Patti Moreno: Today, I’m here with Mark Highland of Organic Mechanics and he is a soil expert. I’m so excited for you to be here. Thank you so much. Today, we’re going to learn about soil. And he spent a better part of a decade researching and developing a unique potting soil. He’s going to introduce us this.
Mark Highland: Yes, yes. Well, the secret to this good soil is that it is compost, worm casting ratio, as well as it has got coconut fiber in there, it has got pine bark in there for a little chunkiness to get that drainage going. The coconut fiber and the compost really help to retain moisture. The worm castings in the compost themselves are a very unique biology to the next—that biology helps set up a nutrient cycling effect that helps protect plants, keep the roots healthier, keep them growing stronger and overall, you’re just going to have bigger healthier plants because that’s the adversity of microorganisms are in perfect ratios in this potting soil.
Compost and the worm casting biology, once they get in there and set up sharp, they start producing these polysaccharides. It’s a sticky coating, binding to the different particles, pulling them together and creating this macropores to hold water. So, they hold water through the macropores as well as the tiny little micropores that are created as more and more of that Biology kind of set-up.
Patti Moreno: All right. So, let’s check out this soil. All right, I can see these are the little coconut fibers in there.
Mark Highland: You got it, yes.
Patti Moreno: And then the white things are the perlite.
Mark Highland: That’s the perlite.
Patti Moreno: And then I think I can see like those are the little sort of pine bark.
Mark Highland: Pine barks nuggets, yes.
Patti Moreno: Okay.
Mark Highland: Any kind of little woody specs that you would see, those really are pine barks, yes.
Patti Moreno: And then just a dark stuff. That’s basically your compost and you worm castings.
Mark Highland: And your coconut fiber—tiny, tiny particles as well as the pines, the pine bark. But there are so much worm castings and I meant you can almost pick them out. They’re like perfectly circle little black dots that would be in here. And then the rest of it would be compost but anytime you can see a perfect little, and they are very hard to see, but they look like little tiny black beach balls.
Patti Moreno: Very cool. All right so that’s some of the mixture here. One of the things that I’ve always wanted to do is make a compost tea. And compost tea isn’t the type of tea that you would rake.
Mark Highland: Yes.
Patti Moreno: If we’re going to make some compost tea and that’s going to feed our plants. So, we’re going to use your soil to make that compost tea. And just tell me a little bit about what so great about compost tea?
Mark Highland: Well, we’re going to use our soil. You’d definitely—if you have really high quality compost or worm castings you can use those items. If you can’t find it you could use the organic mechanic soils simply because we know those items were in here. And it’s really high quality compost that has made. And there would be guidelines.
When you have compost with that high quality, what you’re doing, you’re going to brew up all the little beneficial microorganisms there in the compost. You’re going to multiply those numbers a hundred fold, a thousand fold. By making this compost tea it literary will be like a fertilizer back during that compost tea.
Patti Moreno: I’m so excited to get started. We’ve got some burlap here and we’re just going to dump a bunch of soil into the middle.
Mark Highland: Yes.
Patti Moreno: All right. And then we’re going to just tie this up, right?
Mark Highland: Just to make a little pouch and I can use any kind of vessel that you have. We have some scrap perlite to use up, so that works.
Patti Moreno: I will hold this. You want to tie that around.
Mark Highland: That’s right sure. Just tie that up and this is just, to essentially keep the compost from plugging up your delivery system later on. Let’s say you want to put th
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