin. Alright guys, as you guys can see this is underneath the worm bin, you guys can see since they just watered, now it's basically just dripping, you can see there's like in this bin here, there's like all the castings plus the liquid, the leachate, and you can see all the worm castings down here, there's like no worms in here, because once again the worms go where the food is, which is up near the top, which is at least like a foot and a half up, and once again they'll just scrape the little bit off the bottom fully automatic to get the castings if they want to just harvest a little bit, that being said they have a big demand for castings, so normally they just harvest the whole bin at once. Next I want to show you guys how much castings literally one of these bins can make. Alright guys, check it out, this is the pure worm castings out of their system, once again this is using the composted food and plant materials plus the mycelium blocks, and this is some really nice black worm castings, and very important man, when you pick up castings, you smell them, it should have a nice earthy smell, it shouldn't like smell foul or rank or anything, the top's a little bit dry, but if you dig into this a little bit, really nice moisture content, that's another thing that's very important, you want to have the right moisture content, you don't want to let the castings dry out or get too wet either, you don't want it sopping wet, so I like that they store this out of the sun, and when they bag this up for homeowner use, they actually put it in burlap sacks so they can't breathe, that's very important, don't buy castings in a sealed plastic bag because the castings are still alive, they can't breathe, they're not going to be as beneficial, say if you buy them at a big box store, then if you get them from a local farm that is producing them, you buy the castings and instantly you use them to make compost tea or you instantly add them into your garden to get the most benefit. Speaking about benefits, let's learn about the benefits of the worm castings proven by science, this is not bro science guys, they've done studies here at this very farm to prove that these worm castings work. So guys the way to get the most benefit from the worm castings or the vermicompost may not be just to add the worm compost to your soil or even to your plant hole like I do, but it is actually to make worm casting tea, some people might call it compost tea, this is actively aerated tea that is basically oxygenated, so you can hear the pump in the background, they're boiling this huge brewer that's 1050 gallons which is impressive, what they have in this brewer, this brewer basically can get diverted through a pump here, they turn the valve and it actually goes into the irrigation system for the whole farm, so literally they can dump this out and put it into the irrigation water and then it gets sprayed out on the entire farm just by literally a few controls, so they don't need to empty this out, put it in a tank and they go around and spray it, they direct soil drench it in when they're feeding it, of course direct soil drench is one way to apply but it can also be applied via boiler spray to the leaves that can also be a benefit. Of course somebody at home may use a smaller kind of brewer like this, of course I have my own favorite brewer, I'll put a link down below to that video if you guys want to learn more about it, if you guys want to learn more about the best compost tea recipe, link down below, but the compost tea recipe they use in this, these studies that I'll share with you guys in a second are just basic worm casting tea recipes, let's go over and share with you guys the studies that they have proven with the worm casting tea. Alright guys so you guys can see some white boards behind me and these are all the studies they did here at the farm using the very worm castings that you guys just saw, there's a study on the effect of vermicompost and vermicompost tea on sweet corn physiology and fall armyworm infestation, they also have one on the influence of vermicompost tea on secondary metabolite production in tomatoes, that you guys should be knowing, and then also the effect of compost and vermicompost tea on the physiochemical characteristics of turmeric, so we're going to go over each one of these at a time to show you guys the gist of these studies. Alright guys so I'm just going to go ahead and read you guys part of this study, basically it says the state of Florida ranks first in the nation market for fresh tomato production, but it says although profitable tomato cultivation requires high input pesticides to support the plant life cycle, in a survey conducted by USDA Florida tomato farmers indicated that pesticides were applied to 80% of the farm land, guys so if you guys are buying tomatoes from Florida, they've probably got pesticides on them unless they're organic, then they probably have organic pesticides, nonetheless while the use of pesticides ensured short term production, application could have long term unprecedented effects on human and environmental health, meaning degrading the soil, messing up the soil microbiome, a possible alternative to chemical pesticide usage might be vermicompost and vermicompost tea, so that's what they basically researched in the study, hey how can we use vermicompost which is a naturally made product, not made in a factory, it's not going to pollute the earth right, to increase the benefits of tomato and maybe even make the plant stronger so they don't need pesticides, so that you don't have to spray pesticides and pollute the land or even put toxic chemicals on food that actually people are going to eat. So let's go over to the conclusion of this study, so we're just going to summarize the conclusion because I could read all this and you guys are going to get bored, basically the 20% tea treatment induced physical and chemical changes in tomato plants and it says the treated plants experienced significantly greater biomass and improved concentrations of chlorophyll, yield and soil pH, so literally by adding the worm casting tea, you got bigger plant growth and more chlorophyll and yield, so more tomatoes, and improved the soil pH, it also, the treatment also had a strong influence on the melavolonic acid pathway, as a result the terpenoid production was altered, changes in terpenoid production increased, B felonin adrenaline and lycoprene accumulation while decreasing sterile concentrations, so basically what they're saying in layman's terms is that they made the tomatoes more nutritious, I mean some of you guys out there may really focus on your terpene production, whether it's in tomatoes or other plants, medicinal plants, right, that's what worm casting can do, that's why some of the best herb growers out there use of course worm casting tea because they know it makes a difference, you make a higher quality fruit. Next up, vermicompost tea treatments also affected phenylalonic compounds, something I'm very interested in, specifically the phenylpropanoid pathway, low and moderate vermicompost tea treatments have the highest total concentration of phenylalonic compounds, so basically what are phenylalonic compounds, these are the compounds that we eat that are in the food that give us health benefits, that's how I'm just going to sum it up for you guys, there's so many different polyphenols and they all can do different amazing things for us, and once again, this is why I recommend compost tea, because it increases your quality of your produce that you're growing to have higher quality, and these polyphenols also translate literally into better tasting tomatoes, not only are they more nutritious, they're also better tasting, it also says that some fatty acids were influenced by vermicompost and basically says this would mean that plants are using a high concentration of fatty acids to deter pest infestation, so basically they're saying the vermicompost tea makes your plants more resistant to pest infestation, right, so you don't have to use pesticides. So yeah, that's the basics of this tomato study, you basically got some built in pest protection, you got better crop production, and you had higher quality fruits that are potentially more health beneficial. Next up, let's look at the study on corn, because I know a lot of you guys grow the corn and a lot of you guys have pest problems with corn. Alright guys, so this next study is on basically the vermicompost and vermicompost tea, so they not only added the castings, but they also did the tea on corn to check out the fall armyworm, which is like a little worm that basically gets into corn and it kind of eats the corn up, right. Nobody wants that, and also too, nobody wants pesticides that are sprayed on corn, or even worse, some corn makes its own pesticide, which is terrible in my opinion, that then people end up eating or animals end up consuming. So let's find out what this vermicompost and compost tea did to the corn. Alright guys, we're just going to jump down to conclusion, it says the treatment of vermicompost and tea can protect sweet corn from the armyworm attacks. So this is like literally, the plants were able to make literally their own pesticides when they have the right nutrients or the right stimulation to do so. It says the protection against the armyworm can be attributed to the fact that the vermicompost and its tea extract improved sweet corn's physiological properties and made the plants less susceptible to disease, and it says the vermicompost, 3 tons per acre, increased the rate of growth on the sweet corn, and the plants reached tasseling faster compared to the other treatments, so they grew quicker, so the vermicompost tea application gave the highest biomass and best yield of corn compared to other treatments, and all the treatments gave healthy sweet corn. So they have the pictures of it, as well as all the different graphs, and I'll put links down below, guys, if you guys want to review any of these studies yourself, but basically what we're learning is that compost tea works, right, it can help you reduce pesticide use and increase the yield, increase the food quality. Of course, there's many different pathways in the plant, and once again, doing some stimulation from the vermicompost, whether it's from a nutrient or some microbial, or even some kind of hormetic stress, causes the plant to react to create more of these, you know, plant compounds, you know, in tomatoes it may make them more nutritious, in the corn some of these compounds may deter the pests, that's how this works, which we'll learn more about in just a minute. I think last up, I want to go into the study on turmeric, one of my favorite foods to eat, which a lot of you guys out there should eat more, it's one of the most anti-inflammatory foods that you can grow in your garden. Alright guys, so this last step I'm going to go over is about the effect of compost and vermicompost tea on the physicochemical characteristics of turmeric. So basically it says, turmeric is a tropical annual crop grown to produce spices and pharmaceutical products. Turmeric's medicinal properties can be attributed to the production of curcuminoid compound groups, the production of secondary metabolites such as curcuminoids are highly dependent on fertilizer regimes. Previous studies on the usage of compost and vermicompost tea in model crops suggest that addition to these, organic fertilizer could alter secondary metabolite production and yield. This is what it's all about guys, this is why I recommend things like rock dust, things like the vermicompost tea, the worm castings, because basically plants make these metabolites or secondary plant metabolites, tomato can make up to 200 plant metabolites, and depending on the nutrients in your soil, the biology in your soil, the plant could make up to 200, maybe it only makes 100 because you're feeding just like some miracle grow fertilizer, which I don't recommend, but if you have it firing on all the cylinders and give everything the plant needs, then it could make up to 200, and once again it'll make 200 in different ratios that the plant deems necessary, but only if the plant has the nutrients as well as the biology and whatever else it needs, and that's why I believe worm casting tea is so important. So let's learn what this study found out. Alright guys, so jumping down, the conclusion says the addition of compost and vermicompost tea positively affected chlorophyll and biomass production in turmeric, I mean that was similar in the other study as well, and it says overall rhizome yield was positively affected by the addition of both fertilizers. Plants treated with the vermicompost had the heaviest rhizomes, what did they say, and they said basically they're heavier, they produce more turmeric roots to harvest, and this is the most important part in my opinion, curcuminoid concentrations were similar across all treatments including the control group. This dermomethodroxocurcumin and curcumin concentrations were greatest in the comp treatment, which is the compost treatment, and the desiccum and curcumin were highest in the worm treatment. So basically what they're saying is the compost and the vermicasting, each of one of them increased a certain kind of curcuminoid, which one is more important to have, I don't know, I would say add compost and the vermicompost and you're going to get high on both of them. So the best of both worlds, and it says further research is needed to understand the effects of compost teas on different turmeric secondary metabolites. So basically they're showing some of the metabolites that went up doing the compost tea. So it's amazing that the Lion Farm here allows students to come in to do these studies on their farm using their worm castings, proving that their worm castings really work. Next up we're lucky today to have a doctoral candidate, the girl that actually wrote this study, Daphne, here that I'm going to interview so we can learn a lot more about these studies as well as her work for the last eight years of learning, researching about compost tea and the vermicastings and why it is so beneficial and you should use it in your garden. So now the pleasure of interviewing Daphne Seguino, she's a PhD doctoral candidate, she's going to graduate here later this year from FIU University here in Florida from the agroecology department, very important, go agroecology, I'm so glad for you guys doing your stuff, we need more people doing that. Alright so Daphne, you wrote these studies on the tomatoes and the turmeric using the worm castings, why did you choose to use worm castings instead of chemical fertilizers for example? So I'm originally from Puerto Rico and I was there during Hurricane Maria, and after Hurricane Maria passed, it actually created the collapse of more than 70% of all of our agricultural goods and services that we had there. So I thought to myself, how can I improve my island and make it more resilient? What can we do? And then I discovered sustainable agriculture, originally I actually went to college to study wetland science, but I actually fell in love with agriculture later because we did work adjacent to a lot of agricultural fields and I was seeing all of that pollution that was coming in. So I was already coming back from a destruction of my home and then I saw all of this pollution happening everywhere and I thought, what could we do? And the number one thing that we could do is actually change the way that we fertilize and manage our crops. So that was the main interest that I had. And then one day I read this paper by a really famous scientist, his last name is Arancón, he actually works out of the University of Hawaii, and he inspired me totally by saying that vermicompost can be used not only to fertilize plants, but to actually chemically change them as well without having to change their DNA. And that sparked an idea in my head. We can make food not only taste better, grow better, but also make it more sustainable and adaptable to different, not only weather issues, but also different things that we might see as stressors in our plants. Wow. That's amazing. I mean, people that have been growing some medicinal herbs know these things because they know the herb that they grow with a worm casting tea is just better stuff. So what has your research showed, say for the tomatoes for example, what did you see that was most eye-opening for you that you did not expect? Okay, so one of the main things that I did see and that I did notice is that when I would fertilize my tomatoes with this vermicompost tea, I noticed that the ones that I fertilized with the highest concentration of vermicompost smelled more. And I thought to myself, maybe I'm going crazy. So then I took tissue samples throughout the entire study, and then I tested those and I saw that I was actually not insane. The plant was smelling different because we actually chemically changed the plant. We actually increased a specific compound called beta phylandrin and beta phylandrin is actually a neurotoxin for beetles. This means that the plant not only was growing better, but it was actually learning to defend itself better. When you apply vermicompost, it actually activates this thing called the systematic induced resistance because the plant thinks that it's being attacked. And so that's what vermicompost and the microbes within vermicompost are actually doing. They're activating the system, basically the immune system of the plant, and the plant starts producing all these secondary metabolites or phytoalexins that actually help them defend themselves better. The great thing about these phytoalexins is that they're also used as pharmaceutical products as well. So in combination with that, that's why then I started researching medicinal plants to see if we could change them without modifying their DNA at all, which is a really big thing now that they're doing with CRISPR. But we don't really know the unintended consequences of changing the DNA or genetic structure of a plant. So this is a better way of doing that and getting the results that you actually want. Well, to me, I don't think it would be like we're not changing the DNA of the plants. We're just basically allowing it to fully express itself, that maybe it should be fully expressed itself, because in nature they'd be earthworms, they'd be pooping and peeing or doing whatever, and then they'd be in the soil, and now we've killed all the earthworms in the soil so that the plant can't get fully expressed, so we're just kind of helping it along. Like us, like humans, if we eat a junk food diet, we're not going to have all the nutrients we need. We're going to be sickly. We're going to get more sick. We're going to get more colds. But if we eat a high-nutrient diet, hopefully growing the worm castings and spraying the worm casting tea to get all these amazing plant nutrients in us, then we could have, we know through hormetic stress, actually, that some of the foods that we eat will give us makes our immune system stronger as well. So we work literally like the tomatoes, so we're literally just giving the plant what it needs so it could fully express itself, because think about it, a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago, tomatoes did not have pesticide you'd spray on them. They made their own plant defense chemicals that defend themselves when they're growing in their natural environment that we didn't bulldoze the topsoil and erode the topsoil and then spray all these pesticides and herbicides and fungicides and chemical fertilizers that can disturb the soil microbiome. So Daphne, tell me more about now the turmeric study that you did, because this is more up my alley. I mean, I love tomatoes and a lot of you guys love tomatoes, but I want you guys to get more into turmeric. Turmeric is, you know, has the curcumin in it. They sell turmeric, you know, whatever curcumin supplements you could buy at the store for a lot of money. I would say just grow your turmeric and then eat it often or even, you know, use curry powder like the Indians do. There's been a lot of studies with the Indians because they eat a lot of turmeric, they have like a lot better anti-inflammatory markers in them. But yeah, what did you show in your study when you tested the vermicompost and casting tea with the turmeric? So something that's really interesting and something that people should always remember is that vermicompost does not work the same for every single plant. So we did see some things that we saw in other studies such as increased chlorophyll production, and chlorophyll production is a really good marker for plant health. So the more chloroform that your plant is producing or chlorophyll, the better it is meeting. But we also saw an increase in the rhizomes, which is the fruiting body, it's actually a stem, but it's the fruiting body of the rhizome and it's what we harvest. However, we didn't see any direct chemical effects on the plant. And this is because vermicompost does not affect all kinds of compounds, it mostly affects volatile compounds. So think of the things that you can smell and taste, that's what vermicompost is affecting the most. And volatile compounds are also the compounds that are mostly used in defense as well. I see. So did you check the rhizome nutrition and the compounds in that or did you check the leaf nutrition? We did the rhizome specific. I see. So I think that maybe if you potentially did the leaves, because normally things might eat the rhizome, but maybe the leaf might have different compounds that are increased through the compost because that's the area that usually bugs, above ground bugs, which I suppose there's probably more above ground bugs than below ground bugs, I don't know. So that might make a difference and that'd be interesting. Yeah, no, 100 percent, especially because you can also extract pharmaceutical compounds at a very low amount from the plant, from the top part of the plant. And you could eat, I mean, I eat my turmeric leaves, I like to eat baby leaves, they're good, just add them in a salad. So that's very interesting. So yes, you could still get a higher yield, but in turmeric's case, with testing the rhizome, you didn't necessarily get a higher. We got a higher rhizome yield, but we didn't get a higher percentage of curcuminoids. The curcuminoids didn't change, but indirectly, we had more chemical yield because we had more tissue to extract. I see. So it still was a benefit, so you did have more compounds just because it was bigger compared to the one that was smaller that obviously would have less. Yes, correct. But the percentage was the same across both of them. Yes. I see, cool. And then, so, let's learn more about the specifics of these studies, like how did you apply the vermicompost tea, like what was the specific recipe, for those of you guys that want to know the recipe they use in these studies. Okay, so for vermicompost tea, it's a very simple production, and we actually did the same for our studies. So what we did, we did a 1 to 20 ratio of vermicompost to water, and then we actually just put it inside of a canvas bag, and we also have a mesh bag that we bought from Compost Tea Labs. They're actually really great. We love buying from them. So we actually dunk that for 24 hours within a bucket, and then we aerate it for 24 hours straight. It's really important when you're making your tea that you make sure that you're doing it somewhere where there's cover, and also it's not very hot, because if not, it'll start getting anoxic, which means that there'll be decreased oxygen, and it'll start smelling really bad. And if your compost tea is smelling bad, you do not want to use that, because that means that you're producing bad bacteria in there that could potentially be harmful to you if you consume them. So you literally just used the water and the vermicompost, and you didn't add like molasses, you didn't add any sugars, you didn't add all these fancy things that my friends at Boogie Brew Compost Tea would do. No, and you don't really have to do that. You can if you want to, and it really just depends on what you're trying to grow and what benefits you're trying to see. So for example, I did actually conduct another study with basil using different organic amendments mixed with the vermicompost tea. And so we did fish emulsion, and we also did kelp, and we found that both of them are actually great, but they do something very specific. They actually boost vermicompost effects, specifically with the solubilization of nutrients, which means that with the kelp and also the fish emulsion added to the vermicompost tea, it'll create an explosion of microbiology within your vermicompost tea. And once you apply it, these microbes go right to business, and they start solubilizing everything that's in the ground. So your plants will actually be absorbing these nutrients so fast that you could actually increase application. Wow. So do you think that's better than, so you think adding things like the soluble kelp and the, was it just fish emulsion, is a good thing, and people should do that instead of just making it plain, and that could be a better benefit? I think that just depends what you're going for. The fish emulsion does smell a lot, so I definitely don't recommend you do that in your house, and it could definitely attract some pests. So I would be careful with that one. But the kelp doesn't really have any smell, so that I would recommend. However, when you are using the kelp, make sure that you don't use too much of it because it does contain salt, and so that could actually have, you know, diminishing returns. So if you use, even fish emulsion also is considered salty because a lot of these things are harvested directly from the ocean. So if you don't know exactly where these things are coming from, I don't recommend you actually using them just because of that salt. But if you do, or if you make the fish emulsion yourself specifically, and you know what's going into there, then you should definitely mix it. But for me, I honestly think that the vermicompost tea by itself worked the best. You just add these organic amendments to boost other things. So for instance, fish emulsion worked really well to increase the root structure of the plants. Maybe in basil we don't want that, but in a crop such as turmeric where we're harvesting below ground, it would be perfect to actually add that kelp. Yeah, but in some cases, like just if there's bigger root growth, that's more opportunity for nutrients to kind of get uptaken to the plant later, right? Yes, it is. But the problem is that again, you can have these diminishing returns. So because we saw an increase in root structure, we actually saw a decrease in foliage. And that's what we would harvest in basil. So that's why I always say it really just depends on the plant that you're doing. I know it's not the best answer for everybody, but it definitely depends. So you should definitely experiment a little bit in your garden and see what works best. So the question is, how did you add in the fish emulsion and the kelp to the casting tea? Did you make the tea and then add it in at the end, or did you add it at the beginning so that it got to go through the whole brewing process? So there's two ways that you could do it. But for my experiment, I did add it at the beginning and this was to boost the microbes in there and to keep them alive for the entire brewing time, which is 24 hours. What a lot of scientists have discovered lately, especially in making vermicompost tea and compost tea, is that the microbes will eventually die. So you actually have to add either more vermicompost, which is what we do here after a 12 hour brew, we'll take out the original vermicompost that we put in and we'll add it to soil mixtures and then we'll put new vermicompost in. And that's because we want to keep those microbes alive. So if you're not adding more vermicompost or if you're not adding other organic amendments, this is something that can happen to you if you don't have enough vermicompost initially. So I'm in the understanding that brewing compost tea should be a maximum of 24 hours because once again it peaks out and then once again the bacteria and all the microbes kind of go down after that, unless maybe you re-boost it. So how long did you run the compost tea aerated for? Still for 24 hours. Even by boosting it, you want all of those microbes. You don't want your microbes to start dying out. So if you keep adding things, that will continue feeding these microbes and that will continue proliferating these microbial communities that are beneficial. If you don't do that, then E. coli bacteria and other deleterious bacteria will actually start proliferating because they are anoxic, which means that they live in a low oxygen environment. Alright, cool. So yeah, so I guess the new thing we learned today is if you're making a 24-hour compost tea after like 12 hours, change out the castings or your compost tea that you're using and put a new batch that will boost it even stronger, right? And the other thing that I've learned from Josh at Boogie Brew is if you are going to add like a fish emulsion, I personally use a fish hydrolysate. It smells a little bit less, it's still quite smelly, but it's soluble and you add that at the end, maybe like an hour before you're going to harvest. So like at hour 23, you add the fish emulsion or the fish hydrolysate, then you spray it out on the crops. You can do the same with kelp, of course. You know, like a supercharged compost tea like the Boogie Brew that I personally use because he combines all these ingredients, if you guys want to learn all the ingredients and that, link down below to the open source compost tea recipe where I go over with Josh what he actually adds in there. You know, that may be an overkill for a lot of people, right? And so do what you can afford, what feels right. Hey, if you just want to do plain castings, you know, we showed that you can get amazing benefits from that. If you want to use Josh's over-the-top formula with rock dust and different kinds of castings and insect press and, you know, humates and all these things, hey, that could be good too. I mean, that could have other benefits. And once again, you know, as we're learning today, there's no, like, one size fits all, right? You're going to have to maybe, for your specific crop, you find this plus this works but then that plus that doesn't work. I mean, it's so variable but, you know, I just like to keep things easy. I don't want to, like, figure out all these things. I just use that one Boogie Brew product and I could just be done with it and it's always worked great for me and I know a lot of you guys out there, you know, it has worked for as well. So now, coming back to Puerto Rico where you're from, how are you going to learn what you've learned with your doctorate degree now, hopefully really soon, and bring it back to Puerto Rico so that they could be more resilient in Puerto Rico or even all your, you know, your research could be used here in the States to, you know, start getting away from using toxic man-made pesticides and chemical fertilizers? So a great thing that happened after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was that sustainable agriculture created a really big boom. So there's actually a really big boom in sustainable agriculture everywhere in Puerto Rico, specifically in the mountains. A lot of people are trying to grow there. So what I would like to do is actually have, like, an educational program where I can do workshops and educate farmers all over the island on how they can set up their own vermicompost facility or just vermicompost production within their farm and also how to produce tea. Just because a lot of people don't really, although they know vermicompost, they may not know exactly how to produce the best product with the highest quality and they may not also know how to produce the tea in the best quality or when to use it or how to disperse it, because there's several different dispersal mechanisms. You could spray it in the foliage, you could use soil drenches, you could just apply it as a top dressing. So there's a lot of different things that you could do, so it gets a little confusing. Yeah, I'd say your work is definitely needed in Puerto Rico, because actually one of the farms I visited in Puerto Rico was a worm farm that he grew the worms in his basement and then he just sprayed it down and then he sold the leachate as his final product, which I know you're probably going, oh! Yeah, I'm cringing a little bit at that, I'm sorry, leachate. Yeah, I mean, I filmed that video, I mean, he says, like, you know, I visited people that were using it, that were getting good results, but hey, if your soil is already so low, hey, leachate is adding at least some nutrition, it's going to boost it, but what is the problem with leachate? I don't recommend you guys use leachate and what would you say from the scientific point of view, because I know you've, you know, researched this? So the big thing with leachate is that it's not fully processed through the earthworm, so it'll actually contain some E. coli or some coliform bacteria, and if you apply these to your edible plants, you will get sick. So another thing that's a really important thing is that it's highly concentrated, it has a lot of different organic acids, which makes the pH really low, so if you are considering using your leachate because you want to be, you know, a closed-loop sort of system like we do here, I definitely recommend that you dilute it to 10% with non-chlorinated water and then you can apply it only to your ornamental plants. Here we actually do a mixture where we only apply it to our orchids, we don't really apply it to anything else, just for safety. Wonderful, so, oh, I wanted to also talk about, like, what do they feed the worms here specifically, because I really went over that, but you would know a lot better than me, so if somebody wants to make their own worm castings at home, you know, what's like the formula for the food that you would feed them? So when you're feeding earthworms, you want to keep in mind that you need a 30 to 1 of carbon to nitrogen ratio. So this means that you're going to have to add more leafy material, more woody material onto your vermicompost. The way that we fulfill our carbon end of the bargain for earthworms is by actually adding not only all of this spent garden waste, but we also add spent mushroom blocks from our mushroom block facility, and these mushroom blocks actually have these complex carbohydrates that comes from not only the mycelium, but also the sodas that's used to produce these spent mushroom bags. And then we also, for the nitrogen side, we actually are associated with a lot of different grocery stores. For instance, we're associated with Mylands, and we're also associated with JC Tropicals, which is a tropical fruit producer, and they'll actually bring all of their produce, we'll spray it down with water. It's really important that you always wash your produce before you compost it or even vermicompost it, and the reason is, is because even organic pesticides can actually deter the composting process and the vermicomposting process as well. So that's something super important that you guys should really think about. After that, we'll grind everything to a cubic inch, we'll put it outside for one to two months, depending on how long it takes, you know, the weather also affects the composting process. And once it's fully composted, we'll actually bring it and put it onto our piles. But it's really good to pre-compost it because this way you actually reduce noxious seed weeds, and you also reduce coliform bacteria as well. And here we are very, very conscious of coliform bacteria because that's one of the limiting factors to be able to market all these sorts of products here in Miami-Dade County. Wow, so the interesting thing I forgot to ask you about actually was the spent mushroom blocks that you add to the, to feed the worms basically. So once again, this is a great carbon source, but also you're adding in literally like mycelium into the worms, and one of the benefits that I understand from the worms, the worm castings are the microbiological, you know, bacteria and fungi in the worm's gut that basically they put it in their castings, which gives it the activity, and that's one of the reasons why the worm castings and the casting tees work. So what have you seen, adding these spent mushroom blocks to the worms to give them more carbon, because I know some of you guys out there may live near a mushroom farm like the one in Long Beach that literally once a week they give out all their blocks that you can then feed to your worms or just compost and feed to your garden. So the really big change that we've actually have seen is an explosion in our breeding worm population. So we actually have two boxes that we isolate that we use for breeding, and we've actually seen that, an explosion of earthworms. So this means that their nutrition is so good that they're reproducing way faster. The second thing that we've seen, and this is something that we expected, is an increase in carbon. So with higher carbon production, our vermicompost is actually way darker now because of that carbon. So we have a more nutritious product, and our earthworms are way happier because they're reproducing at honestly unprecedented rates. I want to see a study on that one, unprecedented rates. Alright, so if you want to have happy earthworms that are having lots of babies, you spent mushroom, and this is something I've never heard of at any other worm farm I've been to, now you guys know as well. So Daphne, before we have to sign off today, are there any last words of wisdom you'd like to share with my gardeners and other farmers out there that are interested in using vermicompost tea or vermicompost, or even getting some of their own worm bins? Vermicomposting and just composting in general can seem complex to new farmers or even avid gardeners as well, but it's actually a really easy process. All you have to remember is what earthworms like and what they don't like. You want to add more carbon than nitrogen, and then you can pretty much leave them to be as well because this product is really great, and you can apply it pretty much anywhere, and it's animal safe as well. So I highly recommend you try it yourself, and even if the first three to six months you don't get anything, eventually you will because it does take some time for you to produce vermicompost. Even in our own bins it took us three to six months for those bins to be fully productive. So it takes time, it takes a little bit of effort, but it'll pay off in the end. So if you guys are interested in buying some of the Lion Farms castings or actually they'll come into your place and actually spread the compost tea for you, if you have a big property, you can check them out at lionfarms.com. So Daphne, thank you for all the work you've been doing with the worms and the vermicompost tea, and it's much appreciated because now we have experts in the field, not just bro science guys, we have a doctoral candidate that wrote her thesis on this stuff, she knows her ----, literally, worm ---- anyways. So yeah, so worm castings work, I want you guys to go out and either make your own worms, buy some worms, have a bin if you want to do that. Me personally, I just like to buy the worms and actually just dig them into my garden, and of course every year I top off my garden with good finished compost, which is basically what they feed the worms here, so that the worms can basically make the poop and the worm castings in where I need them, and of course I get good products like Boogie Brew compost tea to basically create the worm casting tea that I spray on my garden. Of course have a worm bin, I just don't want the headache of like, oh I gotta take care of my worms now, because what if I'm gone and I don't feed them or I don't give them enough moisture, they're like, it's too hot for them, they could expire and that's not fun being with worms that are no longer alive, makes me quite sad. So do the best you can, but yeah worms are definitely part of the solution moving forward and I hope you guys now after watching this episode will start using some vermicompost tea and get away from the chemicals. If you guys enjoyed this episode today here at Lion Farms, be sure to give this video a big thumbs up, more importantly share this with other people that are skeptical about the vermicompost tea and the worm castings, because they will learn that yes, it does actually work and can improve your crops' yield performance as well as nutrition in some cases. Also be sure to click that subscribe button right down below so you don't miss any of my new and upcoming episodes. I'll be coming to you in 5-7 days, you never know where I'll show up, what you'll be learning on my YouTube channel. Make sure you click the little bell so you get notified as many videos as I do, and finally down below some of the other videos I've made here today at Lion Farms. So with that, my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, we'll see you next time and until then remember, keep on growing.