hydrating my seedball clay with compost tea

[Toil]

using compost tea to hydrate my seedballs?

anyone try this? Thought I might include extra molasses

[applestar]

That sounds like a great idea. I didn't use AACT but did use compost soak water, using the sifted out larger bits. Used the finer compost IN the seedball clay mix.

[Toil]

yeah I learned that not sifting the compost makes crumbly balls

[Toil]

here are some seedballs I made with some very bacterial aerated tea. At 30 hours or so it was still a bit sleepy, but around 50 hours it was teeming and diverse, with many many more flagellates that ciliates. A few hyphae, but mostly bacterial. I mixed some sugar and some biotone into the dry mix for good measure.

I'm hoping a lot of this biology will go to sleep fast enough. I can say for sure that the rotifers I saw will make it. Yay rotifers!

[img]https://i929.photobucket.com/albums/ad137/toilpics/0ca37916.jpg[/img]

[soil]

I gotta make some seedballs real soon, thanks for the reminder toil

[Sage Hermit]

Whats the idea behind the biology going to sleep?

I don't want to think the seeds will sprout from the ACT or is that the jist of it? The idea is a good one and it hadn't crossed my mind. Hey I got a microscope too, now! We can be science friends! Gee Willikers!

[Toil]

going to sleep - wet stuff going dry is as old as nature, so many microbes know how to handle it. Protozoa makes cysts, for instance. Or rotifers - they go to sleep and can hold it sol long they have been blown all over the world as dust.

anyway, if things happen too fast, they cant keep up.


The idea behind using act is the same as using the compost, except of course the organisms have been cultured and the life is more dense.

The idea is that as the clay melts, it is inoculating the soil.