applestar wrote: ↑Mon Jan 18, 2021 12:53 pm
You can *buy* mixed or single beneficial myco and bacteria* — but you are culturing them when you make good well nurtured compost with plenty of aeration. You can also culture them by making AACT (actively aerated compost tea). In addition, I personally believe — don’t have specific reference links — that adding a bit of yogurt/sour cream/cottage cheese whey or buttermilk to milk solutions for spraying as fungal disease preventive helps. Also saving a burying or composting all culinary mushroom scraps.
You can also grow edible garden mushrooms that have been shown to benefit in symbiosis with cabbage family in particular as well as corn In pre- or companion- planting.
...it would be interesting to find out if adding the fruit wine must (scraps) to compost is also adding beneficial microbes ... or are they not good since they feed on fruits? What about beer grains and hops?
*as an example, Maine Potato Lady site sells beneficial soil microbes that they say help to prevent potato diseases. I don’t remember who they were but I once came across a conifer-only nursery website that included a bag of soil from under their mature trees that they said helps to inoculate the soil where you want to plant a purchased seed-grown treelet with microbes that are symbiotic with the specific conifer.
I put compost in the garden almost every day. Garden gets aeration with tiller too but not sure how much aeration it needs. I am still fighting chickweed I might till soil again today. When I mow, grass, tree leaves, pine needles, pine cones, sticks, etc, it gets chopped very small by the lawn mower blades and I mow it the correct direction to blow all that chopped material directly into the garden. This year was an amazing year for pine cones I mowed back and forth many times finally got about 20,000. pine cones chopped to saw dust size pieces and blown into the garden. Pine needles were 2" deep lawn mower blew them in the garden. Tree leaves 4" deep lawn mower mulched them blew them in the garden. Lots of kitchen scraps get thrown into the garden. Empty yogurt containers, empty sour cream containers, empty cottage cheese containers, empty milk container all get washed and thrown in the garden. Dead bean plants, dead pepper plants, dead corn stalks, lawn mower chopped them they blow in the garden too. Only thing not thrown in the garden is blight infested tomato plants when dry I burn them with dead sticks then put wood ash in garden. I throw lots of potato peals in the garden too but for the past several month I have been throwing potato peals in a bucket to ferment like wine then pour that in the garden. I burn paper & cardboard in the garden. Garden gets lots of organic material all the time it is less work to use lawn mower to chop everything blow it into the garden then till it into the soil. Garden is 1 large continuous compost pile. I mow back & forth over things several time lawn mower blades chop it very small before it gets tilled into the garden. My garden soil sure does look good it is black soft powder.