Making JADAM Liquid Fertilizer

Hi, this is Joey Berger here again, Permaculture Director at Heartwood Mountains Sanctuary. We're continuing our educational series in cahoots with our sister farm on the Big Island, Dragon Heart Farm. Today I'm going to show you a very simple high nitrogen fertilizer you can make using your lawn clippings and grass that you can just cut down. It's very simple, it's high nitrogen. It's called a JADAM liquid fertilizer, J-L-F. JADAM is a form of natural farming popularized in Korea but practiced all over the world. And it's basically to give farmers the independence from going to the grocery store and having to buy chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides. It gives the farmer the power back. And so we're going to teach you today how to make this very simple fertilizer using items you can just find in your yard, on an empty lot, out in the woods. And by the end of this you're going to also feel empowered from the grocery store. So follow along as we bring this to reality. Now you've probably heard a lot of farmers talking about compost teas. And there are a couple different teas you can make. You can make an anaerobic tea or you can make an aerobic tea. Aerobic means there's air in it, it's being aerated while it's being brewed. There are often pumps and air stones putting oxygen into the tea. These can make very good teas, but often times the microbes that are being cultured at that temperature need that constant temperature to survive. So when that tea is stopped brewing, those microbes start dying off quickly. This J-L-F, JADAM liquid fertilizer, we're going to teach you to make today is an anaerobic ferment, meaning we don't oxygenate it while it's being made. We mimic nature a little more in that we're just letting it sit. You're culturing microbes that can withstand a lot of different temperatures. They're going to be a lot stronger and hardier and able to withstand different temperature swings, different elevations. Microbes in the soil break down nutrients and make them available as plant food for your plants. So you want to put these into your soil. You want to get these down onto your soil whenever you can. So the first thing we're going to do is identify some grass. Here's some. So we're going to make this tea today out of grass, but you can make crop-specific teas. If you're growing tomatoes, you can make a tea out of tomatoes to feed to that tomato. Everything that the plant needs to grow is in that plant already. Think about it in nature that these plants were growing wild and their leaves would fall down and over time they would die and they would fertilize themselves. This is how we mimic nature. So if you're making a tomato tea during veg, you would cut off some growing leaves and make a tea out of that. If you're making it for flower, you would use the fruits of that plant. If you're growing cannabis, you would use this during veg. You could clean out the inside of the plant, the big fan leaves, and make a high-nitrogen vegetative tea for that. And when you're ready for flower, you can clean out the little buds on the inside of the plant and make a flower tea. Everything that that plant needs to make a bud is in that bud already. If you're growing zucchini, do the same thing. Zucchini fruits are very high in phosphorus. They're excellent for flower time and for building fruits. So we're going to show you now, we've got our grass. I came through and mowed a little bit already. We're going to make it in this five-gallon bucket. So when we're done making this tea, this tea in particular, grass tea, is going to be heavily potent. You're going to need to dilute this up to 300 times. This five-gallon tea will make potentially 1,500 gallons of fertilizer. That's on the high end. I would start with a dilution of that rate, but you can go all the way down to about 30 to 1. So you could possibly be adding this to 150 gallons of water and making about 150 gallons of a very potent tea. But my advice is to lean it out first, do a test area, see if you burn anything, and then make it more potent. Today we're going to use a five-gallon bucket. Ideally you want to use a food-grade bucket. You can also make these in 50-gallon drums. We call them pickle barrels out here. That's what we have a lot of access to. But today, for ease of use, we're going to show you how to make this in just a five-gallon bucket. So now we're going to rake up this grass that we mowed just a few minutes ago. We're going to make sure we can fill this five-gallon bucket all the way. Alright, now we've got our five-gallon bucket full of grass. The next ingredient here, and really the final ingredient besides water, is leaf mold. Now this is something we're going to go into the woods and collect, but I bet there's some right here in this pile of leaves I'll be able to show you. Leaf mold is basically a fungi that breaks down woody plants and carbon and things like leaves and turns them into soil. So we're going to add just a handful of leaf mold to this tea. And that's going to, it's full of bacteria and microbes, and it's going to break down this grass and turn it into the digested, essentially, ferment it and turn it into this high-nitrogen fertilizer that we're seeking. So let's take a look here really quick, maybe we'll be able to find some just right here. So this is just a pile of leaves that we've had sitting here since last fall. We're going to dig around in here, and here's some leaf mold right here. See this white stuff? These little white patches? Oh, here's a big chunk. It's colonizing on this wood. And this is exactly what I was talking about, is mycelium. It's literally turned this hard wood into a sponge. Look at that. And it's really an amazing thing. This is how your soil is actually built, is by mycelium. So we're going to pull out a handful of this and add it to this tea. So now we've got our handful of leaf mold, our beautiful mycelium that's going to help break this down and turn it into the fermented tea that we want, help release all the nitrogen from this grass, make it available for our plants. This is actually quite a bit. Normally, I would add this much to about a 50-gallon drum, so this should be a really good inoculation. So now we're going to go and fill this up, fill it all the way up to the top, throw a lid on it. It can sit right in the middle of your garden. You want to actually put this where you're going to use it. That way, the microbes that are colonizing it are the ones that are used to being in your site. They're used to this elevation. They're used to this exposure to the sun. These are the indigenous microorganisms that are already here, present on your farm or on your property. So we're going to go fill this up now, pop a lid on it, and then we'll talk about how to apply this. So now we've got our grass in our bucket. We've got our leaf mold. We're going to fill it up with water. We're going to cover it with this lid. You're going to stand back and watch the magic happen. In 10 days, this is going to brew. In colder temperatures, it'll take a little longer, maybe two weeks. These anaerobic ferments are stinky and smelly. You don't want to spill it on yourself. You don't want to drink it. That's the big difference between aerobic and anaerobic. Anaerobic stinks. So be careful when you do go to apply this that you don't get it on your shoes or it won't burn you or mess you up. It's just stinky. So now we've got our bucket. It's full of our grass. It's full of our leaf mold. It's full of our water. We're going to put the lid on it. That's it. We're going to let that sit for 10 days right here in the sun, right by our garden. So one of the last things you're going to do after you put your lid on and your tea is ready to be just cooking away, you want to mark what you put in here. Good farming is all about good record keeping and data collection. So we're going to write on here that this is a JLF and that this is made of grass. And we're going to put the date. April 14th. So now we know in 10 days we're going to be checking this. But this 5 gallons here, like I said, you're going to want to dilute it 300 times when you first go to use it. And then you can do a soil application. You can run it through a drip emitter. You can run it through a hose. You can foliar feed with it. But I'd recommend you dilute it 300 times and then you do a test area. See if you burn anything. See if it's even too hot at 300 times dilution. You can make it as hot as a 30 times dilution if you want. So you could pour this 5 gallons into 150 gallons of water and that would make a very concentrated tea. Definitely do test runs on that first. What I love about these teas is there's no pumps necessary to brew them. No aeration, no air stones. If you're going to be transferring this to a larger tank using a pump, you're going to want to use a diaphragm pump ideally. These pumps won't shred the microbes, the micro bacterias that are in here. Other kinds of pumps will actually shred the microbes while they're running through that pump. So use a diaphragm pump when transferring. When we brew these in 50 gallon drums, we transfer them to a larger tank, 350 or 500 gallon tank with a diaphragm pump which we then use to hand water or run them through our drip emitters. You're never going to need to dump out this material or clean out this bucket which is another reason I like these anaerobic ferments over an aerated tea. So you would just add more grass clippings to this, fill it back up, add another handful of leaf mold. This is going right on top of the old material that's already fermented in there. Fill it back up with water and just let it ferment again for another 10 days. These teas only get better with age. They get more powerful. Maybe you'd be making your teas in the spring to use a year from now for next season. But they'll ferment enough just in 10 days to 2 weeks to make you a nice high nitrogen tea. Well, I want to thank you for watching today. We showed you how you can make a simple high nitrogen fertilizer out of something most people consider a waste product, their clipped lawn or a pain in the butt chore that they have to deal with. Hope that this will help you find food security and help you not have to go spend your dollars at the grocery store on expensive fertilizers. I want to thank our Heartwood family. I want to thank our Hawaii family, our friends over at the Dragon Heart Farm on the Big Island. We're creating this rainbow bridge to bring you educational content on farming from Hawaii and Humboldt County. So I want to thank you all for tuning in and we'll see you all next time.