Eliminate transplant shock!!

Two Nutrition Pathways When we look at how plants are able to intake nutrition, we find a very simple truth - they drink, and they eat. When a plant drinks, it also drinks whatever is inside the water. In a way, these things can be considered nutrition. We all enjoy some electrolytes on a consistent basis. But nobody thinks that replaces eating. But often times that's how we expect plants to get enough to eat. The most amazing thing is, many of them can survive very near to that state of only drinking to get their nutritional input. What's universally clear is that plants want to eat and we had no idea how they did it. Now we do know. We call it rhizophagy (root-eating). Rhizophagy is the process by which roots funnel microbial life through themselves in order to harvest protein and complex nutritional compounds, and generally provide the building blocks of strong plant tissues. Haven't heard about it? Neither has anybody else. The original white paper on it - Published in 2019 by Dr. James F. White. So this is super new information. It also helps us with a lot of puzzles we were trying to figure out in the world of compost. Like why compost tea has such a near immediate response in a plant. What rhizophagy shows is that it wasn't just an errant protozoa poop that was soluble enough for the plant to slurp up in the water table. At the tip of the root, the plant is intaking bacteria and yeast in bulk to run through corral systems in order to be processed. My favorite analogy is that they're ranching microbes. Some will survive and repopulate at the root hairs where they're expelled. (Some will even live within the plant's tissue's for a more extended period, but that's a story for another day.) The result is that plants are intaking their proteins directly - NOT building the proteins themselves from water soluble minerals. They can do that to an extent, but it's much more energy intensive for the plant. It leaves the plant without enough sunlight to do other important functions, like make essential oils to repel pests or send more sugar to the fruits.

This is a text from one of my earliest and most committed adopters of Microbe MasterMix. Months since the last application and still reaping rewards for setting the stage of properly cycling microbiology in an animal husbandry system. Because it's not just about "the smells". The lack of smells is an indicator that nutrients are cycling and held in complex forms. Pathogens are starved out. The microbiome the animals live in is fostering a more positive environment. This is just the beginning in discovering the downstream - and long term - benefits of restoring balanced microbiology. Do you want to see a qualitative shift in how your animals are living? I think you'll be surprised at just how easy it is.

Here's a little journal style update about the last few weeks of my experience with microscope viewing my compost piles. Have questions about anything I bring up? Please ask! I love to bring clarity to the little bits and pieces. If you caught me in the last couple weeks, you may have noticed that I was dumping buckets of microbes on a long compost pile. This was in response to having taken some samples of them for some time on the microscope, and seeing a reasonable predator population (in this case testate amoeba), but a somewhat low population of the bacteria, yeast, and spores that they typically feed on. I didn't hate the ratios I was seeing, but it looked emptier than I wanted. This made some sense to me because the piles had dried further than I would have liked in an ideal situation. They weren't *dried out*, but didn't have the drop of water from a squeeze that I'd really be going for. - More on compost moisture another time. I'll probably post some photos of what I was seeing that week in the comments to give a visual to the comparison. Since I had 2 piles, I decided to remoisturize them differently. On one pile, I only added water as I regularly would with my soaker hose. With the other, the same, but I also manually applied 25 gallons of Microbe MasterMix. My theory was that perhaps I would see a significant boost in that pile relative to the other pile. As fate would have it, we got quite a lot of rain this last week. I could tell the compost loved it. The garden soils all loved it. It was a long, slow drizzle that is not typical for this season in Arizona. So now I had a new variable of amazing rainwater influencing all of my piles equally. The results were pretty spectacular. In both piles the testate amoeba counts were much higher. They looked full, and the landscape of bacterial jiggling was filled out. I was truly impressed by the ability of the piles to increase their robustness with a simple return of more ideal moisture levels. That is not always the case for compost.