Well, Mark, you've got wonderful stuff here.

(laughs) >>Thank you, thank you.

>>I don't know whether to make breakfast or go plant in my garden.

(laughs) >>It's breakfast for something, I promise.

>>Well, share with me what it's breakfast for.

>>It is breakfast for worms, breakfast, lunch and dinner in most cases.

>>All righty.

>>What I do, I make vermicompost, and that's a compost that is a traditional compost with worms added to it to beef it up a little bit.

>>So really, what's the difference?

>>The main difference is that when you take compost through a traditional process, it has a certain set of microbes in it, and then when you add worms into it, they add another element of microbes, enzymes, and more complexity to the compost itself.

>>Sounds great.

>>So to get them to that point, I give them a certain set of foods that I add at different points throughout the process.

>>All righty.

>>One of those is coffee grounds- >>Oh, yes.

>>as one of their initial foods.

It's very dense in nitrogen and they like to just kind of churn that down.

It's pretty close to soil already, texture too, so blends in quite nicely.

And then they also do like a starchy product, which is, for me, different people use different things, but I use oats.

>>Okay.

>>So I've got two different types of oats here.

>>Okay, and which one do you prefer, do you use them at the same time?

>>I do use them at the same time, yep.

I use an oat flour together with the rolled oats so that it can start breaking down quickly, and then the larger oats can feed a little bit slower over time.

>>Excellent, and then these are the outputs?

>>Yes.

>>And what's the difference between these folks?

>>These here are the two outputs of what I create on the farm.

So this one here is a three to four month process.

>>Oh, that's beautiful, yes.

>>And it's mostly a traditional compost with the worms in it for about a month or two.

And then this one is a much longer 380 day process, a particular process called the Johnson-Su method, and that takes a little bit more than a full year and ends up with a whole different host of microbes in it as well.

>>And the goal is microbes?

>>The goal is microbes, yep.

and those microbes that we create, we apply directly to the soil via a extract that I make with this here bag.

>>So how do you make that extract?

>>Yeah, so I basically take a mesh bag of some sort.

This is a pretty professional type of bag, but you could use cheesecloth, you could use pretty much anything with the holes smaller than the soil itself.

>>Okay.

>>Right?

>>You could even use a laundry bag.

>>Absolutely, yeah, whatever you got at home.

And I will take a predetermined amount, but a healthy amount, usually a handful or two, of whichever compost that I'm using, and I will- >>Put it into the bag.

>>Put it into the bag.

Right, we'll use quite a bit.

>>Be generous.

>>Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah, we don't need to take this with us, huh?

(laughs) So we'll fill that up and- >>Here we go.

I'm gonna move this one over here.

>>And you kind of see it there in the bag, ready to go.

We'll close the bag at the top.

That's how we do it here.

And then whatever kind of bucket that you have available to you in your garden or in your backyard, we fill that with unchlorinated water.

>>Okay.

>>It is important that the water is not chlorinated for, we don't want to kill the things that we're creating.

>>Oh, golly, no.

Yes.

>>Not at all.

And we will take the mesh bag here and suspend it in the water and basically massage, gently massage the soil itself into the water.

>>Okay.

>>And what that does is remove the biology itself and suspend it into the water, and what we have, you can't see it 'cause it's a black bucket- >>Right.

>>but I'll show it.

I'll show it right here for you.

We have a different product at the end.

>>Is this wonderful extract.

>>Which is a great extract full of the same microbes that you created in the compost, via liquid.

>>So that's extremely dense?

>>Yes.

>>How do you apply it?

Do you put it into a sprayer and spray it over with water, or?

>>You can apply it in multiple ways.

So I choose to apply directly to soil and ideally to living roots that are already established in the ground.

So if you're in a farming context, that could be a cover crop, but if you're just in and out your garden, whatever you got already growing.

>>Sounds great.

>>But you can also add sugar to it and make an actual compost tea, not the type to drink.

>>Not to drink.

(laughs) >>No, but the type to spray to the leaves, a foliar application.

There's lots of places that you can go from here, but typically I just apply straight to the soil.

>>Right, real quick, 'cause we have seconds.

>>Sure.

>>How often, once a season, once a week, once a month?

>>As often as you have living roots that have been established for about three or four weeks.

So if you're a farmer and you got a couple seasons, you can do a couple times a season, if you just got big old rose bushes, maybe once or twice a year, but it's just generally if there's living roots, then it's never too much.

>>Excellent.

This is wonderful, thank you so much.

>>No, of course.