There's a huge interest in using CBD oil/extracts and infused products containing CBD as medicine. Soil Secrets with the cooperation of a professional medical cannabis grower did a grow out experiment with spent/used soil compared to brand new Fox Farm Forest Floor soil. We cleaned the used soil using our Soil Secrets trommel screen and the treated the used soil with molecular biology made by Soil Secrets. Most growers throw away soil after one use so wanted to see if the used soil could be made good and repurposed for a second or third use. The image provided is from the starvation group where no fertilizer input had been provided to either the SS treated spent soil or the brand new Fox Farm soil. Both groups were treated with a Mycorrhizal product and bacteria. The Fox Farm was treated with the mycorrhizal product called Great White used per label instructions. Great White also contains a bacteria blend. The SS spent soil was treated with the Soil Secrets mycorrhizal product called EndoMaxima and the Soil Secrets Microbial Consortium BIOpack for the bacteria. The image I'm providing clearly shows that the Soil Secrets repurposed soil grew larger and healthier appearing plants than the Fox Farm soil. The plants have been stepped up int o 15 gallon containers using the same soil treatments so our next step is to test and measure the yield from the plants and measure the THC and CBD concentrations produced from all the groups. Stay Tuned for those results.
Carbon Sequestration, how soil turns into top soil. I've shown you the foundation of our research into what the significant carbon based molecules of soil are and I've shown you how a ruined dispersed clay soil can be fix, healed, by inoculating it with a biomimetic soil ecology process developed by Soil Secrets that will capture carbon, change the color of the soil and change the structure of the soil, all in rapid sequence. In this post I'm showing you the roots of a young Shumard Red Oak that was cut down at the Morton Arboretum in Chicago. The wood found in tree roots is composed of cells that have cell walls made up of a sugar called Cellulose. Cellulose is a complex sugar made up of the same sugar that's found in our blood called Glucose, but in the case of Cellulose the Glucose is linked together to make a larger molecular substance that is structurally strong and able to be the structural backbone of wood. As you can see in these two images there's a lot of wood that has grown in the soil under this tree and the carbon making up the molecule of the cellulose will contribute to the soil building process as part of the soil carbon sequestration process.
Soil Carbon Sequestration is Building Top Soil. These two images were taken at our arboretum in Los Lunas, where 32 years ago the soil was a salty high pH clay with terrible structure. The images showing the cracking and light colored clay is the before Soil Secrets. Using the Biomimetic Soil Ecology protocol of Soil Secrets we've stimulated and instigated the process of top soil development which requires that carbon from the atmosphere is harvested by plants and turned into a molecular form in the soil that allows for long term storage. The image showing the darker soil with aggregates is the same spot the arboretum after three decades of Soil Secrets treatment.
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Soil Secrets LLC was created from our nursery business Trees That Please back in the 1990's. It's purpose was to continue the R & D of products that could be effective in restoring the natural balance of soil concerning what defines a healthy soil. The other objective was to use these same products for growing our hundreds of thousands of trees at Trees That Please, growing trees with the natural processes of Nature flourishing on the roots of our product. While fertilizers grow drug addicts addicted to the constant feed of the fertilizer, our Soil Secrets process will grow plants that are ready for the rigors of Nature. For a long time nursery people used balanced N-P-K fertilizers with names that implied they would improve the texture of soil, or they sold bulk amounts of compost, mushroom compost, peat moss and products called Soil Builder, in the attempt to change the Soil Organic Matter and bulk density characteristics of a soil, somehow mimicking the rich dark top soil of nature. However that has proven to not work as the chemistry of soil will consume the organic matter added faster than you can add it, resulting in a failed attempt to accumulate carbon to the point where you can say you are sustainable and contributing to "Soil Carbon Sequestration." The other problem is that by adding bulk volumes of organic matter from compost like products without knowledge of what the chemical characteristics are of the organic matter (salts, salinity, pH, etc.) can easily cause an accumulation of stuff in the soil that can damage the soils structure or ability to grow a healthy crop or landscape.
The following images are of the arboretum site as it is today which also has our Trees That Please production nursery on the grounds. As you can see the professor was wrong and the site is now a healthy sustainable ecosystem of carbon rich soils, with a collection of trees from all over the world. We succeeded because Soil Secrets has developed the molecular biology and products that can restore Nature's natural balance of what defines a healthy soil and our Arboretum and our nursery production system at Trees That Please proves this point.
Friday, March 23, 2018
The Arboretum Tomé property was purchased in 1985 by Michael & Kari Melendrez as vacant land. Unknown to the Melendrez couple the soil was a high pH Saline Sodic Alkaline clay with the pH running as high as 9.3 and never below 8.5. In the winter the salts would come to the surface and turn the ground white. In horticulture terms this situation is called "White Death" as very few of the most hardy weeds can tolerate those conditions. Michael showed a soil analysis report of the site to a Professor of Soil Science at New Mexico State University who told him it was impossible to fix that kind of soil and to put a for sale sign on it. Instead Michael using his knowledge of chemistry, molecular biology, microbiology and a good deal of dumb luck began to experiment with methods of soil restoration. The clay on the site is about 12 feet deep and was hard as a rock, taking many days of digging with a concrete buster and pick axe to dig a single tree planting site. Many dozens of trees were planted in 1986 of which all died after one agonizing summer. Today however the site is a rich collection of trees of the world with the largest collection of Oaks of any landscape in New Mexico or the Southwest. Also growing on the site are 70 foot tall Redwoods, 50 foot tall Native New Mexican Oaks, Giant Timber Bamboo, Sugar Maples and a Naturalized forest Michael calls the Woodland Edge. If you ask Michael what the key ingredient was to fixing the toxic chemistry of the site, he will tell you it was electricity. That's right, electricity that is coming from the Carbon Matrix of our TerraPro product, an invention of Michael that is bio-identical to what Nature is doing in the healthiest soils on the planet. In 2011 Clarence Chavez, Acting Soil Scientists for New Mexico working for the USDA NRCS requested from Michael that a new soil carbon test be used to measure the concentration of carbon on the arboretum grounds. This type of carbon test can prove if a successful soil carbon sequestration process is taking place. If the carbon accumulation is significant and is not there because you added it in the form of compost, biochar, etc., but rather is there because the soil ecology process of Nature put it there, than we can make the claim that Soil Carbon Sequestration has taken place. A result of the Reactive Carbon testing performed by Clarence revealed the highest carbon levels measured in New Mexico, including many Organic Certified Farms that have been organic for many years. It also revealed that when soils are healthy and full of carbon they stay cooler in the heat of the summer as the Arboretum Tomé soils were 16 F degrees cooler that other sites in the same county. Cooler soils stay moist in the summer than hot soils!
Looking East in 1986, showing the salt
The same view of the East side of the Arboretum in 1996
Tree production nursery in the arboretum