Dirty Backyard Biology with Damon Tighe

<v Speaker 1>All right, welcome to another episode of the crime Pace
<v Speaker 1>a Bond. He doesn't podcast. I just wanted to have
<v Speaker 1>my friend Damon Tyan again to talk about composts. You know,
<v Speaker 1>he's always posting this stuff on his inter sham stories
<v Speaker 1>on the inter web, and you know it really inspires
<v Speaker 1>me and motivates me because they dabble and compost myself sometimes. So,
<v Speaker 1>by Dave, what is your day job? Actually? Man? What
<v Speaker 1>do you I don't understand what you do. I see
<v Speaker 1>you post on all kinds of You're sequencing DNA, you're
<v Speaker 1>teaching high school kids, you're doing zoom seminars, you're traveling
<v Speaker 1>all over the country. What is your actual job title?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so, Mike, my day job is I'm a curriculum
<v Speaker 2>train specialist for a company called bioad And so they're
<v Speaker 2>a big biotech company, usually sells stuff to researchers, but
<v Speaker 2>they've got a little plenty of education group. The translates
<v Speaker 2>what's going on in biotech and the stuff you can
<v Speaker 2>do hands on in a classroom. So that's everything from
<v Speaker 2>like extracting your own DNA and taking it home in
<v Speaker 2>a necklace if you're a second grader, all the way
<v Speaker 2>from doing DNA sequencing for taxol and your work for
<v Speaker 2>like high school and college kids.
<v Speaker 1>You sequence, I mean, I use sequence a lot of
<v Speaker 1>fungi in the Oakland area the Bay area because that's
<v Speaker 1>where you live. So explain how to I mean, you're
<v Speaker 1>just you basically are extracting DNA to get solid identifications
<v Speaker 1>on the mushrooms that you find.
<v Speaker 2>Right so, you know, on the West coast of America,
<v Speaker 2>we got this problem which is a lot of our
<v Speaker 2>mushrooms got European names because they kind of looked like
<v Speaker 2>stuff from Europe. But then as soon as you do
<v Speaker 2>a little micross could be and definitely sequencing, you realize, oh,
<v Speaker 2>this is somebody new. And so you know, I've been
<v Speaker 2>doing what I used to called bathtob PCR for a
<v Speaker 2>couple of years, which basically I'd take a shower in
<v Speaker 2>my bath, which you clean it out enough that I
<v Speaker 2>could do.
<v Speaker 3>Molecular work in there.
<v Speaker 2>I extract the DNA out of fun guy in there,
<v Speaker 2>and then do PCR. PCR is the plum raised chain
<v Speaker 2>reactions the way you can amplify DNA, and depending upon
<v Speaker 2>the primers that you use, these are just a little
<v Speaker 2>pieces of the DNA that target locations of the genome,
<v Speaker 2>you can amplify out specific piece of the geno. So
<v Speaker 2>what we would do is amplify out these kind of
<v Speaker 2>universal positions with in fungal genomes that we know little
<v Speaker 2>changes in them can help you understand the taxonomy.
<v Speaker 3>So we amplify that out. And then once you.
<v Speaker 2>Had that PCR product, I used to send that out
<v Speaker 2>for sayinger sequencing, but now there's been such a big
<v Speaker 2>change the last couple of years because everybody is using
<v Speaker 2>these nanopore sequencers that my you know, my buddy Hart
<v Speaker 2>who's been the sequencing head for the California Fungal Diversity Survey. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>they're just pumping out, pumping out shit like crazy. I
<v Speaker 2>mean like you know, thousands of sequences every single run
<v Speaker 2>that he runs. And so last couple of years I've
<v Speaker 2>been a volunteer collector for that group, the California Fungal
<v Speaker 2>Diversity Survey, basically a harvesting fun guy from all over
<v Speaker 2>California and then feed into this pipeline and so like
<v Speaker 2>in two years that group where we put like twelve
<v Speaker 2>thousand collections in a fungarium calif csu E S Bay
<v Speaker 2>and then I think about ten thousand of those now
<v Speaker 2>have sequences thanks to Heart's probably blistered out, sore hands.
<v Speaker 1>But great poor was the real game changer.
<v Speaker 3>It was a huge game changer.
<v Speaker 2>It brought the price down and then also you could
<v Speaker 2>just be dirtier, which is like anybody that works in
<v Speaker 2>community science trying to do molecular work, this is always
<v Speaker 2>a hiccup. Is like stuff comes in with bonus organisms,
<v Speaker 2>bonus DNA bananopore. Since it reads one DNA molecule at
<v Speaker 2>a time, you can just read the same sample, you know,
<v Speaker 2>one hundred times and then take the stuff that's garbage,
<v Speaker 2>put it in the trash ben and then take the
<v Speaker 2>stuff that's good and assemble it to understand what your
<v Speaker 2>actual sequence is.
<v Speaker 1>When is it going to be the game changer? When's
<v Speaker 1>it going to be doable with plants? Like bathtub sequencing
<v Speaker 1>with plants.
<v Speaker 2>Well, the technology isn't the problem. The choice of what
<v Speaker 2>to look for in the genome is the problem with plants.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, agentye matt ka or yeah so fun guy.
<v Speaker 2>It's been relatively easy because like I t S, the
<v Speaker 2>inn h gets you pre dame far for most groups
<v Speaker 2>of like macro fungi. You know, we're ants. Yeah, exactly.
<v Speaker 2>This is the problem, like, which gene do I choose?
<v Speaker 2>Do I need five genes in order to be able
<v Speaker 2>to make an assessment of what I have to.
<v Speaker 1>Compare it to and see how closely they're related and
<v Speaker 1>where it comes out, et cetera.
<v Speaker 3>Exactly.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, But that being said, there's no reason somebody couldn't
<v Speaker 2>start doing this in the same way that I'd say,
<v Speaker 2>Stephen Russell's guy in Indiana is really the one that
<v Speaker 2>kind of kick the fungal amateur mycology group in the
<v Speaker 2>nuts and got us all doing nanopore. Somebody just needs
<v Speaker 2>to do that for plants, And then I think you'd
<v Speaker 2>see these kind of leaps and bounds in the knowledge
<v Speaker 2>of what genes to look for. Plants want to take
<v Speaker 2>it on.
<v Speaker 1>Plants have a bunch of different gums and resins and
<v Speaker 1>cuticle and other shit to get in the weight. To
<v Speaker 1>make it a little bit more complicated, you know, right,
<v Speaker 1>removing that it's not the same as just grinding up
<v Speaker 1>a mushroom or something.
<v Speaker 2>Right, it's a little more complicated. But that doesn't mean
<v Speaker 2>that somebody couldn't come up with a relatively universal protocol
<v Speaker 2>for extracting DNA. It would probably just be a little
<v Speaker 2>more tents where maybe you would be using some sort
<v Speaker 2>of solvent in order to remove those resins and then
<v Speaker 2>doing you know, more of this strait across six tractions.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, we need like we need an Allen Rockefeller
<v Speaker 1>for plants for doing sequencing of place. Yeah, making it,
<v Speaker 1>making it more accessible, doing it in the back of
<v Speaker 1>a car, you know whatever. But anyway, okay, so let's
<v Speaker 1>talk about Let's talk about the compost thing, because that
<v Speaker 1>was what I originally want, and then I want to
<v Speaker 1>ask about all the different the fly fungie that you
<v Speaker 1>were studying for a while to try and infect house flies.
<v Speaker 3>Which was oh and I got I gotta go with
<v Speaker 3>the new place. I'm stoked.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, let's talk about that first. Actually, what's going on there?
<v Speaker 1>What are you doing?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, So it was like twenty fourteen.
<v Speaker 2>I was on a hike Point Raise, this peninsula kind
<v Speaker 2>of sticks out in the Pacific in California, and I
<v Speaker 2>found this giant yellow dumbfly that was just fluffy, pink
<v Speaker 2>with a fungus and it was sitting on top of
<v Speaker 2>a grass stalk and I was like, WHOA, that's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>I started looking around and there's all of these lies
<v Speaker 2>beneath it in different basically well levels of infection. Then
<v Speaker 2>what happens with this fungus it's called the yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>So what happens is we're back.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, we had a little brief cutout. Okay, so you've
<v Speaker 1>seen all these flies with this stuff. They were all
<v Speaker 1>infected with this fungus. What's the name of the fungus.
<v Speaker 2>Fly death fungus is the common name Entroopermafa moose Gue,
<v Speaker 2>and it basically turns them into zombies. And so what
<v Speaker 2>will happen is it takes over their neurosystem and all.
<v Speaker 2>The first thing happens is they can't use their wings,
<v Speaker 2>so they're kind of walking around like all kind of
<v Speaker 2>like awkward, like a zombie. And then they get some
<v Speaker 2>of disease, so they'll start climbing things and they'll usually
<v Speaker 2>want to get themselves, you know, a couple of feet
<v Speaker 2>off the grounds, and from a fungal point of view,
<v Speaker 2>you want to do this because you're gonna want to
<v Speaker 2>shoot spores down on things beneath you.
<v Speaker 3>So they want to get them high and then right
<v Speaker 3>at sunset.
<v Speaker 2>And this is the paper that just came out this
<v Speaker 2>year by the Elo Lab in New York. They realize
<v Speaker 2>that the fungus actually kills the fly right sunset, which
<v Speaker 2>is really kind of cool to kill the flight sunset,
<v Speaker 2>and then it busts out of the abnum and just
<v Speaker 2>like a joint I can find basically, and then just
<v Speaker 2>starts shooting spores. So the reason you kill the fly
<v Speaker 2>at midnight is the spores are unprotected.
<v Speaker 3>They don't have melanin or anything in.
<v Speaker 2>Them, and so you don't want to be shooting spores
<v Speaker 2>when there's a bunch of UV light out. So if
<v Speaker 2>you kill a fly at midnight or right at sundown,
<v Speaker 2>the spores will usually start launching around, like you know,
<v Speaker 2>one am or so, and so they're blasting out and
<v Speaker 2>then flies at this point are usually kind of still
<v Speaker 2>right there hanging out someplace, and so they have the
<v Speaker 2>chance then to get covered by these spores, get the
<v Speaker 2>infection before the sunlight comes up.
<v Speaker 1>Does it have applications on farms? Do you think?
<v Speaker 3>I think so.
<v Speaker 2>I've seen Max Muddy from the UK a couple of
<v Speaker 2>years back set me a photo from like a farm
<v Speaker 2>situation he was at, and I've never seen an infection
<v Speaker 2>this big, but it was literally an entire wall of barn,
<v Speaker 2>thousands of flies all dead. I've never seen anything like
<v Speaker 2>that in the United States. But it's like you could
<v Speaker 2>potentially turn this into a biocontrol if you needed it,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and I think it does just you'll show
<v Speaker 2>it'll show up anytime you get a big enough density
<v Speaker 2>of flies around.
<v Speaker 3>It will eventually find its way there.
<v Speaker 1>But insects can get I mean, because of their their
<v Speaker 1>short generation will turnover. They can get. They can it
<v Speaker 1>seems like they can evolve resistance pretty quick. Do you
<v Speaker 1>think that's the case of this pathogen or no.
<v Speaker 2>That's that's my gas. And that's why I think like
<v Speaker 2>when I have introduced it in places before, I won't
<v Speaker 2>see it blow out my entire population. It'll take a
<v Speaker 2>portion of it, you know, but it won't take the
<v Speaker 2>whole thing. And that's also kind of like being a
<v Speaker 2>good pathogen, right, you don't want to kill all your hosts.
<v Speaker 2>You want to kill this like fifty percent of them.
<v Speaker 2>We'll leave the rest there to eat later, you know,
<v Speaker 2>by your progeny.
<v Speaker 1>But still, if you can reduce a ship fly population
<v Speaker 1>by fifty percent, that's going to make for a more
<v Speaker 1>pleasant picnic or outdoor eating of that. Yeah, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's like fucking yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Well for me, yea, I used to like make it
<v Speaker 2>so my my own apartment was more livable because I,
<v Speaker 2>you know, would compost like outside my window in my apartment.
<v Speaker 2>I used to brew beer in the apartments that had
<v Speaker 2>brain fruit flies and stuff. So that one fungus fly
<v Speaker 2>that I found out point raise, I brought home, put
<v Speaker 2>it in like just a mason jar with a couple
<v Speaker 2>of my fruit flies from my kitchen while I'm hanging
<v Speaker 2>out for you know, about half a day, and I
<v Speaker 2>released them and I never didn't think about it. And
<v Speaker 2>then I don't know, two months later, I was cooking
<v Speaker 2>in the kitchen. I got all hot and sweaty in there.
<v Speaker 2>I was like, oh man, I should I got to
<v Speaker 2>open these windows, opprik the windows. And then the next
<v Speaker 2>day when I come by to look at those windows,
<v Speaker 2>I had about four flies, all infected spores out stuck
<v Speaker 2>to the windows. And then ever since that primary infection,
<v Speaker 2>for seven years while I lived at fifteen oh two
<v Speaker 2>Allis Street, every time that apartment got warm and a
<v Speaker 2>little bit humid, I would get infected flies all over
<v Speaker 2>the place. And it took down three species. While I
<v Speaker 2>was there so I could can jump posts. At least
<v Speaker 2>the one I had that complex seemed like it was
<v Speaker 2>jumping hosts.
<v Speaker 1>So any dip throat would it hit mosquitoes too, I wonder.
<v Speaker 2>Ah, that's a good question. I mean, I have found
<v Speaker 2>this pastor. I did find one at my new place
<v Speaker 2>in San Leander that was coulex species of mosquito that
<v Speaker 2>was infected by something that looks like fly death fungus.
<v Speaker 2>I haven't sequenced it yet, but I think there is
<v Speaker 2>something that probably does infect mosquitos in the same way.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so you're still you still got the You still
<v Speaker 1>have a little, uh magnifying clip for your phone that
<v Speaker 1>you just keep attached to your head all the time.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah. Yeah, it looks like you.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, the majority, the majority of biological stuff is
<v Speaker 2>smaller than us. You got to be able to quickly
<v Speaker 2>like jump down and like look at small stuff.
<v Speaker 3>As soon as you do that, you realize there's tons
<v Speaker 3>of shit.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. This stuff, the stuff that I end up seeing
<v Speaker 1>on your stories is unlike shit that anyone else I
<v Speaker 1>know posts. It's like it's so fascinating. I'm like, what
<v Speaker 1>the fuck, man, where what does this guy? I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you pay attention to things that you know, like I
<v Speaker 1>would never notice. It's so few people pay attention to
<v Speaker 1>and that just goes right underneath everyone's noses. Like but
<v Speaker 1>like fascinating, you know, parts of the ecosystem, of the
<v Speaker 1>human environment, of like the you know, the built environment,
<v Speaker 1>like all kinds of weird fungal stuff, insects. It's really fascinating.
<v Speaker 1>So with the so to inoculate a fly, what do
<v Speaker 1>you You brought an infected fly home? Was it still
<v Speaker 1>alive or it was dead? It was dead already, I
<v Speaker 1>was dead. So you put it in the jar, but
<v Speaker 1>it had spores, and you put it in a jar
<v Speaker 1>with a couple other fruit flies and then release them.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, and then release them because I want them to
<v Speaker 2>hopefully get an infection the spores and then fly away
<v Speaker 2>with it, and then hopefully it does its thing right,
<v Speaker 2>it sorts spreading through that population, and it seems it
<v Speaker 2>seems to you know, it seems to have worked. And
<v Speaker 2>then I did that at the new place, once I
<v Speaker 2>got my compost going. I'd found some fly death fungus
<v Speaker 2>on a hike, brought it home, mixed it in a
<v Speaker 2>jar with some fruit flies and let them out into
<v Speaker 2>my compost, and now it's much more seasonable. In the compost.
<v Speaker 2>There's like a couple of months during the summer wall
<v Speaker 2>see like fly deathlungers just go crazy in there. We'll
<v Speaker 2>open it up to the top and I've just got
<v Speaker 2>zombie out flies stuck.
<v Speaker 1>To so but you basically it's just trying to figure
<v Speaker 1>out a vector for the to get the spores onto
<v Speaker 1>living flies and then they do the rest of the work.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Oh and the other like interesting little thing that's
<v Speaker 2>also I think Ela Labb figured out from New York
<v Speaker 2>was that the fungus also produces a pheromone, at least
<v Speaker 2>in fruit flies, and that is the faeromone for.
<v Speaker 3>Hey, come come after me.
<v Speaker 2>So other fruit flies will be like, oh, yeah, I'm
<v Speaker 2>gonna go have sex with that zombies Jesus.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah exactly.
<v Speaker 1>God damn.
<v Speaker 3>Brilliant, you know. So you're brilliant.
<v Speaker 1>You could so if you wanted to, if you had
<v Speaker 1>a horrible fly problem on a farm, away to and
<v Speaker 1>would probably be to culture the fungus, get dead flies
<v Speaker 1>and then put it inside of like an insect trap
<v Speaker 1>that also had an attract and then like you know,
<v Speaker 1>something putrid, something rotting that would like a dog turt
<v Speaker 1>or something, right, and then yeah, I mean the spores
<v Speaker 1>in there and then just get them. I mean, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>what would a good what would a good vector be
<v Speaker 1>a good way to infect a mass amount of flies,
<v Speaker 1>like on a farm or something.
<v Speaker 2>I mean exactly what we're talking now, which is go
<v Speaker 2>to where the flies are already showing up. Take a
<v Speaker 2>couple of these zombified flies that you found and just
<v Speaker 2>put them in that zone, and the other flies are
<v Speaker 2>going to walk all over them because they're producing sense
<v Speaker 2>you know, that attract other flies to them, and so
<v Speaker 2>they will get covered in those spores, you know. And
<v Speaker 2>so for most people, like if you learn to look
<v Speaker 2>for this fungus, you'll realize it is everywhere. But it's
<v Speaker 2>like learn you find your first one is going to
<v Speaker 2>be the biggest barrier. So for the most part, at
<v Speaker 2>least where I'm out in California, they will show up,
<v Speaker 2>namely in the spring after like a rain, h so
<v Speaker 2>we'll have high humidity and warmer temps. And then what
<v Speaker 2>you want to do is you want to walk through
<v Speaker 2>places that have big leaf trees, especially at the edge
<v Speaker 2>of like an opening, like a meadow or a field,
<v Speaker 2>or like a suburban lot, right, and I tend to
<v Speaker 2>be on the underside of leaves of you know, big
<v Speaker 2>leaf trees. So you just kind of go through and
<v Speaker 2>check the underside of a bunch of leaves and you'll
<v Speaker 2>find like a fly that's like stuck in a weird
<v Speaker 2>position and kind of white. And then sometimes you can
<v Speaker 2>see like a spray of spores all in the leaf.
<v Speaker 1>Uh huh, damn.
<v Speaker 2>That's great, And then you just take that to take
<v Speaker 2>that home, put it wherever you got a bunch of flies,
<v Speaker 2>and somebody will eventually get infected, is what I've seen.
<v Speaker 1>So there's lots of entomopathogenic fungie, that's fungi that infect
<v Speaker 1>the insects. But Entomopra this genus is it is it
<v Speaker 1>related to Cordyceps or is it in its own family
<v Speaker 1>or or.
<v Speaker 3>It's in its own family.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. And there's a group that elolab is ones that
<v Speaker 2>are really working on the taxonians right now because they've
<v Speaker 2>had a program for the last where you could send
<v Speaker 2>them your zombified flies, and what they're trying to do
<v Speaker 2>is figure out how diverse is this group that's attacking flies,
<v Speaker 2>you know, because like right now, there was a paper
<v Speaker 2>that came out maybe two years ago that shows that
<v Speaker 2>there is you know, host besipithy to some degree with
<v Speaker 2>some of these molecular signatures that they have, but it
<v Speaker 2>seems that some of them can still be relatively broad.
<v Speaker 2>So there's a lot of like you know, unanswered questions.
<v Speaker 2>I feel like with the taxonomy is still on.
<v Speaker 1>I think i'd find one that attacked mosquitos like eighties agipti,
<v Speaker 1>which is invasive nearly everywhere. Yeah, it's not Africa. God,
<v Speaker 1>that'd be amazing, man.
<v Speaker 2>And I think and I think it's I really think
<v Speaker 2>it's out there. I think it's just unseen. Can I
<v Speaker 2>mean just in this past year of kind of looking
<v Speaker 2>just in the East Bay Hills and by place in
<v Speaker 2>San Leandro, I mean I found the one that's on
<v Speaker 2>coulex on a mosquito, and I found that it was
<v Speaker 2>on a completely new like fly host up in Huckleberry Preserve.
<v Speaker 2>And I'm like, you know, I ask around and everybody's
<v Speaker 2>like all the excerpts like no, we haven't seen it
<v Speaker 2>on this yet. Uh. And so I think it's just
<v Speaker 2>they go miss the whole bunch because they're on small insects, right,
<v Speaker 2>and they're on small insects, usually under leaves, which turns
<v Speaker 2>out a ton of people aren't just like walking around
<v Speaker 2>looking under every leave.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and who's pretty small insects Mosquitos that are that
<v Speaker 1>aren't flying around anyway. Man, they're so small there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but I think this, I think you you're right there.
<v Speaker 2>There could be a potential kind of like limited biocontrol,
<v Speaker 2>you know, then that could happen here if we found
<v Speaker 2>like a good, a good fungus that takes down mosquitoes, mosquitos,
<v Speaker 2>that's really what you want, right because everybody gets focused
<v Speaker 2>on like having like a one, one tool that's going
<v Speaker 2>to go after this pest. And that's the worst management
<v Speaker 2>strategy ever. That's like, that's just like not fucking understanding evolution.
<v Speaker 2>That's how you get antibiotic resistance, right because people are like, oh,
<v Speaker 2>this use one antibiotic, which is a ship ton of it.
<v Speaker 3>Oh bacteria of all the fight it.
<v Speaker 1>Right, you need to diversify your.
<v Speaker 2>Arc exactly because that's harder to evolve against.
<v Speaker 1>Uh huh yeah yeah man. I on the on the
<v Speaker 1>the regarding anthemopathogenic funny, there was this is kind of cool.
<v Speaker 1>A friend of mine, uh in Equador, who lives in Equator.
<v Speaker 1>They he just helped the he just wrote a paper
<v Speaker 1>on it. I'm pretty sure it just got yeah, just
<v Speaker 1>got described. I think it was in New York Times.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, the spider that mimics infection with a funk?
<v Speaker 1>What would the adaptive benefit.
<v Speaker 3>Of that pep?
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I was that's like I've had this background
<v Speaker 2>conversation with colored people and it's like, I don't know
<v Speaker 2>unless it's like, is it so prevalent that birds are like, oh,
<v Speaker 2>I don't want to eat that. That one tastes bad,
<v Speaker 2>you know, like actual you know, fungused out ones.
<v Speaker 3>Well, what's going on there?
<v Speaker 2>I really need to know more about that eco habitat
<v Speaker 2>that's in.
<v Speaker 1>Right, is it defense or does it help it hunt?
<v Speaker 1>Or what? What is it? It's yeah, but it's such
<v Speaker 1>a weird it's such a weird adaptation. But something selecting
<v Speaker 1>for it obviously, like it wouldn't be there if something
<v Speaker 1>wasn't selecting for it.
<v Speaker 3>Something's definitely sec for it.
<v Speaker 1>How I don't know how big is the thing? Did
<v Speaker 1>you read that? I didn't actually read the paper. I
<v Speaker 1>just saw photos of it and he posted about it.
<v Speaker 2>But I mean, the spider itself is about the size
<v Speaker 2>like a thumbnail.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so like an inch, it's not.
<v Speaker 3>It's not huge.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>This is where you see a lot of like kind
<v Speaker 2>of like they give chivolulas and things like that that
<v Speaker 2>are infecting spiders. They tend to go after smaller spiders
<v Speaker 2>and they're not like the quarter steps. They're going after tarantula's.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, God, there's a bunch of weird shit though.
<v Speaker 1>In the tropics too. We were finding so many courtus
<v Speaker 1>steps down there when we were we were there a
<v Speaker 1>few months ago. You were just in Vietnam, were you?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah?
<v Speaker 1>What were you? What were you doing there?
<v Speaker 2>That was my My wife wanted to go and actually
<v Speaker 2>I was trying to go to Sumatra and then she's like,
<v Speaker 2>I just really want to go to Vietnam.
<v Speaker 3>So I was like, all right, whatever you do, you
<v Speaker 3>plan it, I'll go.
<v Speaker 2>Sorry, man, the neighborhood crows just found me and don't
<v Speaker 2>have my peanuts on me, so they're pissed off.
<v Speaker 1>Oh you've been feeding them.
<v Speaker 3>They they hey, hey, c one, shut up.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, all right, you get scrub jays too.
<v Speaker 1>I used to always love feeding the scrub jays when
<v Speaker 1>I lived out there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I got the scrub jaze in my arm. But
<v Speaker 2>like there are a lot more timids. We don't quite
<v Speaker 2>have the relationship yet. But the crows I've been Uh,
<v Speaker 2>I kind of feed them because they come in and
<v Speaker 2>like harass my squirrels. You mean I get to actually
<v Speaker 2>have like apricots in the spring.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, they drive the squirrels away. Oh shit. Oh so
<v Speaker 1>this is like a symbiotic setup. You've got. It's a
<v Speaker 1>mutualistic association. You're not just feeding the birds, You're you're
<v Speaker 1>paying them to keep the squirrels away.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it feels like that.
<v Speaker 2>So you're walking down the street and it feels like
<v Speaker 2>I'm getting harassed by the mafia. Here got those fun
<v Speaker 2>those my shorts, my shirts.
<v Speaker 1>The fox squirrels in the East Bay are were a
<v Speaker 1>fucking nightmare. Man. They're where they they're from. They're from
<v Speaker 1>the East coast right where the Where are fox squres?
<v Speaker 3>The Midwest?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah?
<v Speaker 1>Got the I liked youwhere man?
<v Speaker 2>Everywhere? I mean, I've got your have a heart trap
<v Speaker 2>and I swear to God, like during the springtime, I'm
<v Speaker 2>pulling a squirrel like every other day and then taking
<v Speaker 2>it up to the Coyote hill zone.
<v Speaker 1>Oh.
<v Speaker 2>I just thought they just keep they just they just
<v Speaker 2>keep coming. That's crazy.
<v Speaker 1>But I just started shooting the fuckers. I felt bad,
<v Speaker 1>fuck it, you know, with like a little pelican, because
<v Speaker 1>it got that bad. It would destroy so much and
<v Speaker 1>nothing was keeping them in check, you know, like the
<v Speaker 1>nine thousand feral cats on my block wouldn't do anything.
<v Speaker 1>And then the it was so I would just started shooting.
<v Speaker 1>It sucks, but you know, it's you have to become
<v Speaker 1>You're part of the ecosystem. You have to be the
<v Speaker 1>checks and balances. My friend Martin would do that too,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like this him and his husband, like this
<v Speaker 1>seventy five year old gay cup. I remember I came
<v Speaker 1>to their door once and and I knocked on the door.
<v Speaker 1>I was with a friend visit them from New York.
<v Speaker 1>We knocked on the door and and uh and Martin's
<v Speaker 1>husband opens the door and just sees a squirrel, reaches
<v Speaker 1>to the side of the inside of the door, pulls
<v Speaker 1>out a fucking pellet rifle and shoots the thing like
<v Speaker 1>clear of you. And my friend was like, oh my god.
<v Speaker 1>I was like from New York, she's not used to,
<v Speaker 1>you know, such acts violence of aggression. Yeah, and so
<v Speaker 1>and then he's like, he closes the door, he sees
<v Speaker 1>the mail man. He's because you know, in Emoryville that's
<v Speaker 1>like a big deal. I don't want you doing that shit.
<v Speaker 1>In Texas it wouldn't be anything. But he was like
<v Speaker 1>all right, you know, he's like, go run the back.
<v Speaker 1>You know, he's like he's so sketchy and shit. I
<v Speaker 1>was like, what the fuck. It's like, oh yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>they'll destroy you know, exceptionally wear plants and yeah, they
<v Speaker 1>dig up, they'll fucking ruin everything. Man. So but uh
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, anyway, so okay, so uh well let's talk.
<v Speaker 1>I want to talk about your compost setup because you're
<v Speaker 1>doing I mean the ship I see you doing with
<v Speaker 1>you do the biochar uh and then you're I mean
<v Speaker 1>I was I wrote you because I was having trouble
<v Speaker 1>with my own setup. I got a wood shipper and
<v Speaker 1>I was putting coffee grounds in it, and the ship
<v Speaker 1>would get hot, it would get like one hundred and
<v Speaker 1>forty five degrees for and I'd measure with the thermometer.
<v Speaker 1>But then you know, I had, like I also have
<v Speaker 1>got like a bunch of tumbler that I was putting
<v Speaker 1>coffee grounds and dog shit in and just whatever. You know,
<v Speaker 1>I was like, fuck it, just let it, let it roast.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not growing vegetables, so I have to worry about
<v Speaker 1>you know, uh, pathogens. I just want to get it hot.
<v Speaker 1>And and but then the fucking tumblers slowed down like
<v Speaker 1>they weren't hot. They were like one hundred degrees maybe,
<v Speaker 1>which is you know, it's gonna be.
<v Speaker 3>Here hold for your prie Texas.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, well we're in like the mid eighties mid
<v Speaker 1>and it's gonna be ninety six today. But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>normally it's super hot, and it's it's generally too hot
<v Speaker 1>for earthworms. So we you know, soldier fly larva are
<v Speaker 1>what really you know, quote unquote meal worms. They're mostly
<v Speaker 1>what do most of the the breaking down here. But
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, man, I mean I don't I don't know
<v Speaker 1>what was So if you got to, if you get
<v Speaker 1>I'd like the tumblers because they're easy. What's your opinion,
<v Speaker 1>You like the tumblers or you like the big towers
<v Speaker 1>that you just stir with a shovel like a sharpshooter
<v Speaker 1>or something.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so I like I like the big towers that
<v Speaker 2>there's actually one specific one that really like and maybe
<v Speaker 2>it's just it was one of the first compost heaps
<v Speaker 2>I ever got, so it's used to using it. But
<v Speaker 2>it's these biostacks, and it was by Cooper Hawkins. They
<v Speaker 2>don't make them anymore, but they're basically just a tall
<v Speaker 2>stack of these three by three by one foot plastic
<v Speaker 2>bands and you can just stack on top of each other.
<v Speaker 2>So the nice thing is you get two of them
<v Speaker 2>and you can just load one up and then as
<v Speaker 2>soon as it's like kind of starts to slow down
<v Speaker 2>the heat, you just pull out the shovel and then
<v Speaker 2>just shovel into the other one or the restack it,
<v Speaker 2>and so you can just kind of you can turn
<v Speaker 2>it relatively quick that way. And the reason I like
<v Speaker 2>that one is it's just the tumbler's breakover time. I
<v Speaker 2>don't care how well you build a tumbler, like they've
<v Speaker 2>kind of just rattled themselves aparts. I feel for these biostacks.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, all the ones I got, I'm getting from
<v Speaker 2>like Criigslist or Facebook, marketplace or my buddy will we'll
<v Speaker 2>see them online or like on his bike and just
<v Speaker 2>call me up and be like corner of Addison, you know,
<v Speaker 2>thirty second, come get one and so you know, I've
<v Speaker 2>just been giving me out to all my friends because
<v Speaker 2>they're just so stable. Like most of these ones that
<v Speaker 2>are in the Bay Area, they were giving them out
<v Speaker 2>basically like an early two thousands, So all these people
<v Speaker 2>have them and they're still you know, twenty years later,
<v Speaker 2>and they're like fucking rock solid.
<v Speaker 1>There's no stackable like compost. Then. Yeah, I haven't seen
<v Speaker 1>like this.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah yeah, all these all these ones, I see that,
<v Speaker 2>like you know, you know, buddies that aren't in the
<v Speaker 2>area by or these ones are kind of as like
<v Speaker 2>roundish or squarish domes.
<v Speaker 3>They have one ass.
<v Speaker 2>Flap on the bottom and then a place to put
<v Speaker 2>stuff in at the top.
<v Speaker 3>And the problem is you can't get it irrated.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, you gotta get this.
<v Speaker 3>What I got to do.
<v Speaker 1>My mine's a fucking workout if I want to. It's
<v Speaker 1>like a three foot tall cheap plastic thing I got
<v Speaker 1>on Scamazon or something. It's like three feet tall, but
<v Speaker 1>like you know, in the door on the bottom brakes
<v Speaker 1>and ship it doesn't really fit. It'll work, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>because where I live it's just it's so hot that
<v Speaker 1>like I can't have it open. It'll just it'll fucking
<v Speaker 1>dry out and turn into tryout. Yeah, and then the tumbler.
<v Speaker 1>The issue with that is that it's too it's like
<v Speaker 1>a wet wad inside, so like eventually I spin it
<v Speaker 1>and it doesn't even it doesn't even tumble. Man, it's
<v Speaker 1>not even tumbling. I don't know what I should do,
<v Speaker 1>if I should just open the top and let it
<v Speaker 1>dry out a little bit or what.
<v Speaker 2>Probably Yeah, so it's just becoming like one giant like
<v Speaker 2>roving dog turn in there.
<v Speaker 1>Well it's not just dog shit, but there's there's like
<v Speaker 1>food scraps in there too. But then I put woodships.
<v Speaker 1>But it's not like it's not tumbling right, It's like
<v Speaker 1>I think it's too small. It's not the right size.
<v Speaker 1>I used to have this one by tumbleweed that was
<v Speaker 1>more like pill shaped, like a long pill shape, like
<v Speaker 1>a you know, like the fucking antibiotic style pills, not
<v Speaker 1>like a tablet. This is more like a tablet shape,
<v Speaker 1>so it's more like a disc. But so I'll have
<v Speaker 1>to go in there and just and then stir it
<v Speaker 1>around anyway, which is a pain in the ass because
<v Speaker 1>the holes not big enough. And it's yes, I think
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna move to towers, but but getting that you're getting.
<v Speaker 3>The something in there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I get the ratio is right, But I'm wondering
<v Speaker 2>if all some of those tumblers, if you could do
<v Speaker 2>with like what people do with like their dryers. You know,
<v Speaker 2>they'll put like a big ass like ball in there.
<v Speaker 2>But bas so you don't want something that like doesn't
<v Speaker 2>break down. So maybe like stone or just some really
<v Speaker 2>you know, dense wood kind of help mil mill it
<v Speaker 2>a little bit probably.
<v Speaker 1>When you think it, yeah, a stone, so it'll actually
<v Speaker 1>move it around. But also I think just not filling
<v Speaker 1>it up, which is important. So anyway, I off to
<v Speaker 1>go in there and like shovel the ship out. And
<v Speaker 1>I just the reason I wanted to start doing this
<v Speaker 1>was because just for making my own soil, because for
<v Speaker 1>h you know, for an additive to soil, because it's
<v Speaker 1>hard to get soil down here. I've have like tried
<v Speaker 1>all different mixtures for just like for potting up anything
<v Speaker 1>from cacti to fucking whatever. And because again because it's
<v Speaker 1>so hot, I've got to use thick soil. I only
<v Speaker 1>had a little bit of parlay, but I would put
<v Speaker 1>you know, get coarse sand normally just get it from
<v Speaker 1>the steel from a golf course or something makes it.
<v Speaker 1>Mix it with some ship They call it soil conditioner,
<v Speaker 1>but it's essentially just like pine bark chips. It's really good.
<v Speaker 1>Whatever it is, it's like pine bark or juniper, but
<v Speaker 1>it like really improves the soil texture and because of
<v Speaker 1>the residents, it doesn't rot, so it's not you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's a great additive. And then yeah, and then I'll
<v Speaker 1>put composts and maybe some vermiculate to give aeration and
<v Speaker 1>soil and I don't know, I'm like a soil chef.
<v Speaker 1>I mix it, just mix around.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. I think the first guys I saw like, I think,
<v Speaker 2>like you're going to these long explanations as you're like
<v Speaker 2>blending up stuff in a bucket more or less. And
<v Speaker 2>I was like, oh sure, I'm gon have to start
<v Speaker 2>doing that. They way back in the day.
<v Speaker 1>I was trying a year ago. I was trying to
<v Speaker 1>use juniper like they call it cedar shames so you
<v Speaker 1>can get it from the store here. But that was
<v Speaker 1>actually shitty. It's got to break down more. I used
<v Speaker 1>a little bit. I mean, if you could chop them up,
<v Speaker 1>you know more, that would work. But it was like
<v Speaker 1>just shaved junipers ashyi shavings, which sucked. That was fucking goofy.
<v Speaker 1>That was clownish. I mean I learned my lesson after
<v Speaker 1>like a month or two. But you know what help
<v Speaker 1>those get in that woods? You have a woodship or
<v Speaker 1>don't you like one of those little ms that those
<v Speaker 1>are fucking great man, and they shave it. They give
<v Speaker 1>you really like fine particled shavings. You know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there's a prizingly good And I see a lot
<v Speaker 2>of people like shit, talk to them and like their
<v Speaker 2>problem is they don't take them apart and occasionally sharpen
<v Speaker 2>the blade.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah it's going downside, pull them apart, sharp blade case.
<v Speaker 1>It takes five minutes with the fucking dremal, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I do it five minutes with a dremal and a
<v Speaker 1>dremal attachment, and you can see the blade. You're like, oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's dull. I just got to shave it, basically shave
<v Speaker 1>the edge off, sharpen it, and it takes it literally
<v Speaker 1>takes five minutes. I do it like if I'm using
<v Speaker 1>it every day. I do it once a week. And
<v Speaker 1>like the molts you get, the woodschips you get, they're
<v Speaker 1>not really it's not really like enough to mulch with.
<v Speaker 1>I guess you could, but it's mostly just for for
<v Speaker 1>compost because that's the for organic mix for soil. That's
<v Speaker 1>all it is. It's just broken down organic material. So
<v Speaker 1>I'll mix that with coffee grounds. You can go to Starballs.
<v Speaker 1>You can get a fucking you know, two pound or
<v Speaker 1>ten pound bag of soil of used coffee grounds in
<v Speaker 1>a morning, you know, And that gets how what else
<v Speaker 1>should I be doing to this though in the tower?
<v Speaker 1>If it's just coffee grounds and wood wood chips.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, one of the other things that I've started
<v Speaker 2>doing in the last two years I really like is
<v Speaker 2>all my leeds on the property. I will ferment those
<v Speaker 2>before going into the compost with them, and I feel
<v Speaker 2>like that just blows up the heat really quick. So
<v Speaker 2>it's acting kind of like as like a brown a
<v Speaker 2>little bit in your compost because like compos most people
<v Speaker 2>talk about having greens and browns.
<v Speaker 3>Greens are mainly like your nitrogen.
<v Speaker 2>Stuff, like your food waste, and then browns are kind
<v Speaker 2>of your scrappy, you know, woody stuff or plant stuff.
<v Speaker 2>But the beautyful I'm doing the fermentation is it changes
<v Speaker 2>the redox state on a lot of the compounds in
<v Speaker 2>these plants, and so when you then throw that into
<v Speaker 2>an aerobic environment, we got a bunch of oxygen, which
<v Speaker 2>is your compost, it'll just release a bunch of heat
<v Speaker 2>because you have this redox reaction taking place.
<v Speaker 3>And so I feel like that's great.
<v Speaker 2>And then also the fermenting of the weeds guarantees me
<v Speaker 2>that even if I screw up my compost, I'm not
<v Speaker 2>gonna end up with a bunch of weed seeds in
<v Speaker 2>my compost material later.
<v Speaker 3>On, because like, explain, how do you a lot of seeds.
<v Speaker 1>How do you ferment? How do you ferment the weeds?
<v Speaker 1>If you're pulling weeds five gallon bucket?
<v Speaker 2>Yes, it's a really tough protocol. Where you get a
<v Speaker 2>five gallon bucket and you just jam the weeds in
<v Speaker 2>there as much as you can, and then you top
<v Speaker 2>it off the water and then forget about it for
<v Speaker 2>about two to three weeks. It kind of bubble or anything.
<v Speaker 2>You Actually, I want it to get anaerobic. So I
<v Speaker 2>want it to get smelly, because that tells me that
<v Speaker 2>ship's going down and that I've got this redox reaction
<v Speaker 2>taking place.
<v Speaker 1>Explain the redox reaction for the listeners because they may
<v Speaker 1>not you know, we got guys that are just paying houses. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Either way you think about this is like.
<v Speaker 2>You're anything that goes through fermentation will accumulate a bunch
<v Speaker 2>of acids, and acids are basically ways to kind of
<v Speaker 2>store electrons and compounds to some degree, and so that
<v Speaker 2>is now a reduced substance. So your beer, your beer
<v Speaker 2>is a pretty reduced kind of material. So when you
<v Speaker 2>drink it, you know, it goes in your gut, which
<v Speaker 2>is relatively aerobics. Got much oxygen there. You'll release a
<v Speaker 2>bunch of energy like warmth from it due to oxygen
<v Speaker 2>coming in and stealing those electrons, and in that process,
<v Speaker 2>heat is released, and so that's what's going on there.
<v Speaker 2>So you're basically producing a munch of acids and then
<v Speaker 2>using oxygen later to then liberate those the electrons in
<v Speaker 2>those acids, and that's what's going to give you.
<v Speaker 3>That extra heat in the compost. And you know, it.
<v Speaker 2>Doesn't take much to kind of run this. It's literally
<v Speaker 2>put stuff in water, let it sit for a couple
<v Speaker 2>of weeks and you start to get that kind of
<v Speaker 2>you get that a little bit of sewage smell to
<v Speaker 2>it and then you're like, oh, yeah, now I know
<v Speaker 2>it's good. And so there's two things you can do
<v Speaker 2>with the point. You could take that liquid, pour it
<v Speaker 2>into another bucket and kind of pour it back and
<v Speaker 2>forth a couple of times, and you'll oxidize that liquid now,
<v Speaker 2>and that'll kill most of the anaerobic bacteria that you've generated.
<v Speaker 1>Oxidizing it just by just by mixing it up. Essentially,
<v Speaker 1>it's like.
<v Speaker 2>Just just by mixing it up. Yeah, you'll see like
<v Speaker 2>people on I don't know YouTube and should try and
<v Speaker 2>sell you like oxygen stones and like errating basically.
<v Speaker 1>So just throwing it like back and forth between the
<v Speaker 1>buckets and it gets the oxygen in there. And it's
<v Speaker 1>so readox stands for reduction oxidation, and you know reduction
<v Speaker 1>is the gaining of electrons. So it's kind of counterintuitive
<v Speaker 1>you think, you know reducing, but you're actually gaining electrons.
<v Speaker 1>Reduction gain electrons, oxidation loss of electrons. And so when
<v Speaker 1>you're getting so basically you're you're oxidizing it that mixture
<v Speaker 1>when you're pouring it back and forth between the buckets.
<v Speaker 2>Right, and it's through two things you're going to oxidize
<v Speaker 2>those compounds. But then more importantly here for me, what
<v Speaker 2>I'm gonna do with this is I'm ultimately gonna use
<v Speaker 2>it as a liquid fertilizer on my plants. So the
<v Speaker 2>reason I want to oxidize all of that is it'll
<v Speaker 2>kill those organisms that only live in that anaerobic environment.
<v Speaker 2>And this is why people that do like oyster mushroom cultivation.
<v Speaker 2>You'll see some of them do this kind of like
<v Speaker 2>cold barrel technology. It'll take a bunch of head. They'll
<v Speaker 2>put it in a barrel, cover with water, let it get funky,
<v Speaker 2>and then pull it out and then let it basically
<v Speaker 2>sit out for you know, a couple of minutes on
<v Speaker 2>a table, and then they'll just mix their my ceiling
<v Speaker 2>in there, and and then my and the mushroom my
<v Speaker 2>ceiling takes off. The reason it can do that is
<v Speaker 2>because all of those organisms that codd that straw, as
<v Speaker 2>soon as you expose them to air, they all die.
<v Speaker 2>And so you've got like at that point that one
<v Speaker 2>moment time you kind of have like a semi stero ish,
<v Speaker 2>you know, environment where you don't have much competition.
<v Speaker 1>They need an anaerobic environment. That's why they die when
<v Speaker 1>you expose them to air.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yep, damn, damn.
<v Speaker 1>So so sorry, go ahead.
<v Speaker 3>A bucket.
<v Speaker 2>You can take that liquid. You can take that liquid
<v Speaker 2>after you oxidized that, and then you know use that.
<v Speaker 2>You know, I will usually dilute it like one to ten,
<v Speaker 2>one to twenty in water, and then you know, use
<v Speaker 2>that on my plants and then the and then the
<v Speaker 2>leftover biomass that's in that bucket, that the real stinky,
<v Speaker 2>sludgy old weeds that now goes into compost and that
<v Speaker 2>you know, that usually picks up the temperature of my
<v Speaker 2>compost pretty well.
<v Speaker 1>So that fermented stuff that you put on your plants,
<v Speaker 1>that liquid that's rich in nitrogen, which is a product
<v Speaker 1>of the plants, the weeds breaking down or what.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a product of that and
<v Speaker 2>those microbes right that have been growing in an anaerobic environment,
<v Speaker 2>because you've also grown a bunch of them, and so
<v Speaker 2>they've kind of increased the complexity of the compounds from
<v Speaker 2>the plants right by having to run their metabolism. And
<v Speaker 2>so I mean usually when I think about like trying
<v Speaker 2>to do with my property, I don't have like a
<v Speaker 2>target compound. I'm trying to get to. My big thing
<v Speaker 2>is just diversity. That's diversity in terms of organisms, it's
<v Speaker 2>diversity in terms of CA pounds, because the more diversity
<v Speaker 2>any place has, the more likely it'll survive changes inny
<v Speaker 2>you know, environment or conditions and things like that. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and so I know a life people get really focused on, like, oh,
<v Speaker 2>I just need to get some more I don't know
<v Speaker 2>uria from my plants. That's like, yeah, it was like some,
<v Speaker 2>but it'd also probably like a diversity of nitrogen carrying compounds.
<v Speaker 2>You know, that's going to make your plant survive a
<v Speaker 2>lot better as things as things change around you.
<v Speaker 1>So that I wanted like a nasty ass five gallon bucket.
<v Speaker 1>I remember I stepped in one of those. I when
<v Speaker 1>I was a kid. I'm fucking I'll never forget, man.
<v Speaker 1>I was like seven. We were you know, we used
<v Speaker 1>to go crawl through the alleys and in between people's
<v Speaker 1>houses and garages and shit. You could get away with
<v Speaker 1>trespassing thing because you know, we were seven. And I
<v Speaker 1>remember behind this old man's garage that lived on my block,
<v Speaker 1>I stepped in this fucking bucket that it just filled
<v Speaker 1>with rain water, had a bunch of leaves in it,
<v Speaker 1>and it was the most putrid smelling shit, and I
<v Speaker 1>didn't I remember that smell. It was such a traumatizing
<v Speaker 1>event because it was like up to my ankle, up
<v Speaker 1>to my knee, it was actually up to like my
<v Speaker 1>shin in this nasty bucket and it smelled like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>like sewage, but it was just rotting leaves. I couldn't.
<v Speaker 1>I'm like that someone pissing his bucket. But it was
<v Speaker 1>just rotting leaves behind the Stude's house. So you're saying,
<v Speaker 1>you want all that's all good shit, that's all nutrients,
<v Speaker 1>that's stuff breaking down. You want to put that on
<v Speaker 1>the plants and then throw that shit in the compost too.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, exactly, And that smell will go away as soon
<v Speaker 2>as stuff has a chance to kind of oxidize, so
<v Speaker 2>that smell will be really bad, right, and then as
<v Speaker 2>soon as you add it to your soil, you know it,
<v Speaker 2>that smell is gone, probably within about two days tops
<v Speaker 2>it's you won't even notice that it's there.
<v Speaker 1>All the bacteria are dying. All the bacteria are dying
<v Speaker 1>upon exposure to oxygen basically exactly.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, all those methanogens that are producing all those really nasty.
<v Speaker 3>Scents you know, will go away.
<v Speaker 2>However, you know, cautionary tail here you get your hand
<v Speaker 2>in there and you stick your foot in there by accident, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>your your leg, your skin is gonna smell like that
<v Speaker 2>for a solid day. Like I accidentally just dropped my
<v Speaker 2>uh phone in my bucket last night.
<v Speaker 1>God damn, what did you do? How did you get
<v Speaker 1>out of that? Just tea troil or something? What do you?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, how do you get rid of that?
<v Speaker 2>Mean? Ico probele alcohol, so that'll pick up a lot
<v Speaker 2>of that stuff. So I just went through with some
<v Speaker 2>toilet paper and Ico propeleluccol wiped it down in most
<v Speaker 2>that sense called.
<v Speaker 1>But your phone didn't die, like it was just a
<v Speaker 1>quick dip or what.
<v Speaker 2>It's just it was a quick dip I remember, Like
<v Speaker 2>my phone, you know has gone swimming lake merrit and
<v Speaker 2>stuff like that, Like it's yeah, this is park par
<v Speaker 2>for the course probably why.
<v Speaker 1>Just like merits smell so bad? That's just like bird
<v Speaker 1>shitt and rotting seaweed or what.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I mean, yeah, it's the birch of the Ryan seaweed.
<v Speaker 2>But then also you get these anaerobic mudflats there, you
<v Speaker 2>get all that stuff just precipitating, you get a solid
<v Speaker 2>later on top, and then it goes anaerobic, especially a
<v Speaker 2>foot down. You're completely anaerobic in Lake Merit. Uh huh.
<v Speaker 2>I mean I've gone digging in there one time, and
<v Speaker 2>I mean it gets Jesus. You get down a couple
<v Speaker 2>of feet in there, Holy crap, that smell. It's really
<v Speaker 2>hard to get off for a couple of days.
<v Speaker 1>So why do why do aerobic bacteria generally not smell
<v Speaker 1>as terrible as anaerobic.
<v Speaker 2>I can't point to the exact compounds, but you know,
<v Speaker 2>in general, it's just the compounds are producing during their
<v Speaker 2>metabolism are way way different. Yeah. So a lot of
<v Speaker 2>these methanogens, right, they can process sulfree compounds that other
<v Speaker 2>things aren't.
<v Speaker 3>In the same way.
<v Speaker 2>And so that's why you get this really bad stink
<v Speaker 2>usually a lot of times due to these sulfur compounds
<v Speaker 2>and and some of these answer of the nitrogen compounds
<v Speaker 2>that they can produce too.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so what about what about like, because you're in
<v Speaker 1>a mild climate, you're in a Bay area, what about
<v Speaker 1>people like me who are living in South Texas or Tucson,
<v Speaker 1>who are I mean composting, there's a whole different ballpark
<v Speaker 1>when it's one hundred hundred. Yeah, freeze, and then what
<v Speaker 1>about like cultivating or trying to isolate or cultivate and
<v Speaker 1>bring out the more heat tolerant natural species of bacteria
<v Speaker 1>and fungi that are just naturally occurring. How you know, Like,
<v Speaker 1>what's that method called the Korean.
<v Speaker 3>K and F Korean natural farm.
<v Speaker 2>So, I mean this is something this is something anybody
<v Speaker 2>should do any place they live. You're about to start
<v Speaker 2>your compost heap, first thing you want to do is
<v Speaker 2>go to some like native plant habitats that are close
<v Speaker 2>by to you that have some sort of duff layer.
<v Speaker 2>You know, not everybody has a big duff layer. So
<v Speaker 2>it's like, you know, if you can just find someplace
<v Speaker 2>where a little bit of like plant debris is.
<v Speaker 3>Accumulating, you can do two things.
<v Speaker 2>You can be lazy, like you could just take a
<v Speaker 2>couple of fistfols that home and then just throw that
<v Speaker 2>in the compost. Or the classic K and F Korean
<v Speaker 2>natural farming way of doing this, you'd make a little
<v Speaker 2>box and you'd put some basically cooked rice in there,
<v Speaker 2>and then you'd bury that in the place where that
<v Speaker 2>plant debris being broken down in the dust or even
<v Speaker 2>in the soil a little bit into the ground. Let
<v Speaker 2>that go for a couple of days, and then go back,
<v Speaker 2>harvest that and take that home. What happen is a
<v Speaker 2>lot those microorganisms that they are gonna be good for
<v Speaker 2>your composts. We'll grow onto that rice and you can
<v Speaker 2>use that rice to inoculate your compost with.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's the ship that's what. That's pretty, that's nice.
<v Speaker 2>And that's the smart thing, right because all those microbes
<v Speaker 2>are already evolved to deal with your habitat. You know,
<v Speaker 2>they're used to that temperature, they're used to that humidity,
<v Speaker 2>they're used to that soil complexity.
<v Speaker 1>There is some wild stuff in the soil here too,
<v Speaker 1>like wild very regionally specific, because we've got these you know,
<v Speaker 1>sandy loam, fine particled calcareous clays and shit. And then
<v Speaker 1>you got like you know, go to like a spot
<v Speaker 1>where there's like Texas ebony trees and blackbrush and they
<v Speaker 1>create a nice duff on the ground mesquites of the leaves.
<v Speaker 1>When last year's leaves fall off, you go in that
<v Speaker 1>big a little hole on air, put the box in
<v Speaker 1>their probably have to do it before a rain down
<v Speaker 1>here because it's just or bring your own water somehow
<v Speaker 1>or something, you know, and get the water around the
<v Speaker 1>soil around it wet, and then yeah, just let it
<v Speaker 1>go to town and come back in a week or to
<v Speaker 1>and pick it up, throw it on the compost. That
<v Speaker 1>would be really cool to find out what's in there too.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And I mean a little exterm that any of
<v Speaker 2>you can do, even if you're not gonna be starting
<v Speaker 2>combos at your house, you know, is go out to
<v Speaker 2>that native habitat, get a couple of those leaves that
<v Speaker 2>fall on the ground, and then just put it like
<v Speaker 2>in a plastic to go container and splt it with
<v Speaker 2>a little bit of water, pop a couple holes in
<v Speaker 2>the top, and then just set that on a shelf
<v Speaker 2>and then look at every couple of days and what
<v Speaker 2>you'll see is you'll see all that micro you know,
<v Speaker 2>world pop out of those leaves over the course of time,
<v Speaker 2>so a lot of those fun guys that are inside
<v Speaker 2>the leaves will start to erupt. You'll see bacterial colonies start,
<v Speaker 2>and you can kind of get you know, you can
<v Speaker 2>put yourself in a place to appreciate actually the biodiversity
<v Speaker 2>in your place. Even if you think you don't have
<v Speaker 2>any because you're in a hot, dry place. No, man,
<v Speaker 2>life has not a way to make it everywhere. A
<v Speaker 2>lot of times it's just add water, you know, and
<v Speaker 2>give it some time and you'll see stuff pop out.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. For me, what I think is so cool about
<v Speaker 1>where I live. I mean, you know, I'm not talking
<v Speaker 1>about the fucking car dealerships and the billboards and all
<v Speaker 1>the heinous shit that Texas is so good at, but
<v Speaker 1>you know, the regional specificity of the climate and the
<v Speaker 1>soil and the fucking plants. There's just so much cool
<v Speaker 1>stuff down here. You know. That's why I want to
<v Speaker 1>get people, you know, over to thorn scrub to like
<v Speaker 1>study and sequence you know, soil fungi and bacteria. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, there's it's just it's learning. It's a whole
<v Speaker 1>different set of rules from you know, like the Eastern
<v Speaker 1>Seaboard or like the temperate, temperate Midwest, the temperate latitudes
<v Speaker 1>of North America. Like it's just different. And people in Tucson,
<v Speaker 1>it seems like, have been doing this for a good
<v Speaker 1>thirty forty years, Like they're really figuring it out how
<v Speaker 1>to garden in a desert and compost and grow natives
<v Speaker 1>and like make the landscape thrive down here in South Texas.
<v Speaker 1>You know, the culture here is so isolated and alienated
<v Speaker 1>from the land. They're still trying to pretend they're in
<v Speaker 1>fucking you know, grow They're trying to like grow the
<v Speaker 1>land landscapes of Maryland or Ohio, uh, down here in
<v Speaker 1>South Texas. And so it's but I think people can
<v Speaker 1>figure it out. I mean, you just gotta. Yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>it's just a different, different suite of tools and strategies
<v Speaker 1>that you need. So yeah, like I figured that out earlier.
<v Speaker 1>I was like, oh, just get some worms for the compost,
<v Speaker 1>and it was like, man, it's too fucking insanely hot
<v Speaker 1>in there.
<v Speaker 3>They all die.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, And then I was like and then the Soldier
<v Speaker 1>flies just shot up, showed up, and I was like,
<v Speaker 1>what are these giant fucking fly larva in here? And
<v Speaker 1>then I saw a soldier flyes like, oh shit, that's
<v Speaker 1>I you know, I identified it on I NAD. I
<v Speaker 1>put it on IADS. It's a soldier fly and it
<v Speaker 1>mentioned on there that their larva are used for composts.
<v Speaker 1>And I put two and two together, like, oh, that's
<v Speaker 1>what just showed up naturally. Holy shit, how do I
<v Speaker 1>get more of these? You know? How do I get
<v Speaker 1>more soldier flies to fucking show up in the compost?
<v Speaker 1>The hash? But yeah, the tumblers are fucking me up,
<v Speaker 1>man there too. I need to errate them, and I
<v Speaker 1>might even just stop using them, or I think you
<v Speaker 1>just have to keep a like half full so they
<v Speaker 1>can actually tumble. You know. But if it's getting you wet,
<v Speaker 1>what would you recommend like just letting it.
<v Speaker 2>If you're getting to yeah, letting it dry out and
<v Speaker 2>then adding more browns, adding more coarse browns to it,
<v Speaker 2>more of your kind of like yeah, yeah, more of
<v Speaker 2>your chips kind of like woody, you know, stuff to it,
<v Speaker 2>and then they'll help break it up.
<v Speaker 1>What about the stuff out of the topic of Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>go ahead on the.
<v Speaker 2>Topic of like those like organisms showing up, because everybody
<v Speaker 2>like that does. Composts are starting comblets are like, oh,
<v Speaker 2>I got to get like some red wigglers from someplace,
<v Speaker 2>or like, you know, I gotta buy some soldier flies.
<v Speaker 3>Like no, no, you don't.
<v Speaker 2>Just make the habitat and whatever lives in your environment
<v Speaker 2>anyway will show up for it, you know, Like I'd
<v Speaker 2>never added worms to mine I never added soldier flies,
<v Speaker 2>but they're all they're all there now, and they come
<v Speaker 2>with different seasons, you know, And that's what you want.
<v Speaker 2>You want to make this little robust ecosystem of whoever's
<v Speaker 2>already around you.
<v Speaker 1>You know.
<v Speaker 2>It's like the whole like Shield of Dreams Kevin Costner bullshit,
<v Speaker 2>Like if you build it, they'll come. It's like the
<v Speaker 2>same thing with the compost, Like it's not going to
<v Speaker 2>happen overnight, you know, so just you know, put a
<v Speaker 2>year in on it and then start watching what happens
<v Speaker 2>around your compost and you'll see things show up, like
<v Speaker 2>I've got the souldier flies, but they only show up
<v Speaker 2>for the summer season it's hot.
<v Speaker 1>But they're still around.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, only when it's hot.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. And that's actually perfect because I'll get so many
<v Speaker 2>of them in there that that's a protein from my chicken.
<v Speaker 2>So I'll just open the top on the compost, let
<v Speaker 2>the chickens out. They'll go in there dig for soldier
<v Speaker 2>fly larvae. At the same time they'll airrate my stack
<v Speaker 2>by digging, you know. And so it's oh.
<v Speaker 1>The chickens go in there, and oh that's nice, man,
<v Speaker 1>But don't they fuck up other plants though too, you.
<v Speaker 2>Know what they're I've kind of probe because the chickens
<v Speaker 2>are easy to program, per se, So when I release
<v Speaker 2>them from their pin, they'll just follow me all the
<v Speaker 2>way through the yard to the compost and then jump
<v Speaker 2>up and get in the compost, pop the top.
<v Speaker 1>Where does the rabbit come into all of this? You
<v Speaker 1>got a rabbit that you found somewhere too, right, like
<v Speaker 1>that one of.
<v Speaker 3>Those Yeah, yeah, this guy was this crib.
<v Speaker 1>He he looks like an anime cartoon or a Pokemon
<v Speaker 1>or something. He's not a normal rabbit. He's a cultivar rabbit.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's this weird like lion's main cultivar, and he's
<v Speaker 2>a double mutant and that usually they have just like
<v Speaker 2>one big poof of hair behind their heads.
<v Speaker 3>They kind of look like I guess a lion per se.
<v Speaker 2>This guy's got two mutations, so he's got that, and
<v Speaker 2>then his whole body has this giant furry skirt and
<v Speaker 2>he's in a flat face. So he, like he said,
<v Speaker 2>he looks like an anime character. And he was breaking
<v Speaker 2>into our yard four years ago to eat our cherry leaves,
<v Speaker 2>and I thought he was just a weird looking cat.
<v Speaker 2>Because I kept seeing this thing at night, and then
<v Speaker 2>I finally caught it and I was like, oh jeezure's
<v Speaker 2>somebody's weird pet rabbit. And then nobody, nobody the neighbor
<v Speaker 2>claimed him, and my wife was like, oh, it's too cute.
<v Speaker 3>We got to keep him. I'm like, ah, shit, all right.
<v Speaker 1>It was just loose, but you found his ass. He
<v Speaker 1>just showed up.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And after like a couple of years later, we
<v Speaker 2>found out that there was somebody in the neighborhood who's
<v Speaker 2>had a giant, fair whole rabbit colony in their backyard
<v Speaker 2>and they were gainst their starved and most of them died,
<v Speaker 2>and this guy somehow escaped damn, and then have just
<v Speaker 2>been living in the neighborhood for I don't know how long.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, he's yeah, yeah he does.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, he's still he's still around. The wife's wife brought
<v Speaker 2>him inside, so he gets he has he has a wife.
<v Speaker 1>Now.
<v Speaker 2>My wife's like, well he needs a partner. I'm like,
<v Speaker 2>I guess. So he now is inside, but he's like, dude,
<v Speaker 2>he's better train than their dog. I open up the
<v Speaker 2>door and I'm like, hey, mice, he's you will go outside.
<v Speaker 2>He'll run outside, goes does his thing like eat some ship,
<v Speaker 2>terrorize the chickens, and then he'll come back to the
<v Speaker 2>door and be like, hey, I'm done, ready to come
<v Speaker 2>back in.
<v Speaker 1>He doesn't ship in the house.
<v Speaker 3>We got a little like box that he'll like jump
<v Speaker 3>up on.
<v Speaker 2>Ship in the house.
<v Speaker 1>Just pellets though, man, So it's not it's not like
<v Speaker 1>dog shit or anything that's not that's.
<v Speaker 3>It's not dog shit. And the rabbit.
<v Speaker 2>The rabbit pelts are great because they're not hot and
<v Speaker 2>so you can you could actually use them just straight
<v Speaker 2>in your garden. I'm like, you know, my chicken ship
<v Speaker 2>I got of put through the compost.
<v Speaker 1>So the carbon yeah, it's just broken down. Yep.
<v Speaker 2>And it's great too because has been a fungus guy.
<v Speaker 2>There's a lot of fun guy that right live undung
<v Speaker 2>and so I've been using mister mices to we're trying
<v Speaker 2>to find what plant and we think it's a rush
<v Speaker 2>up in Mendocino County produces this crazy xylariaceous fungus that
<v Speaker 2>is just out of this world. I mean it looks
<v Speaker 2>like it looks like something from like a b horror movie.
<v Speaker 2>And so I've been up in Mendocino and these bogs
<v Speaker 2>harvesting plants up there, and then I'll just feed them
<v Speaker 2>to mister Mice's and then cultivate his poop to see
<v Speaker 2>if I can cultivate this fungus because we think it's
<v Speaker 2>probably an indo fight.
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow, So it lives inside the plant non pathologically,
<v Speaker 1>like not harming it, and then just the right and
<v Speaker 1>then fruits and the shit.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so people are familiar indo fights are these fun
<v Speaker 2>guy that live inside plant tissue, and the plant basically
<v Speaker 2>gives me a home and the fun it's usually what
<v Speaker 2>it's doing is it's get in a place to live
<v Speaker 2>in a place where it's rent by keeping other fun
<v Speaker 2>guy from invading it and bacteria. So lnies are producing
<v Speaker 2>really interesting secondary metabolites compounds that can kill bacteria or
<v Speaker 2>kill their fung guy, and so some of these end
<v Speaker 2>up being like blockbuster drugs. Like Taxol is a compound
<v Speaker 2>that's used in cancer treatments. It basically stops your microtubules
<v Speaker 2>from polymerizing. And it was originally found in the yew tree,
<v Speaker 2>and people forever thought it was the yew tree, and
<v Speaker 2>they're like, oh damn, how are we going to make
<v Speaker 2>enough of these yew trees to make a drug out
<v Speaker 2>of it, and somebody realized, like, oh, it's the fungus.
<v Speaker 1>Cool, we came from a little fungus. It didn't come
<v Speaker 1>from I mean, it was in Texas, but it was
<v Speaker 1>only in Texas because of an endo fight. Yep, God damn,
<v Speaker 1>I had no idea. That's wild.
<v Speaker 2>And I guarantee you a lot of compounds that we
<v Speaker 2>thought were planting were from the plant originally, and we're
<v Speaker 2>going to realize they're actually the indefit a fun guy,
<v Speaker 2>especially when you look at alkaloids like my like my
<v Speaker 2>little pet, my little pet. Ideas that a lot of
<v Speaker 2>these alcoholis that people really enjoy from plants might actually
<v Speaker 2>be fantasytic sung guy.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus, like mescaline and Trico Serious, which you've You've got
<v Speaker 1>an amazing Tricho Serious collection, by the way, right, which
<v Speaker 1>you frequently fertilized with urine.
<v Speaker 2>Oh man, Yeah, urine is the way they go, big.
<v Speaker 1>Proponent of piss fertilizer, which you know some of the squares,
<v Speaker 1>especially Texas is full of squids, might be vibed out
<v Speaker 1>by that. I think that's I piss on all the plants.
<v Speaker 1>You just gotta mix it with water a little bit.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you just mixed with wild but I usually go
<v Speaker 2>one to ten, one to twenty right the right of
<v Speaker 2>the water and can't and then just do everything in
<v Speaker 2>the yard. You know, everything loves urine. Everything. Yeah, the
<v Speaker 2>beauty is like you know, it's it's something you're just
<v Speaker 2>throwing away and you're going to the storm and buying fertilizer.
<v Speaker 1>I never I don't like pissing inside, and then you
<v Speaker 1>waste you weigh first off, if you don't flush, which
<v Speaker 1>you shouldn't flush piss because it's a fucking waste of water,
<v Speaker 1>especially in a droughtstress to way, and then when you
<v Speaker 1>leave it in the toilet, it starts stinking. And so
<v Speaker 1>I I prefer pissing outside all its way, it's way
<v Speaker 1>more enjoyable.
<v Speaker 2>So well, the reason I actually started doing this was
<v Speaker 2>due to we had this harmful alga bloom events in
<v Speaker 2>the summer twenty twenty two in the San Francisco Bay
<v Speaker 2>where we had I mean just fish dying everywhere in
<v Speaker 2>the sf BA, like we we almost killed all our
<v Speaker 2>sturgeon and this was due to a giant algae bloom
<v Speaker 2>due to our nitrogen levels in the SFA are crazy.
<v Speaker 2>They're higher than the Chesapeake, you know, and so I
<v Speaker 2>was like looking around, I was like like, how do
<v Speaker 2>we how do we stop you know, some of this
<v Speaker 2>or how do I stop this? And it's like, well,
<v Speaker 2>my own property, I could take fifty percent of my
<v Speaker 2>nitrogen that's coming out of me and piss and just
<v Speaker 2>not put it into the system that's going to be
<v Speaker 2>ultimately dumping into the bay, which is your local you know,
<v Speaker 2>municipality that handles your wastewater. And if you can put
<v Speaker 2>it right on the ground into your plants, you've just
<v Speaker 2>trapped all that nitrogen.
<v Speaker 3>You know, it's most of.
<v Speaker 1>The nitrogen that was polluting the bay. I mean, do
<v Speaker 1>you think it's from sewage or is it some other
<v Speaker 1>source or where is it?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's man from It's mainly from wastewater facilities. So
<v Speaker 2>the SFA has thirty seven wastewater facility plants that more
<v Speaker 2>or less dump you know, their processed sewage into the
<v Speaker 2>San Francisco Bay. And people have looked at you know,
<v Speaker 2>that versus nitrogen coming from you know, the Central Valley
<v Speaker 2>coming through the rivers into the bay. And now it's
<v Speaker 2>the It is definitely the wastewater that's the main carrier.
<v Speaker 1>So what does process sewage? It just means it's been
<v Speaker 1>decontaminated for most of the you know, harmful bacteria, but
<v Speaker 1>there's still a shit ton of nitrogen in there or what.
<v Speaker 2>Yep yep, and you can and you could and you
<v Speaker 2>could transform the nitrogen. There's like more modern plants. So
<v Speaker 2>actually South Ay down by San Jose they did this,
<v Speaker 2>I think in the eighties or nineties. They updated their plants,
<v Speaker 2>so I forget if it's nitrade for which one they're
<v Speaker 2>putting out. They're putting in a different form of nitrogen
<v Speaker 2>by doing another additional couple steps, and in that way,
<v Speaker 2>the algae doesn't have as quick access to it, but
<v Speaker 2>most plants in America, because we're horrible building infrastructure anymore.
<v Speaker 2>Don't get me started on that.
<v Speaker 1>I should all be private industry, private private industry. And
<v Speaker 1>then you get a fucking middleman involved is going to
<v Speaker 1>start fleecing the government that you know, it's yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>part of the did all this. It's like the Republican
<v Speaker 1>fucking way of doing everything's private and then it's more
<v Speaker 1>costly and more inefficient, right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but basically, like you could be doing this the
<v Speaker 2>right way where you're not putting out these nitrogen compounds
<v Speaker 2>that are really accessible to algae.
<v Speaker 3>But most places.
<v Speaker 2>Aren't doing that in the United States, and so you
<v Speaker 2>have these huge ballooms that can take place. And to
<v Speaker 2>be honest, to even be better about this, we should
<v Speaker 2>just find a way to retrap that nitrogen and then
<v Speaker 2>use it as fertilizers. You know, every gets grossed out
<v Speaker 2>by that, and it's like, you know, what, this is
<v Speaker 2>what's going on in your environment every day. Were shouldn't
<v Speaker 2>just going from all these other organisms, it's going into
<v Speaker 2>other organized Italian ecosystem work.
<v Speaker 1>Italian grandfathers have been watering their basilin tomato plants with
<v Speaker 1>pists for centuries. Seriously, Yeah, it's fucking yeah, it's it's pretty.
<v Speaker 1>So let's move on to a more controversial topic now, Daman.
<v Speaker 1>Let's talk about shit composting, which I first became exposed
<v Speaker 1>to in northern California at a friend's land project where
<v Speaker 1>they didn't have you know, they had a lot of
<v Speaker 1>people coming through there, you know, both to volunteer and
<v Speaker 1>do work, and so there was a lot of massive
<v Speaker 1>amounts of shit and it would have destroyed the plumbing.
<v Speaker 1>I mean that toilet would be flushing. They had like
<v Speaker 1>two or three toilets, they would have been fucking wrecked.
<v Speaker 1>So they got a five gallon barrel, built an out house,
<v Speaker 1>and then people would shit in the five gallon barrel,
<v Speaker 1>cover it with a scoop of sawdust, pine shavings, whatever,
<v Speaker 1>and then they'd put those out in the sun, which
<v Speaker 1>I don't know how much sense that make, but it
<v Speaker 1>would certainly get hot and then you know, after a
<v Speaker 1>couple of years they'd be ready. But it doesn't take
<v Speaker 1>a couple of years to make it safe to actually
<v Speaker 1>just dump on plants. I mean, you don't want to
<v Speaker 1>put on veggies, of course. But how does this shit
<v Speaker 1>composting work? Do you know of any stable and reliable
<v Speaker 1>shit composters around you or what?
<v Speaker 3>Oh?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I know quite a few. The way that works is,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it's very simple, simple, you know. It's it's
<v Speaker 2>similar to other composts. And we were just trying to
<v Speaker 2>take a material and get it hot enough to get
<v Speaker 2>rid of the stuff that you don't want anymore, which
<v Speaker 2>is going to be things like pathogenic bacteria and some
<v Speaker 2>of the viruses and some of the viruses that could
<v Speaker 2>also be in that pequal matter, and so I mean
<v Speaker 2>you're basically and that's the reason why they're mixing in
<v Speaker 2>the pine shavings there, right, that's gonna be one of
<v Speaker 2>those browns. It's going to help that get really hot
<v Speaker 2>in the compost.
<v Speaker 1>The nitrogen, yeah, the ship is the green, the nitrogen
<v Speaker 1>and pine shavings are the carbon the brown yep.
<v Speaker 2>And then and the reason that people are usually saying
<v Speaker 2>to let you know, go for so long is that
<v Speaker 2>you're just going to increase the chance, right that everything
<v Speaker 2>has expired at that point, the bacteria and the viruses
<v Speaker 2>have turned over at that point, and so that's why
<v Speaker 2>you have these really long time scales. But like most
<v Speaker 2>people I know they're doing human manure, I think are
<v Speaker 2>kind of doing it most like a year cycle on it.
<v Speaker 1>That's it. After a year, it's it's safe if you've
<v Speaker 1>got it to the right temperature. And so what temperature
<v Speaker 1>do you want it at? So it's and also it's
<v Speaker 1>not just the process of the virus and bacteria getting cooked.
<v Speaker 1>It's a it's a process of them just expiring as
<v Speaker 1>well or getting eaten by microbes.
<v Speaker 2>Right right, and and also them kind of getting you know,
<v Speaker 2>exposed to oxygen, right oxygen. So what's gonna, you know,
<v Speaker 2>slowly kind of break everybody down in the long run.
<v Speaker 2>And so that's why that time, that time is also important.
<v Speaker 2>I don't have the temperatures off the top of my
<v Speaker 2>head just because I'm not human manureing at my place yet.
<v Speaker 2>It's the wife wouldn't be too happy about that, but
<v Speaker 2>one day in my.
<v Speaker 1>Grip probably would. I think it's illegal in most places too, Like,
<v Speaker 1>if you're going to mean.
<v Speaker 2>It's a.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it is.
<v Speaker 2>It is illegal in most places, So it's kind of
<v Speaker 2>you gotta be a hushushed about it.
<v Speaker 3>Gorilla ship. Yeah, you gotta understand that from a city
<v Speaker 3>point of view.
<v Speaker 2>Right, Like the whole reason we have modern septic systems
<v Speaker 2>is you so you don't have like, you know, collar
<v Speaker 2>outbreaks turn the centry.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it could get out of control so easily, it could.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you've seen how how people how dumb and
<v Speaker 1>just not not even dumb, that's rude, How just not
<v Speaker 1>on top of things people can be and you let, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that sounds like a horrible you know, it's only only
<v Speaker 1>for the eclectic hippies who really fixate on doing it
<v Speaker 1>right right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, And and and have a you know, long
<v Speaker 2>term attention to stuffing, Like, you know, I'm really all
<v Speaker 2>relatively attentive guy, but I'll still go out and find
<v Speaker 2>plants in my yard that are dead because I forgot
<v Speaker 2>to water them, right, stuff like that.
<v Speaker 3>I just imagine.
<v Speaker 2>Now that's a can of ship and right, you let
<v Speaker 2>a fifty five gallon vadas ship get out of control,
<v Speaker 2>you're or you know, you don't pay attention to it
<v Speaker 2>for a couple of weeks.
<v Speaker 1>Now you've got a color outbreak, right, So.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, you can't just go out and now be like,
<v Speaker 2>oh I screwed up, going to slide that into the
<v Speaker 2>trash can. No, like somebody's gonna notice. It's not going
<v Speaker 2>well for anybody. So the orac you're going to go
<v Speaker 2>down that road, you really want to put your put
<v Speaker 2>the time in, get the investment down, and then get
<v Speaker 2>a protocol in place so that it's like a you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's a time behavior thing.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah, the oracle here says maintaining temperatures above one
<v Speaker 1>hundred and twenty two degrees fairreheit, which is actually kind
<v Speaker 1>of low, like you'd think it would need to be one.
<v Speaker 2>I mean I'm trying to Yeah, I'm trying to get
<v Speaker 2>like up to like one thirty to make sure all
<v Speaker 2>my you know, seeds are dead in a compost, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so yeah, that's what my tower is at. It's
<v Speaker 1>at one forty. So how would you and you can
<v Speaker 1>feel it on the sides of this this compost tower,
<v Speaker 1>So how would you if you got someone who's compost
<v Speaker 1>is not getting hot. We're not talking about human organ
<v Speaker 1>commo's not getting hot. How what would you? I guess
<v Speaker 1>then you have to start thinking, well, what ratio is off?
<v Speaker 1>Is it carbon or nitrogen? And what do I need
<v Speaker 1>to what do I need to get in there?
<v Speaker 2>Well, carbon nitrogen and then also moisture content, right, because
<v Speaker 2>there's lot some people that are like my, my, my
<v Speaker 2>pile's cool, and I'll go over and I'll look at it.
<v Speaker 2>I'm like, well, it's also like, you know, barely drier
<v Speaker 2>than a bucket of water. And at that point you're like,
<v Speaker 2>you want to you want to let this dry out,
<v Speaker 2>like air rate at first, because a lot of moisture
<v Speaker 2>is going to cause it to get more anaerobic. You
<v Speaker 2>want to air rate it, let it dry out, and
<v Speaker 2>then let's see where you're at in a week or
<v Speaker 2>two a lot of places, though I talk to people,
<v Speaker 2>what I realized is they've just got too much food
<v Speaker 2>straps going in there compared to browns, compared to carbon.
<v Speaker 2>So a lot of times for the wa it's like, hey,
<v Speaker 2>my compass heat doesn't getting hot. We I'll tell them
<v Speaker 2>is add more browns and mix it and then let's
<v Speaker 2>talk in three days. And if it hasn't gone up,
<v Speaker 2>then let's look at your moisture content and kind of
<v Speaker 2>go from there. What's the most use I find it
<v Speaker 2>most for most people, they're not enough carbons.
<v Speaker 1>For moisture content. What is the most what's the most
<v Speaker 1>common problem? Too dryer, to wet, too wet?
<v Speaker 3>Right, too wet? Too wet?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, people, Well, and it tends on your habit, right,
<v Speaker 2>too wet in most most places on the West coast.
<v Speaker 2>Might talk to people, but I can imagine you know
<v Speaker 2>a place like you or like Tucson, like it might
<v Speaker 2>just be that dries out really quick, you know, And
<v Speaker 2>so in that case, you might be wanting to add
<v Speaker 2>water more frequently, or maybe jacket your compost heap a
<v Speaker 2>little bit so it doesn't lose moisture as fast.
<v Speaker 1>So the if it's too wet, then what you got
<v Speaker 1>to do is basically stir it up, get airflow in
<v Speaker 1>there and take the lid off. Maybe you know, just
<v Speaker 1>get airflow and ambient uh, you know, atmospheric humidity to
<v Speaker 1>kind of pull the moisture out of it, or maybe
<v Speaker 1>even take some of the composts out and put it
<v Speaker 1>in its own separate bucket so that it dries quicker,
<v Speaker 1>because you know, a large volume is going to take
<v Speaker 1>longer to dry than a smaller volume. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Or other thing you could do if you're if you're
<v Speaker 2>already burning stuff on your property is grind up any
<v Speaker 2>char you have and throw it in there and that'll sucked.
<v Speaker 3>Out a lot of water.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and then you can kind of then you can
<v Speaker 2>kind of get the little with the biochar world. So biochar,
<v Speaker 2>for those of you are uninitiated, is kind of this
<v Speaker 2>idea of taking pyalzed plant life and then basically adding.
<v Speaker 3>Nutrients to it and then adding us to your soil.
<v Speaker 2>So this kind of comes out of people discovering the
<v Speaker 2>terra preta in the Amazon, which are these black soils,
<v Speaker 2>and if you know anything about the Amazon, soils are
<v Speaker 2>actually kind of shitty, except for like rivul of plants
<v Speaker 2>are right, because they've built up all this layer. But
<v Speaker 2>these places where humans have been for a while, they
<v Speaker 2>could dig down there are just like this, like soft, loamy,
<v Speaker 2>black soil. And what they realize is people have been
<v Speaker 2>burning stuff and then adding you know, they're probably their
<v Speaker 2>own human manure and stuff like that in there, and
<v Speaker 2>they just got these really dynamic, long lasting soils. And
<v Speaker 2>so there's been this fascination over the last couple of
<v Speaker 2>decades about how could contemporary humans make these type of
<v Speaker 2>soils again. So the general idea is you take wood
<v Speaker 2>or something like that, you heat it really high, like
<v Speaker 2>you're almost burning it. You try and do it in
<v Speaker 2>a relatively low auxygen environment, so you get the charcoal
<v Speaker 2>stuff at the end. And then you would take this
<v Speaker 2>charcoal and then blend it with a bunch of like
<v Speaker 2>nitrogen or like you know, nutrients and then add that
<v Speaker 2>to the soil.
<v Speaker 1>But the biochar will suck the nitrogen out of things.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, so like you A way to do it
<v Speaker 1>is get like one of those those god they're so overpriced,
<v Speaker 1>those fucking stoves that the smokeless stoves. You know, you
<v Speaker 1>can get backyard stoves. A friend of mine uses.
<v Speaker 2>Looks like the inside of a washing machine.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, like yeah, yeah, my friend of mine used to
<v Speaker 1>use one of those, the old inside of a washing machine.
<v Speaker 1>Heat the ship up and then before right when it
<v Speaker 1>starts turning to the white ash right and it's it's
<v Speaker 1>like settling down. Then you douse water on it and
<v Speaker 1>then chop it up with a shovel if you can,
<v Speaker 1>because smaller I think smaller size is better generally, right right,
<v Speaker 1>like marble.
<v Speaker 2>Size depend on the plants you're trying to grow. So
<v Speaker 2>people that are trying to grow like veggies and stuff,
<v Speaker 2>they want to get as much access to basically the
<v Speaker 2>biocharts possible in the soil, so they'll grind it relatively small,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, like fine almost dust size.
<v Speaker 1>But you're not using like lake gas logs.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, using big ass logs in there.
<v Speaker 2>But like me, for like at least like the trichoserius
<v Speaker 2>I grow, I actually want it kind of chunky. So
<v Speaker 2>I'm like breaking it down to you know, maybe about
<v Speaker 2>stuff the size of like a dime or so, and
<v Speaker 2>then using that as as my soil mix because it
<v Speaker 2>keeps it really airy for those for those roots that
<v Speaker 2>don't like to.
<v Speaker 3>Have a lot of That was how I first learned application.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's how I first learned about my my buddy
<v Speaker 1>Jeremy that runs Bona Terra Nursery and where it was Maryland.
<v Speaker 1>I think, cool guy, he's like a Hessian with this
<v Speaker 1>long ass beard and fucking listens to the metal and
<v Speaker 1>just dozen native plants. But he was, uh, he was
<v Speaker 1>using it as a soil amendment, like for potting soil
<v Speaker 1>in lieu of pearlite, and so I tried doing that too,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, it just it was it took all my
<v Speaker 1>plants that I grew in that I didn't I didn't
<v Speaker 1>buffe it up with nitrogen that bunch enough. So all
<v Speaker 1>the plants I grew and it started getting chlorotic and
<v Speaker 1>so I had to repot or I just used too
<v Speaker 1>much of it, or maybe it wasn't the right size either.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't chop it up enough. So but that's why,
<v Speaker 1>what's your solution to that? Piss? Right?
<v Speaker 2>Piss? Pissing a bucket? So I take my I got
<v Speaker 2>kind of like a knockoff solo stove smokeless you know
<v Speaker 2>thing I got flicked like eighty bucks. And what I'll
<v Speaker 2>do is I'll get that chart and I'll just move
<v Speaker 2>it into five gallon buckets. You know, I'll quench it
<v Speaker 2>with water. As soon as that fire starts to like
<v Speaker 2>damper down, I'm seeing little bit of ashirmation, I'll just
<v Speaker 2>soak that whole thing water, move that to buckets, and
<v Speaker 2>then just basically just pissing those buckets until.
<v Speaker 1>He's blowing the minds of the squares. He's he's he's
<v Speaker 1>traumatizing a square community, right, this is you gotta remember
<v Speaker 1>I'm in I'm in text. It's different here, so people
<v Speaker 1>are not used to, you know, having a lab of
<v Speaker 1>piss buckets, but they need to get on that, right.
<v Speaker 1>Texas needs to loosen the fuck up and get start
<v Speaker 1>pissling in buckets. That's some more level. If you take
<v Speaker 1>one thing with this podcast, start pissing in the buckets
<v Speaker 1>in your backyard.
<v Speaker 2>And the beauty about this is is like because of
<v Speaker 2>that the structure of that carbon of that charcoal, as
<v Speaker 2>you piss, yeah, nitdrigen just gets bound right up into
<v Speaker 2>it because that carbonyl honity is really kind of forget
<v Speaker 2>if it's a negative or a positive surface, but basically
<v Speaker 2>it'll pull that your area right in and it'll cover
<v Speaker 2>in the surface, which means they won't start smelling. So
<v Speaker 2>if you're pissing your bucket and it's like fresh char,
<v Speaker 2>you can go put your head in the bucket and
<v Speaker 2>take a big whiff, and you're not going to get
<v Speaker 2>a big, you know, plume of like bum bum scent
<v Speaker 2>in there. It's gonna be perfectly fine.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And then as soon as it starts to get really
<v Speaker 2>bummy smelling, right like you come line, you're like, oh,
<v Speaker 2>I can smell some urine in there. That's telling you
<v Speaker 2>your biochar is close to getting saturated as far as
<v Speaker 2>the nutrition goes. And at that point, you know, then
<v Speaker 2>I would take it out and then I'd mix that
<v Speaker 2>with my soils, because if you don't do that, you
<v Speaker 2>might have the experience where you had, which is you
<v Speaker 2>pop that charcoal more or less in your soul and
<v Speaker 2>it grabbed all the nitrogen and other things and then
<v Speaker 2>causes your plants to starve. But what you want to
<v Speaker 2>do is make it a resource for nutrition. And so
<v Speaker 2>if you fill a bucket with urine with that with
<v Speaker 2>that charcoal, you'll have that so when it's in the soil,
<v Speaker 2>the plant roots will go over to that, to that
<v Speaker 2>biochar and then be able to pull the nitrogen back
<v Speaker 2>off of it. And also the weird thing about the
<v Speaker 2>biotart that I realized, and this is why I really
<v Speaker 2>love it for the cat die, is that it will
<v Speaker 2>dry out relatively quick on its surface, like like you know,
<v Speaker 2>say I've got my dime sized nugget in there, but
<v Speaker 2>inside that nugget it'll still hold a little bit of moisture.
<v Speaker 2>And so my plants never like have the chance to
<v Speaker 2>get you know, completely dried out, you know, which is
<v Speaker 2>bad at the root tip zone. And so some of
<v Speaker 2>the guys I know that grind their biochar up a
<v Speaker 2>lot for their seedlings, they'll see this when they pull
<v Speaker 2>their seed wings out. The roots are just covered in
<v Speaker 2>the biochar because the seedling roots hairs are going.
<v Speaker 3>Into the biotrape probably ministre.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I was going to say, they're probably penetrating. So
<v Speaker 1>but it would do. Would you use biochar for other plantss?
<v Speaker 1>It mostly good for cacti because most cacti are more
<v Speaker 1>tolerant of salts and salutes in the soil. Because you
<v Speaker 1>get a lot of salts and salutes in the desert,
<v Speaker 1>they've evolved tolerance for it. The habitat is literally selected
<v Speaker 1>for plants that can tell, like we get like astrophytem
<v Speaker 1>grows with all these salt tolerant plants here in South
<v Speaker 1>Texas right in same thing in Chili, you've got more
<v Speaker 1>evaporation than you've got precipitation, so the water the ground
<v Speaker 1>is going to be really salty. So plants that have
<v Speaker 1>spent six million years involving there have a lot of
<v Speaker 1>tolerance of salt, right, so it may not be an
<v Speaker 1>issue there. Do you think that's I mean, is it
<v Speaker 1>the same for like if we're trying to grow fucking
<v Speaker 1>kale and in a in a biochart mix or would
<v Speaker 1>it be Is it different?
<v Speaker 2>So what I what I've realized is through this process
<v Speaker 2>of using urines is that it also causes me to
<v Speaker 2>change my behavior because I have that thought process in
<v Speaker 2>my mind when I'm going to go take a piss,
<v Speaker 2>because if I'm like, I just had a big salty
<v Speaker 2>meal last night, that piece is going to go straight
<v Speaker 2>into compost.
<v Speaker 3>The reason that's going to go in the compost is
<v Speaker 3>the compost.
<v Speaker 2>Can handle a lot more salt because I'll have all
<v Speaker 2>of those you know invertebrates, you know, the soldier flies,
<v Speaker 2>the worms, things like that, coming through there, and they'll
<v Speaker 2>scavenge out those salts, right because they need them for
<v Speaker 2>their nervous system. But you know, if i'm if I'm
<v Speaker 2>like eating good, I haven't had a giant ass salty meal.
<v Speaker 2>That's the stuff I'm going to water directly on my
<v Speaker 2>plants with, or I'm gonna put in the biochart bucket
<v Speaker 2>because I know it's gonna have a lower you know,
<v Speaker 2>salt content.
<v Speaker 3>So it works really well.
<v Speaker 2>I feel like for my vegetable garden, you know, as
<v Speaker 2>long as I think about you know what pisch is
<v Speaker 2>going where?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it was.
<v Speaker 2>Actually it's kind of funny because thinking about wanting to
<v Speaker 2>grow plants is actually going to make you have a
<v Speaker 2>better diet. I didn't really, I didn'tbody attend that when
<v Speaker 2>I started this this piss experiment in twenty twenty two.
<v Speaker 2>I didn't.
<v Speaker 3>I didn't think that.
<v Speaker 2>Like every time I ate, I was like, ah, but
<v Speaker 2>how is this going to affect my ventre?
<v Speaker 1>More green tea, more water, more you know, juices, less
<v Speaker 1>nasty high fruit those shit. It's I can't believe people
<v Speaker 1>don't fucking mountain dew and like Coca Cola's so gross
<v Speaker 1>to me. But but uh, anyway. But yeah, so okay,
<v Speaker 1>so I wish that there was a way to like
<v Speaker 1>a grinder, you know, like a grinder for biochary, to
<v Speaker 1>get it to a smaller really for anything. Because when
<v Speaker 1>I was I was grinding, I was grinding up coffee
<v Speaker 1>one day and I was thinking, I'm like, man, it
<v Speaker 1>goes from like a bean to this very small particle
<v Speaker 1>so easily. This is a great And that's what actually
<v Speaker 1>made me get the wood chipper because I was like, fuck,
<v Speaker 1>I've got all this brush. If I could grind this
<v Speaker 1>material up, and the wood chips that I got from
<v Speaker 1>the Tree Company they were too large because that's a
<v Speaker 1>big ass wood chipper. So I'm like, this isn't good.
<v Speaker 1>I need something smaller. And that's why that's when I
<v Speaker 1>got that little wood chipper and Scamazon for like one
<v Speaker 1>hundred and twenty bucks. I got your York brand or something.
<v Speaker 1>But they're probably all the same. They probably all come
<v Speaker 1>out of the same factory in China, right, you just
<v Speaker 1>get like one hundred Yeah, I just get one hundred
<v Speaker 1>and twenty dollars wood schipper into canzons, So all the same.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, but uh, and so that fine stuff, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that was great, So I really I and that occurred
<v Speaker 1>to me because I was thinking about what a coffee
<v Speaker 1>grinder does. I was like, fuck, we had something like
<v Speaker 1>that for biochar, because all I do now is chop
<v Speaker 1>it up with a shovel and it takes forever. Man,
<v Speaker 1>someone should invent something like that, you know, like just
<v Speaker 1>the fucking electric plugin grinder for like basically a big
<v Speaker 1>coffee grinder, right, that's like the size of like yeahbcap
<v Speaker 1>or something.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I've seen people that'll take their biochar outher five
<v Speaker 2>gallon bucket and then feed it through their wood.
<v Speaker 1>Chipper No shit, really and just kind of yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I mean you're gonna like sharpen that blade a lot more,
<v Speaker 2>but you can grind it down that way. Or I'll
<v Speaker 2>see people just move it into like, you know, a
<v Speaker 2>canvas sack and then just back over it a whole
<v Speaker 2>bunch of times with their vehicle.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, it'll work. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I Mean what I do is like I like to
<v Speaker 2>stir my biochar, you know, every once in a while
<v Speaker 2>to make sure that nutrition, make sure that urine is
<v Speaker 2>getting nice and homogenious in the bucket. So I'll just
<v Speaker 2>take a big ass branch and then kind of do
<v Speaker 2>a stamping motion when I'm doing my swirling and so
<v Speaker 2>by the time it's coming out of my bucket, you know,
<v Speaker 2>about thirty percent of it now is really fine dust
<v Speaker 2>and then the rest of it's kind of that you know,
<v Speaker 2>quarter to dime size stuff, I like the cactus.
<v Speaker 3>And then we'll do is.
<v Speaker 2>I'll split out the stuff, so the big stuff will
<v Speaker 2>go towards the cactus, the fine stuff will go towards
<v Speaker 2>the vegetable beds.
<v Speaker 1>It seems like you definitely want smaller particle size though
<v Speaker 1>with that stuff.
<v Speaker 2>Like that's yeah, because like the more the smaller you are,
<v Speaker 2>the more surface area you're getting, which means the more
<v Speaker 2>nutrition it can manage, it can move around, and so
<v Speaker 2>that's why the finds really good for the vegetable gardens.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, for going in general, it's probably good for your soils.
<v Speaker 2>Like if you've got stuff you've got just other plants
<v Speaker 2>and you're not trying to eat or your property, that's
<v Speaker 2>probably what you want to use too, is that finer stuff.
<v Speaker 2>And then if you've got something that like a cactus,
<v Speaker 2>then you have the bigger blocks.
<v Speaker 1>The tri the trikes though, I mean they respond to
<v Speaker 1>urine really well. They do right, Oh my god, you paid,
<v Speaker 1>like you know what differences have you done? Like a
<v Speaker 1>control where like trikes that don't get your in same
<v Speaker 1>clone and then trikes that do get pissed.
<v Speaker 2>I've tried doing that with seedlings, but I realized that
<v Speaker 2>with seedlings there's so much genetic diversity and a batch
<v Speaker 2>of seedlings, I feel like it's not it hasn't been
<v Speaker 2>a well controlled experiment. So I really need to do
<v Speaker 2>is take a single column, cut it into two pieces,
<v Speaker 2>and then use those to run the experiment. But in
<v Speaker 2>general I do see is I mean they can handle
<v Speaker 2>a ton of urine. I mean, in the Trico serious community,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of people will use straight urine at the
<v Speaker 2>base to try to get them to pup, because like,
<v Speaker 2>sometimes you don't want to cut your column, its beautiful
<v Speaker 2>and you're like, I'd like to be able to get
<v Speaker 2>a piece to give to somebody. You know, you basically
<v Speaker 2>piss on the bottom of it. And they, especially if
<v Speaker 2>it's springtime, they will shoot pups like nobody's business. And
<v Speaker 2>to be honest, like I'm I always was afraid that
<v Speaker 2>you could like overdo the urine. And that's why I'd
<v Speaker 2>never gone straight on a lot of my cactuses. And
<v Speaker 2>that's just this past though. I started just on a
<v Speaker 2>couple of them, just being like, all right, I don't
<v Speaker 2>care that much about you.
<v Speaker 3>You're just gonna get straight piss.
<v Speaker 2>Holy crap, The columns on the top just swoll up,
<v Speaker 2>like I can look at my column be like, oh yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that's why I just started giving it straight piss.
<v Speaker 1>So why is the piss so full of nitrogen? Because
<v Speaker 1>it basically everything we eat is carbon and nitrogen.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And so as your proteins break down your way,
<v Speaker 2>your body gets rid of it ultimately turns into urea,
<v Speaker 2>and so you know urea that's really nice nitrogen containing
<v Speaker 2>compound is what a lot of your urine is. It's
<v Speaker 2>the breakdown products from proteins in your body.
<v Speaker 3>Proteins.
<v Speaker 2>I know people wanted to hear proteins. Yeah, and people
<v Speaker 2>want to hear proteins. I know, Like there's this it's uh,
<v Speaker 2>as a biologist and as somebody that hears like health stuff,
<v Speaker 2>we're talking almost two different things. So proteins are basically
<v Speaker 2>almost everything of you that you can touch right now
<v Speaker 2>is basically protein and water and your protein, like the
<v Speaker 2>health world, they're talking about you know, just a subset
<v Speaker 2>of these proteins that you know are important for like
<v Speaker 2>animal growth. But basically any cillilar process you have in
<v Speaker 2>your body is going to be involving proteins.
<v Speaker 3>Those will eventually turn over.
<v Speaker 2>Your body gets rid of it through turning it into
<v Speaker 2>urea and then pissing it out.
<v Speaker 1>And so what is the structure of a protein then,
<v Speaker 1>I mean what elements is nitrogen and.
<v Speaker 2>Carbon and ye, nitrogen carbon, some oxygen in there and
<v Speaker 2>that's pretty much it. And so your body can get
<v Speaker 2>rid of you know, the other things will recycle some
<v Speaker 2>of the other stuff, but the nitrogen, it'll it'll off
<v Speaker 2>as your reea.
<v Speaker 1>Do you do you have a favorite book you could
<v Speaker 1>recommend the listeners regarding just this kind of backyard biology
<v Speaker 1>stuff like regarding compost thing and just creating like a
<v Speaker 1>cyclical ecosystem that people can nerd out on. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>do you have any references?
<v Speaker 3>You know? I wish, I really wish I did.
<v Speaker 2>I feel like maybe this is something that's kind of
<v Speaker 2>missing from the popular culture, is like you know, pissing
<v Speaker 2>in my backyard by Damon Tie or something like that.
<v Speaker 1>Seriously that you got to catch the title and then
<v Speaker 1>you could just cover everything like biochart compost all this ship,
<v Speaker 1>which is like basically making people self sufficient less wasteful.
<v Speaker 1>It's really fascinating shit, right, I mean it's I think
<v Speaker 1>it's yeah cool. I love the stories you post on Intagram,
<v Speaker 1>which is you're in Instagram's date. Just what is it,
<v Speaker 1>Damon Tian? What is it again?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it's just it's just Damon Tai e A.
<v Speaker 1>M O n and then Thai t I I g
<v Speaker 1>h e.
<v Speaker 3>Yep.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And I mean the thing is like a lot of
<v Speaker 2>it's like I've pulled from, like I say, different cultural groups.
<v Speaker 2>People are into biocharts. You can find forms just about
<v Speaker 2>that where people nerd out about that. You can find
<v Speaker 2>forms about people that just do k and F Korean
<v Speaker 2>natural farming, and then calm posting.
<v Speaker 3>So if you if you kind of stick your.
<v Speaker 2>Head in those three worlds, you'll pick up a lot
<v Speaker 2>of stuff we're just talking about. But nobody I feel
<v Speaker 2>like has really taken those and like weighted them into
<v Speaker 2>one easy to like consume.
<v Speaker 3>You know, book, you should do that.
<v Speaker 1>I'm serious, man, you should do that, because that would
<v Speaker 1>that's fucking I mean, the stuff you post is so
<v Speaker 1>fucking interesting, and you're a biologist and a scientist and
<v Speaker 1>and have a like a understand I mean, this is
<v Speaker 1>your career. It's an understanding. And then you take that
<v Speaker 1>approach to just growing things in a backyard, composting and
<v Speaker 1>that kind of just you know, and it's and it's
<v Speaker 1>fucking fun and rewarding obviously for people. So it's I
<v Speaker 1>think it's a unique lens. You know, it'd be really Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I encourage you to put it together in some sort
<v Speaker 1>of format, even just the website. It's really cool shit.
<v Speaker 2>So it's kind of funny, you because like I didn't
<v Speaker 2>get into this because I was like trying to grow
<v Speaker 2>a thing in my yard, which is like what most
<v Speaker 2>people get into guarding for. I got into this as
<v Speaker 2>like a person that loves ecology and was like, all right, cool,
<v Speaker 2>how do I basically keep all my nutrients here and
<v Speaker 2>not have to bring anything in? I don't need to,
<v Speaker 2>you know, if I can, if I can stand it.
<v Speaker 2>So my whole goals since moving to like my new
<v Speaker 2>place has been to never use the green bin and
<v Speaker 2>then to like minimize how much we use the trash
<v Speaker 2>and the recycling bins. Yeah, and I think we've only
<v Speaker 2>used the green bin twice since we've been here, So
<v Speaker 2>I mean everything I figure out how to cycle, which
<v Speaker 2>is weird because like most people they talk about gardening,
<v Speaker 2>they're like growing stuff, and I would say, like seventy
<v Speaker 2>percent of my effort is how do I break stuff down?
<v Speaker 3>I really interested in making soil.
<v Speaker 1>But also it's like on another level, it's like you're
<v Speaker 1>you've created this ecosystem on your fucking property, right, not
<v Speaker 1>just you personally, but the proverbial you me anyone listening,
<v Speaker 1>and now you're in charge of it, and you're kind
<v Speaker 1>of you know, you learn so much more by paying attention,
<v Speaker 1>and it gets your ass outside so you're not just
<v Speaker 1>sitting inside staring at a screen. And it's fascinating stuff
<v Speaker 1>and it's it sure beats fucking video games, but it's
<v Speaker 1>a similar thing going on. There's lots of different factors
<v Speaker 1>to think about their strategies. There's and it's really cool
<v Speaker 1>stuff like that. Was that when I got the wood chipper,
<v Speaker 1>you know, because I was I was like, man, I'm pruning.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not growing grass. I don't have turf grass I
<v Speaker 1>live in time a leaping thorn scrubs. So that's what
<v Speaker 1>I'm growing. I'm growing thorn scrub plants. That's what brings
<v Speaker 1>in all the cool lizards. I had a fucking Texas
<v Speaker 1>spiny lizard, you know, doing a face off with me
<v Speaker 1>today when I opened my front door. I've got cool
<v Speaker 1>birds coming by, all these cool insects, all these cool moths.
<v Speaker 1>I get dragonflies, you know, chirping frogs in the back.
<v Speaker 1>And so I was like, you know, I was like, well,
<v Speaker 1>I'm wasting and I'm cutting brush a lot because like
<v Speaker 1>these shrubs grow, I want to keep them from getting
<v Speaker 1>too big so I can pack a lot of stuff
<v Speaker 1>in here. I don't want them to shade out some
<v Speaker 1>of the cac that I got, So I prune these
<v Speaker 1>shrubs and then I was just taking the clippings, which
<v Speaker 1>are all like an inch diameter at most branches, and
<v Speaker 1>just throwing them on a street. And I was like,
<v Speaker 1>this is a pain in the ass, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>the fucking neighbors probably don't like it. And so if
<v Speaker 1>I could just use these and I was like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>I just get a wood shipper and then I can
<v Speaker 1>turn it into compost and I can then use for
<v Speaker 1>soil to grow more stuff so I have more trees
<v Speaker 1>to plant and you know, and it's yeah, it was
<v Speaker 1>really fulfilling. And so I'm just like, man, and I'm
<v Speaker 1>like cultivating this ecosystem. I want less roaches. I need
<v Speaker 1>more lizards. What do I need to do to get
<v Speaker 1>the lizards in there? You know, I want the chirping frogs.
<v Speaker 1>What type of habitat do they like? Right? Like, how
<v Speaker 1>do I I've got mosquito traps to keep the mosquitoes
<v Speaker 1>down because the mosquitos will naturally be attracted the plant
<v Speaker 1>life as opposed to like an empty parking lot. And
<v Speaker 1>so there's all this. You know, you just start thinking
<v Speaker 1>about these things and you're like, damn, I'm like this
<v Speaker 1>is what people have been doing forever, like stewarding the
<v Speaker 1>land essentially right, like managing it right, enabling the diversity,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. It's really fucking fulfilling, man, It's really fun.
<v Speaker 1>That's why I love seeing what you do. I mean
<v Speaker 1>talking about like fly pathogenic fungi trying to cultivate fundy.
<v Speaker 1>You grow oysters in everything too. You grow oyster mushrooms
<v Speaker 1>on all your composts. I haven't hit that yet.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, so oysters are one of the ways for me.
<v Speaker 2>Oyster mushroms are one of the ways for me to
<v Speaker 2>deal with a lot of the woody substrates I was
<v Speaker 2>getting because I've got a like around life property. You know,
<v Speaker 2>We've got a bunch of like really old established shruit
<v Speaker 2>trees that you know, I got to prune and stuff
<v Speaker 2>like that's you know, with all this heavy biomass that
<v Speaker 2>you know, I can chip and I can throw into compost,
<v Speaker 2>but it's something that also breaks these things down our
<v Speaker 2>fun guys. I was like, well, it'll be nice, but
<v Speaker 2>I could also get a little food out of this.
<v Speaker 2>And so I'll do is I'll take some of that
<v Speaker 2>woody biomass and then run native oysters on it.
<v Speaker 3>And it's really important.
<v Speaker 2>I'm trying to work predominantly with native fung guys. Like
<v Speaker 2>you know, you could buy oysters online, but a lot
<v Speaker 2>of times you might be getting something that is a
<v Speaker 2>potential threat for your ecosystem. I e. You would get
<v Speaker 2>a species that if it got out of your yard
<v Speaker 2>for some reason, might end up taking over your native habitat.
<v Speaker 3>And we see this with the yellow oyster.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, in the kind of like northeastern United States through
<v Speaker 2>the Midwest. Now it's a species of originally from China
<v Speaker 2>and Russia.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I saw that Wisconsin over the summer. I was like,
<v Speaker 1>what the fuck? And then I was like, this is beautiful.
<v Speaker 1>Then I learned it was in vasive, was like, god
<v Speaker 1>damn it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And so that's why it's important to work with
<v Speaker 2>the natives. And then also the natives are already adapted
<v Speaker 2>to where you're at, and so they're going to be
<v Speaker 2>able to throw easier and stuff like that in your habitat.
<v Speaker 2>So I'll use that to break down the woody biomass,
<v Speaker 2>get a little bit of food from it, and then
<v Speaker 2>I'll take the spent substrate and then just add out
<v Speaker 2>of the compost because all the lignin and a good
<v Speaker 2>portion of the cellulus has been broken down at that point,
<v Speaker 2>and so it just you know, breaks down even faster
<v Speaker 2>in that compost heat.
<v Speaker 3>And the beauty about that too is that's going.
<v Speaker 2>To bring in a different set of microinvertebrates. You know,
<v Speaker 2>that will bring in a lot more springtails, a lot
<v Speaker 2>more things like fungus mites and things like that.
<v Speaker 1>Springtails easy, Yeah, that's I didn't even know what they
<v Speaker 1>were until a few I mean, i'd heard the name,
<v Speaker 1>but I didn't really know a roll in an ecosystem
<v Speaker 1>till a few months ago. So what so for like
<v Speaker 1>someone who wants to cultivate oysters but doesn't want because
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to do the whole setup. Man, where
<v Speaker 1>you're sterilizing shit in a pressure cooker, wohild you? Is
<v Speaker 1>there like a easy method to do it? Or you
<v Speaker 1>always need the pressure cooker? Can you do it outside?
<v Speaker 1>What's your method?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? It's I mean my method right now. I mean
<v Speaker 2>I do a mix of things. I do. I do
<v Speaker 2>a pressure cooker and my pressure cooker.
<v Speaker 3>I mean instapot.
<v Speaker 2>I don't mean like a fancy pressure cooker, like it's
<v Speaker 2>the thing we're already cooked and rice within the house,
<v Speaker 2>because that can get that can get you a high
<v Speaker 2>enough pressure over extended period of time to sterilize your substrates,
<v Speaker 2>especially dude, if it's just coming straight out of your
<v Speaker 2>wood chipper.
<v Speaker 3>Like I'm not saying that stuffs clean, but it's.
<v Speaker 2>Pretty clean, you know, And so just doing it in
<v Speaker 2>the pot will get you there. But I've also been
<v Speaker 2>experimenting the last man three four years with just using
<v Speaker 2>a solar cooker instead of a pressure cooker in order
<v Speaker 2>to sterilize the substrates and stuff, and that's worked well,
<v Speaker 2>but I think it's only it works well in my
<v Speaker 2>hands to play have that molecular cell biology background, and
<v Speaker 2>so I'm trying to figure out ways to make that
<v Speaker 2>easier for other people to pick up. But I would
<v Speaker 2>say that, you know, the really the full proof way
<v Speaker 2>is to get an instapot. Go online and watch a
<v Speaker 2>couple of people that are using instapot to do much
<v Speaker 2>from cultivation and you'll be able to get there. The
<v Speaker 2>other thing I'm trying to do get away from like
<v Speaker 2>online you'll see everybody using plastic bags for muscu fultivation
<v Speaker 2>and drive me fucking crazy. So I mainly just use
<v Speaker 2>canning jars and they work great. You can resh them,
<v Speaker 2>you can use them. They're dirt cheap, you know. You
<v Speaker 2>go to small March and get a case of them
<v Speaker 2>for like ten bucks and that'll that'll do you well.
<v Speaker 1>So you do them inside right, like you keep them
<v Speaker 1>inside while they're being inoculated.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, keep it inside while they're being inoculated. Well, actually
<v Speaker 2>I take that back. They used to be in the
<v Speaker 2>closet with a closet is full of dried mushrooms right now,
<v Speaker 2>they need to get sequenced.
<v Speaker 3>So I did move them outside. They're just in okay,
<v Speaker 3>weide ice chest.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, put them outside, just in an ice chest.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, just in an ice chest.
<v Speaker 2>So that way, like their temperature isn't fluctuating a whole bunch.
<v Speaker 1>Oh sure, it's more moderated instead of going up and
<v Speaker 1>down a lot. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it's more moderated in there.
<v Speaker 2>And then once I see that my ceilium has run
<v Speaker 2>through all the substraight, then I'll take them and I'll
<v Speaker 2>put them in my fruiting chamber, which is literally just
<v Speaker 2>like a box with holes in it, so I can
<v Speaker 2>kind of keep a high humidity in there. And they'll
<v Speaker 2>put that outside so that way that the airflow comes
<v Speaker 2>through exchanges enough oxygen to get them the fruit.
<v Speaker 1>It might be too hot where I am to do
<v Speaker 1>it outside though, huh.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it might be ease. I mean you see oysters
<v Speaker 2>in your native.
<v Speaker 1>Environments, right, yeah, totally right.
<v Speaker 2>You know it's like that's like one of these things
<v Speaker 2>like you're using a fungus, you really want to look
<v Speaker 2>around and you're like, who survives.
<v Speaker 3>In my area already?
<v Speaker 2>And then lean into that?
<v Speaker 1>What would be? So what is it?
<v Speaker 3>Unless you do inside? Unless you do inside cultivations.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, So what would be just really easy for
<v Speaker 1>someone who wants to just do oysters. You would just
<v Speaker 1>get canning jars, put stuff, probably chop it up to
<v Speaker 1>a decent size so you can actually stuff it in
<v Speaker 1>the canning jar. After you heat it, heat it up
<v Speaker 1>in the pressure cooker, sterilize it, and then when it's
<v Speaker 1>still kind of hot, put it in the canning jar.
<v Speaker 1>Or what would you do?
<v Speaker 2>You So, I'll just a'll fill my canning jars with
<v Speaker 2>my woody debris, just kind of smash it in there
<v Speaker 2>as tight as I can because you'll always have air
<v Speaker 2>pockets and any kind of like wood. You biomas your
<v Speaker 2>jam into a jar, make sure that there's there's moisture
<v Speaker 2>in it, so you could put water in there, let
<v Speaker 2>it sit for like overnight, pour the water out, and
<v Speaker 2>then put that in your your your insta pot. And
<v Speaker 2>you're gonna want to have a couple of holes poked
<v Speaker 2>in the top of the jar, and you can just
<v Speaker 2>put like athletic tape over the top of that, and
<v Speaker 2>that's gonna act as a way to keep bacteria from
<v Speaker 2>getting in there, and it'll keep you making a bomb.
<v Speaker 1>Put a lid on the jar when you put it
<v Speaker 1>in there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I'm actually going to put a lid on the
<v Speaker 2>jar and put that in the insta pot with holes
<v Speaker 2>in them though, yep. And and then so I'll just
<v Speaker 2>cook that for two hours, you know, on the insta pot,
<v Speaker 2>let it sit overnight and let it cool down, and
<v Speaker 2>the next day I'll take that jar now, and then
<v Speaker 2>I'll transfer my spaw into it my mycelium.
<v Speaker 1>Does the have water around the jars too, or is
<v Speaker 1>it just just in the Yeah?
<v Speaker 3>It does.
<v Speaker 2>So like I'm usually putting i don't know, like a
<v Speaker 2>fourth of the size of the jar for the fourth
<v Speaker 2>the heighth of the jar of water in the bomby instapot. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>all right, because that steam right to get the pressure yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, okay, cool, okay, cool.
<v Speaker 2>Soot we'll get up to about yeah yeah, inSpot, we'll
<v Speaker 2>get up to twelve psi, where like a typical kind
<v Speaker 2>of like sterilizer that people are using gets up to
<v Speaker 2>fifteen psi and the thing is just run out longer.
<v Speaker 1>The water also makes it so I can't get hotter
<v Speaker 1>than two twelve inside. Yeah cool, okay, great, Just we
<v Speaker 1>want to make they get up of water in insta
<v Speaker 1>pot and.
<v Speaker 2>So then well you got to go in there.
<v Speaker 1>So after two hours, then you take what you what
<v Speaker 1>do you do?
<v Speaker 2>So then I'll let it cool down, because you don't
<v Speaker 2>want add your my celium to it. When it's blazing hot.
<v Speaker 2>It'll kill it. And I will try to, you know,
<v Speaker 2>as cleanly as i can, take a clean spoon that
<v Speaker 2>i've wiped off with, say isopropyl alcohol, and then I'll
<v Speaker 2>scoop out some of my uh spawn and so spawn.
<v Speaker 2>All this is is a grain that you've grown your
<v Speaker 2>mushroom my celium on. And I'll just make a layer
<v Speaker 2>of that on top of my wood chips in that jar,
<v Speaker 2>and I'll pap that down so that it's a solid
<v Speaker 2>layer nothing else can get in there.
<v Speaker 3>I'll put the lid back on and.
<v Speaker 2>Then I'll just put that away like you know, in
<v Speaker 2>the cooler or in the closet, and then let it run. Oysters,
<v Speaker 2>you know, if I'm doing a you know, a five
<v Speaker 2>hundred mil jar that'll run in about two weeks, you'll
<v Speaker 2>see the my celium grow all the way down to
<v Speaker 2>the bottom.
<v Speaker 1>No shit, and it's it doesn't get contaminated in that
<v Speaker 1>brief moment when you take the lid off and spoon
<v Speaker 1>the my celium in there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and so this is the reason why I'm just
<v Speaker 2>doing like a solid layer at the top. You'll see
<v Speaker 2>a lot of people that make mushroom bags online. They'll
<v Speaker 2>add my celium to it and they'll shake their plastic
<v Speaker 2>bag around. And that's great if you're working in a
<v Speaker 2>totally sterile environment. But I know I am dirty as fuck,
<v Speaker 2>and so what I'm trying to do is make kind
<v Speaker 2>of like a casing layer of the myceelium at the
<v Speaker 2>top there. So even if a spore from something I
<v Speaker 2>don't want gets in there, there'll be so much of
<v Speaker 2>that my celium right there at that top level that
<v Speaker 2>it'll usually out compete it and kill it.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, And you'll leave it a contamination in the jar.
<v Speaker 1>When you're filling it with wood chips, you leave what
<v Speaker 1>like an inch or two or what.
<v Speaker 2>I leave like a lead, like a little like you know,
<v Speaker 2>inch at the top maybe a space, And that's that's
<v Speaker 2>where you're gonna put your my ceilium ultimately, And.
<v Speaker 1>If you don't have easy access to my ceiling, can
<v Speaker 1>you just start with like an oyster grow kit, like
<v Speaker 1>order one of those, and then just use it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>after it fruits, just take that my celium or.
<v Speaker 2>What Yeah, or being better at that point is don't
<v Speaker 2>let it fruit, and then just harvest right from that
<v Speaker 2>and you'll have a bunch of viable my celium because like,
<v Speaker 2>once the mushroom fruits, it kind of slows down its
<v Speaker 2>immune system from what I've seen, Yeah, and so it's
<v Speaker 2>more liable to get infected. So I would just take
<v Speaker 2>a new kind of you know, grow bag, and then
<v Speaker 2>you use that as my starter and.
<v Speaker 1>Just start like five jars or whatever with it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And what you could do is start five you know,
<v Speaker 2>start five jars you know, of your woody substrate, and
<v Speaker 2>then if you want to make your own spawn at
<v Speaker 2>this point, take some of that from your from that
<v Speaker 2>grow bag and then just make a jar that's just
<v Speaker 2>like grain.
<v Speaker 3>So a lot of people will use rye.
<v Speaker 2>I don't like rye because I feel like it's contamining
<v Speaker 2>all the time, So I'll use millet. And all you're
<v Speaker 2>gonna do is just basically fluff up some millet in
<v Speaker 2>your instapot and then just add that layer of my
<v Speaker 2>celium on at the top of that and it'll run
<v Speaker 2>through it just like it's running through your woody stuff
<v Speaker 2>and your other jars, and now you've got this kind
<v Speaker 2>of like super charge my celium because it's got all
<v Speaker 2>the nutrient access from all that grain.
<v Speaker 1>When you say fluff up some millet, you mean fluff
<v Speaker 1>up millet in a jar already, or literally just make
<v Speaker 1>an instapot full of millet and then spoon on it.
<v Speaker 3>Make like an instant pot full of millet.
<v Speaker 2>So I mean the way I do it, and I
<v Speaker 2>don't like to measure anything because I'm becoming a lazy biologist,
<v Speaker 2>is I will literally add half a jarbi millet, and
<v Speaker 2>I'll just add water to that millet until it covers it.
<v Speaker 3>And then I'll just put the lid on with.
<v Speaker 2>You know the holes in the lid, and then pop
<v Speaker 2>that into pot to cook it.
<v Speaker 1>Mm hmm, okay cool, and then you spoon that into
<v Speaker 1>the jars. Let that cool, and then add the spot
<v Speaker 1>on it.
<v Speaker 2>No no, no, no, just that'll that'll fluff up. And now
<v Speaker 2>your jar when you pull it out, it'll be it'll
<v Speaker 2>be like a half an inch to an inch left
<v Speaker 2>of the top of headspace. And you'll just take that
<v Speaker 2>my celium now from that, you know, store bob bag whatever,
<v Speaker 2>and then just add that to the top and then
<v Speaker 2>put the lid back on. And what will happen is
<v Speaker 2>that my celium now will grow through that millet.
<v Speaker 1>Oh okay, and so it's now it's growing on millet
<v Speaker 1>instead of the woodchips. It'll probably you're basically creating like
<v Speaker 1>your your own starter spawn that you can keep using.
<v Speaker 2>Right. And then so once I have that jar, what
<v Speaker 2>happens is I will take that jar to make more
<v Speaker 2>millet jars, and that is being the stuff that I
<v Speaker 2>add to all of my jars going forward, because mill
<v Speaker 2>it's a lot easier to work with, and a bunch
<v Speaker 2>of woody scraps to adsw a little more nutrient dense.
<v Speaker 2>You're you're my ceium's a little bit healthier usually mm hmm.
<v Speaker 1>Damn, but you're still but I mean you still. But
<v Speaker 1>then once you've got that going, then you can use
<v Speaker 1>that my celium to to inoculate the woodship.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, yeah, exactly, and then you can just regenerate it
<v Speaker 2>every time that you're you know, making more jars.
<v Speaker 1>And then that mushroom compost that comes out of it
<v Speaker 1>when it's spent, that's probably really good for the compost
<v Speaker 1>as well.
<v Speaker 2>Oh it's great, yeah, and I'll kind of do it
<v Speaker 2>to make an extra like liquid fertilizer out of that sometimes.
<v Speaker 2>So there's two things you can do with that. So
<v Speaker 2>once you've got that substrate, you've already pretty your mushrooms,
<v Speaker 2>you could add water to it and let it ferment
<v Speaker 2>for a week and you'll get this really really nice,
<v Speaker 2>complex nitrogen rich fertilizer that you can dilute out and
<v Speaker 2>use on your plants. Then the other thing you can
<v Speaker 2>do is take that block out, put it someplace like
<v Speaker 2>rolled in the dirt, and then put it in a
<v Speaker 2>humid zone and let it get infected. And what you'll
<v Speaker 2>see is you'll get this green fuzz that shows up
<v Speaker 2>all over that substrate, and that is usually trichoderma. And
<v Speaker 2>so trichoderma is a fungus that eats other fung guy.
<v Speaker 2>It is one of the main additives you will see
<v Speaker 2>in like seedling starter like soil mixes, because it will
<v Speaker 2>keep pathogenic fungi from coming after the roots of your plants.
<v Speaker 2>And so sometimes I'll just generate a bunch of trichoderma
<v Speaker 2>and then I will scrape off basically all about green
<v Speaker 2>into just a little cup and then I'll keep that
<v Speaker 2>for when I'm making seedlings in the spring, I'll mix
<v Speaker 2>that in with my compost in order to make kind
<v Speaker 2>of a more you know, seedlings safe starting mixing soil.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't I saw trichaderma because I've always heard it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, as being the bane of existence of mushroom
<v Speaker 1>growers because it will infect the message.
<v Speaker 3>I mean you mean you mean cube, you mean cube,
<v Speaker 3>you mean cube growers?
<v Speaker 1>You growers, right, yeah, cube gros but it but it's
<v Speaker 1>actually beneficial to plants because what is it. It's a
<v Speaker 1>fungus that eats other fungi or what.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yep, wow, it's great to having the soil and
<v Speaker 2>it will tightly associate with plant roots. And I think
<v Speaker 2>the first guy I saw doing this is like Temo.
<v Speaker 2>He's like down in Mexico now, but he was up
<v Speaker 2>in Humble for a while. He was at some place
<v Speaker 2>in Costa Rica and they're just making these giant batches
<v Speaker 2>a trichoderma like in fast. I'm like, dude, what are
<v Speaker 2>you doing? Like that seems corible. I know you're like
<v Speaker 2>a mushroom guy. And he's like, oh no, we're doing
<v Speaker 2>this for our plants. And I was reading up on it.
<v Speaker 2>I was like, oh Jesus, that's brilliant.
<v Speaker 1>Holy shit. I didn't. I didn't. I don't know why
<v Speaker 1>I didn't realize this. Yeah, because I've seen it listed
<v Speaker 1>as additives and some of that, like you know, beneficial
<v Speaker 1>soil mix. So trichoderma is beneficial to plants. It's not
<v Speaker 1>beneficial to silasi by cubensus for people that are trying
<v Speaker 1>to grow psychoactive mushrooms, but it's it's beneficial to plants
<v Speaker 1>because it it out competes. It keeps the bad the
<v Speaker 1>quote bad fungi away, the rots and the other eagens
<v Speaker 1>and so.
<v Speaker 2>And also, you know, for those of you doing home
<v Speaker 2>coolation of mushrooms with you know, your giant ecological project
<v Speaker 2>like I'm doing in my yard, you know, you don't
<v Speaker 2>want to like go rub yourself in your trichoderma and
<v Speaker 2>then go work on your mushroom projects because you're just
<v Speaker 2>gonna f everything over. So you want to, you know,
<v Speaker 2>use some logic there of like hey, I'm gonna work
<v Speaker 2>with the trichoderma today, I'm gonna make sure I wash
<v Speaker 2>his clothes. I'm not going to come into the place
<v Speaker 2>I'm moving mushroom stuff around, right, you know, to keep
<v Speaker 2>those two separate. But man, yeah, it's a great it's
<v Speaker 2>a great additive to have.
<v Speaker 1>Who is that you said some guy was? He was
<v Speaker 1>in Costa Rica. They were mixing te like a derma
<v Speaker 1>into the seedling mix, the plant seedling mix chemo.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Timoin. His last name is Menendez. He was up
<v Speaker 2>at Humboldt State for a while and yeah, I met
<v Speaker 2>him through foolks up there. He's just an incredible guy,
<v Speaker 2>just knows a whole bunch of stuff, really into a
<v Speaker 2>lot of this kind of you know, dirty biology for
<v Speaker 2>like yard use, and he was doing at in dirty
<v Speaker 2>by A Rica. Yeah, dirty biology for yard use.
<v Speaker 1>I gotta use it again. That's nice. Yeah, Okay, sorry,
<v Speaker 1>going so.
<v Speaker 2>He just said he has been an inspiration for me
<v Speaker 2>in a lot of ways, just kind of like seeing
<v Speaker 2>his stuff. He doesn't post online that much anymore, but
<v Speaker 2>he's as one of these guys you get a chance
<v Speaker 2>to have a conversation with him and you just walk
<v Speaker 2>you walk away excited about trying new shit again. You know,
<v Speaker 2>those the type of people you want to surround yourself with.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, really, man, for real, I mean that's how I
<v Speaker 1>feel when I talk to you. So, like, so, trichoderma
<v Speaker 1>fungus acts as an antagonist to soil borne pathogens, which
<v Speaker 1>is something through it damn. So, so what would be
<v Speaker 1>a way to grow trichoderma and mass to inoculate soil?
<v Speaker 1>Like use it like you said, just take an old
<v Speaker 1>spent mustard casing, roll it in the dirt, let it
<v Speaker 1>get infected with the blue and greens, and then mix
<v Speaker 1>that into a soil mix.
<v Speaker 2>Yep, that's like the that's the dirtiest way of doing it.
<v Speaker 2>And like you know what Timo was doing. I think
<v Speaker 2>in Costa Rica, I think they had isolated their own trichodermas,
<v Speaker 2>probably buy a similar method or close right, and then
<v Speaker 2>they would take some of that trichoderma and then add
<v Speaker 2>that to a liquid culture. And so that's just usually
<v Speaker 2>water with some sort of sugar source. A lot of
<v Speaker 2>people will just use like honey, like ten percent by
<v Speaker 2>volume honey or five percent by volume honey, and then
<v Speaker 2>the fungus will just grow like crazy that liquid if
<v Speaker 2>you keep it area.
<v Speaker 1>The sugars act for a food as a food for
<v Speaker 1>the fungus.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, food source, and you can just grow a whole
<v Speaker 3>bunch of it.
<v Speaker 1>They'll grow in liquid if you have a bubbler in there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, if you got a bubbler in there, or even
<v Speaker 2>if you can just put it like on a stir plate,
<v Speaker 2>you know, little magnetic stir type thing.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, oh yeah, one of those oscillating like plates that's
<v Speaker 1>you know, like the size of a compact disc and
<v Speaker 1>moves back and forth.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, or if you don't have that, you know, just
<v Speaker 2>poured into a shallow container so that oxygen can get
<v Speaker 2>exchange from the surface relatively easily, and I come through
<v Speaker 2>and just shake it every once in a while, they know,
<v Speaker 2>a couple of times per day, and it'll it'll do
<v Speaker 2>the same thing. You're just trying to keep oxygen throughout
<v Speaker 2>that liquid. But yeah, you can culture. Most fung guy
<v Speaker 2>will be happy in liquid cultivation, you know ascoes, basidio
<v Speaker 2>my seats, things like that. They're easy to cultivate.
<v Speaker 1>So that's basically I know this is elementary for funky people,
<v Speaker 1>but I'm not a you know, yeah, that's still blowing
<v Speaker 1>my mind. So like that's how people when people do
<v Speaker 1>that with zilosophy obviously with psilocybin mushrooms.
<v Speaker 2>Right, Yeah, we'll do these liquid cultures of it and
<v Speaker 2>inject that into a bag of substrate, you know, to
<v Speaker 2>get it to grow.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus and literally just giving them sugars and water and
<v Speaker 1>then keeping that moving bubbler or or an oscillating disk
<v Speaker 1>plate or something. Wow.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Or if it's just a shallow enough thing too, you
<v Speaker 2>don't really need anything. If it's if it's an inch
<v Speaker 2>or too deep, you know, you're making a really small
<v Speaker 2>volume thing, or you got a big ass pan, you
<v Speaker 2>can get it to grow in there.
<v Speaker 3>Like, I'm pretty lazy. So actually, like the few times.
<v Speaker 2>I've done liquid cultures, I've just done them like that.
<v Speaker 1>Roe.
<v Speaker 2>I just got a canny jar and you know, an
<v Speaker 2>inch or two of liquid in there with sugars and
<v Speaker 2>they'll grow in there.
<v Speaker 1>So when you're growing fungi in liquid culture, it's my
<v Speaker 1>celium that you're growing, right, even though you can't really
<v Speaker 1>I mean you can't really see my celial strands in
<v Speaker 1>the liquid, can you.
<v Speaker 2>You you'll see them ultimately, they'll they'll form like this
<v Speaker 2>little like blob. You know, you'll get this like hairy
<v Speaker 2>blob growing in the liquid and that's all my celium.
<v Speaker 2>And you know that's especially if you're doing my lazy
<v Speaker 2>method of not relays, sturring it and just using a
<v Speaker 2>small liquid volume. But people that have a stir in there,
<v Speaker 2>usually what you'll start to see is if you hold
<v Speaker 2>up to the light, you'll see these little kind of
<v Speaker 2>like cloudy blobs in there, really small ones, and that's
<v Speaker 2>all just you know, my celial kind of clusters.
<v Speaker 1>Wow. So it just takes on a different form since
<v Speaker 1>it's in liquid and not on a solid substrate.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And the people the reason people like do those
<v Speaker 2>all c's like that is each one of those little
<v Speaker 2>nodules that you end up seeing is a new initiation
<v Speaker 2>site right for fungus to grow out. So if you
<v Speaker 2>pull up a syringe of that and you put that
<v Speaker 2>into your substrate, you can inject that all around your
<v Speaker 2>substrate and you'll be adding those little nodules all throughout
<v Speaker 2>your substrate, and so that whole bag will then get
<v Speaker 2>colonized much faster.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder if that would work for inoculating madrone trees
<v Speaker 1>with micro rhizol fungi if you found the right, if
<v Speaker 1>you found the right you know, like at the base
<v Speaker 1>of a madrone, there's an ectomycorrhizol mushroom stocking cap. You know,
<v Speaker 1>this is probably associating with the madrone. You know, it's
<v Speaker 1>an Ecdo microhisol species. You could take that put it
<v Speaker 1>in a liquid culture somehow, maybe just grind up the
<v Speaker 1>cap or something or a little piece of the cap
<v Speaker 1>and put it in a liquid culture with what's in
<v Speaker 1>the liquid culture against it is it? It's just sugar or.
<v Speaker 3>Sugar your sugar.
<v Speaker 2>So a lot of people will just use honey, like
<v Speaker 2>five percent by volume honey.
<v Speaker 3>It works pretty well.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, And then take that into like a meat
<v Speaker 1>meat injector you know, for like injecting flavoring into meat,
<v Speaker 1>and then inject that into potted madrone trees. Do you
<v Speaker 1>think that's feasible.
<v Speaker 3>I mean it's feasile.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know if it'll take because the madrone tree
<v Speaker 2>is already kind of old and probably already has somebody
<v Speaker 2>attached to the roofs by now.
<v Speaker 1>Well i'm talking about it. I'm talking about seedlings because
<v Speaker 1>people like in Texas madrones are a lot more sensitive
<v Speaker 1>than Pacific madrones because that's just the climate here is
<v Speaker 1>it's more extreme and so and it's kind of the
<v Speaker 1>edge of the range, like they're only here because of
<v Speaker 1>the place to scene. They're mostly in Mexico at higher
<v Speaker 1>elevations and more music higher rainfall climates, but you know
<v Speaker 1>there's some in the Austin area, Texas Madrones that and
<v Speaker 1>they're they're like a fucking pain ask to grow. They
<v Speaker 1>die really easily, I think, until they get inoculated with
<v Speaker 1>the fungus they need because their root structure, because of
<v Speaker 1>that obligate acto microsissentation, the root structure is just different.
<v Speaker 1>So and they're like, man, they'll fuck. I had deer
<v Speaker 1>chew on one and instead of just re sprouting, it died.
<v Speaker 1>It was like two feet tall. Yeah, I was so
<v Speaker 1>fucking pissed.
<v Speaker 2>Man.
<v Speaker 1>The fucking deer in West Texas are awful. They just
<v Speaker 1>they're like locusts that just live in the towns and
<v Speaker 1>you can't shoot them anyway. And so my and my
<v Speaker 1>friend Dan host Age was like, oh, yeah, if they
<v Speaker 1>get chewed on when they're two or three feet tall,
<v Speaker 1>they just die. They don't re sprout. And I was like,
<v Speaker 1>what the fuck why. It's like, oh, they probably don't
<v Speaker 1>have the fungus yet. So I don't know, I'm just assuming,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, that's really interesting.
<v Speaker 2>That's yeah, yeah, my assumption though, is it's probably what's
<v Speaker 2>keeping the deer from eating. It probably isn't a mic
<v Speaker 2>rizal fungus, it's probably an indefittic fungus.
<v Speaker 1>Well, well, not keeping the deer. I think it's when
<v Speaker 1>the leaves get knawed off and then now the transpirational
<v Speaker 1>pull is no longer pulling water up from the roots,
<v Speaker 1>and so then they just rode and fungie can get
<v Speaker 1>at them. Maybe I don't know, but it was a
<v Speaker 1>fucking bummer. I thought it would re sprout so but
<v Speaker 1>it didn't.
<v Speaker 3>Hull.
<v Speaker 2>Do you see herbivore damage on them in the wild
<v Speaker 2>very much. I'm also wondering if there's like if there
<v Speaker 2>might be like an indo fight, it's like making something
<v Speaker 2>that keeps the deer from medium in the wild.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I mean there's something in the ecosystem they seem
<v Speaker 1>to get that they're not getting when you grow them
<v Speaker 1>in cultivation, or that you maybe have to introduce. That's
<v Speaker 1>my thinking. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know, but they're
<v Speaker 1>you know, they're not I would they're not abundant in
<v Speaker 1>Central Texas anyway, but you know, there's they do. There
<v Speaker 1>are still quite a few left. But yeah, I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>I mean what I would do is I would try
<v Speaker 2>to just go get some soil from a wild species
<v Speaker 2>or next to the wild plant, and then mix that
<v Speaker 2>with whatever soil I'm using to try and you know,
<v Speaker 2>grow my seedlings in. Because at least then you know
<v Speaker 2>at least that by all would you is probably there
<v Speaker 2>and the chance of it picking up the thing it needs.
<v Speaker 3>You know, goes up a little bit.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that would be That would be the quickest, dirty
<v Speaker 2>way to do it, you know, without having to do
<v Speaker 2>some like lab work to try and figure out who
<v Speaker 2>it is that's associated and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 1>Seems like such an easy project for a grad student, right, Like,
<v Speaker 1>it'd be really easy to have a control group and
<v Speaker 1>then have another group of seedlings because you can get
<v Speaker 1>them to germinate easy, really easy. My friend really just
<v Speaker 1>germinated a bunch from seed that I got for his
<v Speaker 1>his nursery greensleeves in Flugerville. But it's keeping them alive.
<v Speaker 1>They're just so they're so sensitive. So you know, you
<v Speaker 1>could do a control where you've got a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>seedlings that you just don't inoculate, and then it's like
<v Speaker 1>and you have to pick the fungal species. Then you've
<v Speaker 1>got a group where you inoculate them with the meat
<v Speaker 1>injector and a liquid culture or sport whatever of the
<v Speaker 1>fungus and see how it goes, you know, or just
<v Speaker 1>even grind up a dry cap into the mix it
<v Speaker 1>into the soil mix. I don't know. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>but there's gonna be a way to come.
<v Speaker 2>Well, let's be something to like look at and we
<v Speaker 2>can maybe asses through IAT and stuff like that. Is
<v Speaker 2>what microhyzel fund do we see associated with these arbutists?
<v Speaker 2>You know, like gods feeling, it's probably gonna be heboloma.
<v Speaker 2>We seem to have a lot of those on our
<v Speaker 2>beautist I see in California. But man, this would be
<v Speaker 2>a great grad school project, like you said, for somebody,
<v Speaker 2>somebody if they could do root tip sequencing and then
<v Speaker 2>do some indo fight prospecting and different tissues of the plant.
<v Speaker 2>With that knowledge right there, you would you'd probably have
<v Speaker 2>what you need to know to make a good plan
<v Speaker 2>of like how to grow these out better.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what do you what do you get associating with
<v Speaker 1>with our budhist men zizii in California? Like that? That's
<v Speaker 1>that you know is an ecto micro hizal mushroom.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so you mean we do have like some belits
<v Speaker 2>that will associate with them, like le sinum mans and.
<v Speaker 1>Like I saw, I saw it on Camaro Staphilus, a
<v Speaker 1>relative of our beautiful Costa Rica. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so that's definitely one of the big boys that's
<v Speaker 2>on there. I think, uh, you do get hebolomas also
<v Speaker 2>that associate with them. In fact, even that weird strawberry
<v Speaker 2>tree they bring into California from the Mediterranean or from
<v Speaker 2>Europe that always comes to kiboloma on it. Yeah, so
<v Speaker 2>those would be my those would be my two to
<v Speaker 2>goose would be the lexium.
<v Speaker 3>And a heboloma. I'm pretty sure.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I think somebody somethdy can call me out, but
<v Speaker 2>I'm pretty sure they're micro rhyzol let me see. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and then also I'll see a couple of rhizopogons that
<v Speaker 2>will show up on them too, and they always seem
<v Speaker 2>to pop out at the same time as the hebolomas,
<v Speaker 2>but I only see those on our buddhis uh uno,
<v Speaker 2>the strawberry tree from Europe.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, that's also.
<v Speaker 3>That's also but that's also a bully, you know. It's
<v Speaker 3>also bull of tallis.
<v Speaker 2>I would say, okay, yeah, so I would say try
<v Speaker 2>and get a hebeloma and try to get a bowl
<v Speaker 2>of tallis. You know that you're scene associated with these
<v Speaker 2>trees in Texas, and then use that in your soil mix.
<v Speaker 2>At least then you know you're probably getting some of
<v Speaker 2>the right Michaisal players there. I'm just gonna go to
<v Speaker 2>Austin's got to do this, all right.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna go to I naturalist type in Heboloma, Texas.
<v Speaker 1>Set up a perimeter for the area where I know, like,
<v Speaker 1>set up a transect for central Texas where I see
<v Speaker 1>where I know MA drones grow, and then see what
<v Speaker 1>species has been observed there.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean probably talking one of mycological clubs, San Antonio.
<v Speaker 2>Austin's got to have one, Yeah, pulling samples and drying
<v Speaker 2>for folks, that would be great, and then just grind
<v Speaker 2>those up and out of the soils.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Heboloma crystulin of crystulino for me, and heboloma of
<v Speaker 1>the lutipis.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, the lutipees might be more of the native one.
<v Speaker 2>I think the other one for sure is from Europe,
<v Speaker 2>but also big aspects like people are horrible identifying hebolomas.
<v Speaker 1>It might be a neo, a new world one that's
<v Speaker 1>just been lumped in with Christ for me or what.
<v Speaker 1>And then then let's see lex signum. What lex signums
<v Speaker 1>occur in Texas? Just that one lex signum scam. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>that's a beautiful one. God, there's only one. There's only
<v Speaker 1>fucking two le signum observations in Texas.
<v Speaker 2>Sam is probably wrong. That's that's like one that's more
<v Speaker 2>like high latitude for the most part. Bars, I'm aware.
<v Speaker 2>So if you I, my guy feeling is that's probably misidentified.
<v Speaker 1>It's only got I can send you the U I'll
<v Speaker 1>send you the link and maybe you can put an
<v Speaker 1>idea on it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, I already commented on this one. Let's see. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so it's probably not. It's probably not. Yeah, I was
<v Speaker 1>already because I was already sniffing on this. I was like,
<v Speaker 1>there's gotta be what what lex synum species are are
<v Speaker 1>known from?
<v Speaker 2>You might also have some other you might have some
<v Speaker 2>other bullet allies I'm not thinking about that shows up,
<v Speaker 2>So it might be one of the riizopoge.
<v Speaker 1>I can't believe nobody has looked at this man, like
<v Speaker 1>it's such an obvious fucking thing. It's like, Okay, you've
<v Speaker 1>got a micro hyzyl tree that's hard to grow. Why
<v Speaker 1>is it hard to grow in cultivation? Probably because it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't have the micro rhise unless it's you're planting in
<v Speaker 1>the native soil. So now we have to figure out
<v Speaker 1>what what micro orsea grow with it.
<v Speaker 2>This is the reason why I think the strawberry tree
<v Speaker 2>does so good in California's because whoever is making the
<v Speaker 2>stock of it, I think accidentally has this rhizopogon and
<v Speaker 2>the hiboloma in the soil mix already, so just they
<v Speaker 2>just do great, you know. Yeah, Like I don't see
<v Speaker 2>people growing like our native our view is that much.
<v Speaker 2>I think it's probably a similar problem out here in California.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I don't know, so there is. Okay, So
<v Speaker 1>for bullet taile's the order, they're all micro rhyzol right,
<v Speaker 1>They're all symbiotic with plants with trees.
<v Speaker 2>Like ninety five percent of them. Yeah, Okay, I think
<v Speaker 2>there might be a couple of weird saprofitic things in there.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, so there's one hundred species observed on inet
<v Speaker 1>in central Texas in the order bullet dailies Piso lithus, which,
<v Speaker 1>of course that you see that Scleroderma belitist luriddellis hord
<v Speaker 1>of belitist rubellus is the most common one. So being
<v Speaker 1>that that's the most common, maybe that's a good candidate.
<v Speaker 1>Zera comilis christ centron.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Man, but any of these are wrong. That's not that's
<v Speaker 1>not that's a European one or what.
<v Speaker 2>No, it's it's a nay. We've been applying to the
<v Speaker 2>wrong thing for a long time. But I would be
<v Speaker 2>surprised if Texas doesn't have multiple zero camealas that just
<v Speaker 2>don't have appropriate names right now.
<v Speaker 1>Uh huh.
<v Speaker 2>You know, when people want to help out with this,
<v Speaker 2>like you can literally dry your samples down and then
<v Speaker 2>send them over to Stephen Russell is at Indiana, Michigan
<v Speaker 2>now at mycota dot com and he'll do like relatively
<v Speaker 2>cheap sequencing for you because he's basically, you know, trying
<v Speaker 2>to base figure out what we have in North America
<v Speaker 2>non academics, so this is totally on his own, which
<v Speaker 2>is great because I feel like it's more accessible that way.
<v Speaker 2>But you can easily contribute by just drying specimens down
<v Speaker 2>and sending them to my CODA dot call.
<v Speaker 1>But but they have to be tied to an I
<v Speaker 1>Naturalist observation too, right yeah, right, the yeah, So so
<v Speaker 1>up upload it on in AT and then whenever you
<v Speaker 1>upload something to in AD on the web page, the
<v Speaker 1>web link of that in AD observation, it'll have numbers
<v Speaker 1>after the last forward slash, and that those numbers it
<v Speaker 1>should be nine numbers? Are is it nine or ten?
<v Speaker 1>Forget anyway, it's nine or ten numbers. Yeah, that's the
<v Speaker 1>that's the IGH Naturalists identification that pertains specifically to that observation.
<v Speaker 1>So you write the number on it and whatever ID
<v Speaker 1>the AI thinks it is the ID, and and then
<v Speaker 1>you know, dry it, mail it off and it'll get
<v Speaker 1>sequenced and uploaded to a database and you can contribute
<v Speaker 1>to a community science. So this fucking thing with the
<v Speaker 1>Madrones has been driving me nuts though, because it's they're
<v Speaker 1>such dope trees and they need to be cultivated more.
<v Speaker 1>And ours are probably different from the ones in Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>being how much the climate has changed in Central Texas
<v Speaker 1>compared to Mexico over the last you know, fIF fifty
<v Speaker 1>thousand years and so you know, they've been selected for
<v Speaker 1>a hot or drier climate and they're they're getting developed.
<v Speaker 1>They're getting destroyed a bunch too, because Texas hates it's
<v Speaker 1>the landscape, so you know, and the developers. Yeah, it's crazy, man,
<v Speaker 1>It's Texas and Florida I think are like pioneering habitat
<v Speaker 1>destruction because of the just the all the politicians are
<v Speaker 1>corrupt and connected to developers. And yeah, they're just creating
<v Speaker 1>some of the most ugly landscapes in the United States.
<v Speaker 1>Really good job.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah there. Their choice of paradise is strip Mall.
<v Speaker 1>Oh god. Yeah, well people hate it too, like people
<v Speaker 1>are miserable. I did these videos the last like a
<v Speaker 1>month ago, called you know, spiritually depraved and misery inducing
<v Speaker 1>Landscapes in North America, and I like uploaded it. I
<v Speaker 1>didn't check. I just was like, you know, it's cathartic
<v Speaker 1>for me because I hate this landscape, this kind of landscape.
<v Speaker 1>And I checked like four days later. In the video
<v Speaker 1>had like, you know, fifty thousand likes, and I was like,
<v Speaker 1>what the fuck? Like this really resonates with people. This
<v Speaker 1>is kind of hilarious, Like everyone agrees that this stuff
<v Speaker 1>looks terrible and makes you feel terrible to be around.
<v Speaker 1>And but we keep building it. Not we the developers,
<v Speaker 1>you know, so they can cash in and we all
<v Speaker 1>have to suffer with the fucking is sores and you know,
<v Speaker 1>autodependent communities and giant parking lots and you know consumer farm,
<v Speaker 1>the consumerism that's farming all of us. So yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's been weird, you know, not living in
<v Speaker 1>a place with public land like California and Arizona have.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, Texas is crazy about how i mean little
<v Speaker 2>access you guys have any anything that's not from it
<v Speaker 2>private land, right, So it's like hard for anybody to
<v Speaker 2>like go experience like, oh this is what this is
<v Speaker 2>what paradise is. It's actually like what grew here on
<v Speaker 2>its own, yeah itself.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, you cross, you cross, you know, an hour
<v Speaker 1>over the border and you're in like beautiful uh you know,
<v Speaker 1>thorn scrub woodlands that aren't destroyed and paved over with
<v Speaker 1>hideous ship It's crazy, I mean, the contrast, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And I think it's just because Mexico has the whole
<v Speaker 1>heto system that was set up after the Revolution of
<v Speaker 1>Mexican Revolution, which basically was a way to guarantee that
<v Speaker 1>you know, the poor, the peasants had access to land,
<v Speaker 1>to agriculture. And it was you know, revolt against the
<v Speaker 1>hacienda system and all these rich, fucking pig land owning
<v Speaker 1>families that were owning all the land and enslaving everyone
<v Speaker 1>else in a feudal in a feudal like state of uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, peasantry. So yeah, so Mexico, you know, or
<v Speaker 1>you can go to New Mexico or Nevada or Oregon
<v Speaker 1>or Arizona or Utah or all these places that have
<v Speaker 1>more public land that you can actually go appreciate the landscape,
<v Speaker 1>but not in Texas.
<v Speaker 3>So yeah, anyway, and.
<v Speaker 2>I think Mexico actually has a step above like our
<v Speaker 2>federal lands at this point because like we're seeing this
<v Speaker 2>right when you've got you know, big Papa Feds come in,
<v Speaker 2>they can then do some of these public lands. We're
<v Speaker 2>like in Mexico, like who owns the real rights? So
<v Speaker 2>like what's going to happen to that property, to that land?
<v Speaker 2>It's the people that live there, right, I mean, I
<v Speaker 2>had I had Lineline blown away this year. This is
<v Speaker 2>my first time down to Wahawka last September and just
<v Speaker 2>like seeing the communities and the landscapes that they've basically preserved,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and maintained more or less. Right, these natural
<v Speaker 2>landscapes im just like holy crapped, Yeah, man, which we
<v Speaker 2>had I was had have shreded this up here because
<v Speaker 2>I'm watched I'm going through this years. You know this spring, dude,
<v Speaker 2>logging's going down like I haven't seen since like the nineties.
<v Speaker 3>Oh yeah, Well what I assumed you to, Dude Trump.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I think part of it was you get
<v Speaker 2>rid of a bunch of the National Force Service folks, Right,
<v Speaker 2>That's happened right away when you came in, and that
<v Speaker 2>means all your watchdogs are gone, and then you can
<v Speaker 2>slowly start to bring in, you know, your friends to
<v Speaker 2>kind of come and take all the resources.
<v Speaker 3>And I think that's what we're starting to see.
<v Speaker 2>So there's nobody who were reporting on it because you
<v Speaker 2>already took all the people that are usually walking over
<v Speaker 2>the forest out of the picture. And now we're getting
<v Speaker 2>rid of all the research hubs in the National Force Service.
<v Speaker 1>It was all planned. All this shit was planned. This
<v Speaker 1>is all twenty protect, twenty twenty five, all this bullshit.
<v Speaker 1>These fucking pigs, these fucking vermin, these these human cancers. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's crazy, man, what's happening? And I to I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I still can't believe people voted for the fuck thinking
<v Speaker 1>he's gonna you know, that he cares about them. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's what really blows my mind. Yeah, we got that
<v Speaker 1>fucking that, the society got that fucking stupid Really, how
<v Speaker 1>did that happen so quick?
<v Speaker 2>Really?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, how do you how do you this guy's
<v Speaker 1>been out there and like annoying con artists and scam
<v Speaker 1>artists for fifty years. How the fuck did you think
<v Speaker 1>that this dude was on your side at any point? Like,
<v Speaker 1>I know, the left got annoying the last you know,
<v Speaker 1>ten years, But was it that annoying that it drove
<v Speaker 1>you to the side of being a fucking moron?
<v Speaker 2>Like?
<v Speaker 1>Really?
<v Speaker 3>Apparently? God?
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I mean, both sides aren't offering what anybody wants, right,
<v Speaker 2>that's the problem.
<v Speaker 3>What do people want?
<v Speaker 2>They just want, like to know that the next generation
<v Speaker 2>is going to be doing as well, if not a
<v Speaker 2>little bit better than.
<v Speaker 1>That, to own a home and have like a couple
<v Speaker 1>of vacation days a year and not have to worry
<v Speaker 1>about getting sick like those what people want, right, Like,
<v Speaker 1>they don't they don't want to fucking go to war
<v Speaker 1>with Iran. They don't want, you know, to know that
<v Speaker 1>people are afraid to use the word retard and everything's safe,
<v Speaker 1>and we're not going to call the homeless homeless anymore.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna call the munhoused because like, oh, that shit
<v Speaker 1>was fucking nuts, really nuts, well intentioned, but absolutely fucking insane. Insane.
<v Speaker 1>You live in a bubble. You don't have any genuine concerns,
<v Speaker 1>you know, holy shit, how do we go to It's
<v Speaker 1>just and now we're here and now we're like Christian nationalists,
<v Speaker 1>you know, losing access to fucking abortion, the myth of Priysta,
<v Speaker 1>all this stuff like it went. It's just this pendulum
<v Speaker 1>swing back and forth between crazy and crazy. You know,
<v Speaker 1>like when when does it get like things that are
<v Speaker 1>actually going to benefit people that live here? It's so nuts.
<v Speaker 2>Well, this is the most important thing you can do
<v Speaker 2>is fucking walk around the place you live, meet the
<v Speaker 2>people that you live near, and just start talking to them.
<v Speaker 2>And you know what, You're not going to have the
<v Speaker 2>same opinions, and that's perfectly fine, you know, but like
<v Speaker 2>you need to learn to like live with other people.
<v Speaker 2>And I feel like part of pendulum swing now has
<v Speaker 2>been people have gotten so used to finding their own communities,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the people that think just like them, and
<v Speaker 2>that just is going to create this political back and
<v Speaker 2>forth pendulum until we fucking blow the thing off its rockers.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and it's so easy for humans to do that too,
<v Speaker 1>because we're just innately tribal. You look at chimps, it's
<v Speaker 1>the same thing. They grow to the group grows to
<v Speaker 1>a certain size, it splits. Now they're fighting each other.
<v Speaker 1>Then that group grows to a different side. Now you
<v Speaker 1>got more groups fight each other. Tribalism is unfortunately ingrained
<v Speaker 1>in our genome. I feel like in our social behavior.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't need to, Like you can correct for it
<v Speaker 1>with culture, but you have to really be conscious and
<v Speaker 1>aware of yourself. And yeah, man, just grant people some grace, right,
<v Speaker 1>Like you can disagree with someone and think their opinions
<v Speaker 1>are idiotic and still be respectful to them and not
<v Speaker 1>demonize them, right, I mean yep, yeah, man, I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I mean we used to be able to reach
<v Speaker 2>cumpromises in this country, right, Like, Hey, people could have
<v Speaker 2>radically different opinions, we'll find the midway point that that wrk.
<v Speaker 2>It's a little bit of what they want. But like
<v Speaker 2>now it's like everybody's like, oh, I need to either
<v Speaker 2>win or just we're not doing this at all. I'm
<v Speaker 2>not going to even play the game. Like no, man,
<v Speaker 2>It's like, look at all the human society. It's like
<v Speaker 2>this has been a problem, like you said, going all
<v Speaker 2>the way back to our you know, primate ancestors, and
<v Speaker 2>how did humans get.
<v Speaker 3>To the point where we are at this point.
<v Speaker 2>We learned to find institutional or social ways to control that,
<v Speaker 2>and we're like starting to lose that again. Some of
<v Speaker 2>that was religion, some of that was you know, philosophy,
<v Speaker 2>and this has been a big thing in philosophy since
<v Speaker 2>the Greeks and prior to that. And I feel like
<v Speaker 2>now we're just throwing out all to the wind to
<v Speaker 2>like try and get winner takes all and not just
<v Speaker 2>gonna burn us all to the ground.
<v Speaker 1>So stupid man. Yeah, and people really got a limit
<v Speaker 1>phone times too. I feel like that's another thing, right,
<v Speaker 1>get outside and start you know shiitcomposting and looking for
<v Speaker 1>fly fungus and ping on trico. Serious, that's what you
<v Speaker 1>need to do maybe.
<v Speaker 2>Take maybe take a little acid too in your yard.
<v Speaker 2>I really think so much going on here.
<v Speaker 1>I really think the psychedelic thing helps once. I don't
<v Speaker 1>trust anybody who hasn't done acid once, right, especially no
<v Speaker 1>one who's had a bad trip. The bad trips are
<v Speaker 1>what forced you to change. But it's so funny because yeah,
<v Speaker 1>here at the Texas more oppressive you mentioned acid, they
<v Speaker 1>think it's like PCP. They think it's like the same,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like you're gonna fucking be jumping off buildings
<v Speaker 1>and attacking p It's crazy, man, It's just it's nuts.
<v Speaker 1>But I think the psychedelics are definitely and psychedelics and
<v Speaker 1>nature not not this like party mentality. Oh let's get
<v Speaker 1>fucked up. It's like no, it's it's completely against that
<v Speaker 1>all that like college college kid booze mentality, the drug
<v Speaker 1>war mentality. Let's get fucked up. No, no, no, you know,
<v Speaker 1>do do psychedelics sparingly there are self limiting drug and
<v Speaker 1>do them in nature and do them for self insight
<v Speaker 1>and uh and the experience, you know, to step outside
<v Speaker 1>of yourself. And they're really it could it could really
<v Speaker 1>help people, so you know, but it's not a given
<v Speaker 1>you might just have a act like a jackass whatever,
<v Speaker 1>but it's a yeah, definitely, I don't know. I think
<v Speaker 1>it gets people out of that. So anyway, well, man,
<v Speaker 1>thanks a lot for coming on. I I this was
<v Speaker 1>two hours if yea.
<v Speaker 3>It's good to catch up.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, and I love keep hosting your stories and of
<v Speaker 1>course if people want to follow you, I always recommend.
<v Speaker 1>I recommend you to everybody. Damon tie on Instagram, and
<v Speaker 1>I think it's just really Instagram that you got that
<v Speaker 1>you use the most, right.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's why I use the most. I'm lazy come
<v Speaker 2>to social media. Yeah, but you're use one platform mainly.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's good, yeah, limited to put the stories. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the stories are super interesting. So all right, man, well
<v Speaker 1>thanks a lot, Damon, great talking to you.
<v Speaker 3>Right you too, man, take care, take care.
<v Speaker 1>But