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