This past Summer saw the first Koanga Seed Internship in New Zealand.. and that felt like a turning point for me.

I’ve taught the two week Seed Internships in both Australia and Jordon, but this year it felt like time to teach it here.

We had 6 women with us, who came from very varied backgrounds, but all on a mission. One woman, Merili, was from Estonia…. and she had been looking for such a workshop all around the world. She came to learn and experience as much as she could about seed saving so she could go home and begin a serious seed bank in Estonia! She enjoyed it so much she stayed on an extra 3 weeks afterwards to continue helping in the seed processing room which in late March is still very very busy (beans, peppers, watermelon, pumpkin and much more still coming in… all the corn to go yet) It was great for me to see that the systems we have set up for planning were able to be effectively used for the Northern hemisphere.

Processing seeds from all of our seed gardens is a super wonderful and addictive job to have and the experience of actually ‘doing it’ for real is hard to pass up… everybody loves working in the seed processing shed, and we will offer the possibility each year to those who do the Seed Internship to stay on as apprentices to help finish processing the new seasons seed, a great opportunity for serious hands on experience!

Cushla and Moana were on the Seed Internship as paid training by their employer, The Tuaropaki Trust, as part of their training in the process of Tuaropaki setting up a sister seed bank at Mokai. Cushla had been here for over a year I think, she has done the Urban Garden apprenticeship, the Growing Soil Food and Health Internship our PDC and lastly the Seed Internship. She is well equipped to go out and earn a good living doing this stuff as is Moana who was also here over a long period soaking it all up. We’ll miss them both and wish them well…. And we’ll be keeping in touch.

More and more we are seeing employers coming and asking us for people who have done previous training with us that they could employ. The work we are doing is seriously becoming recognized as a way to future employment… meaningful, satisfying, healthy, regenerative employment!

It’s not just the learning in the classroom but also the inspiration of seeing it really happening and also the experience of working in these designed systems and getting the confidence to go out and actually do it, from designing food gardens that could make a good living for you, whilst saving your own seed, or really and truly feeding your family by saving the seed then growing it, and not only that but fully nourish your family, or designing a seed garden capable of maintaining food security for your bioregion or an entire country, or learning the gift of preparing food that comes entirely from the garden, tastes incredible and is super healthy, or the art of growing soil….all of which are becoming valued skills once again.

We had another woman on the Seed Internship, Suzanne, who came to find the space to immerse herself in seeds and garden planning so she could come up with a detailed plan for how to feed and manage and nourish (based on being able to provide Weston Price levels of minerals vitamins and traditional fats) her extended family … which included saving seeds for all of the food crops. It is no mean feat to be able to realistically design a garden to feed an extended family, knowing it is done super efficiently so it can work in the time available, and so that there will be enough nutrition to maintain family health for the long run, which means also having the knowledge to build soil over time, and also in a way that saves the seed for all of the crops grown for food. That takes some skill and some careful thought and planning and Suzanne did just that and went home with spreadsheets and data bases and all the information she needed, as well as the confidence and the experience to make it real and possible. I see her seed growing becoming the core of a bioregional seed bank in her Bioregion and we will be watching her learning. For Suzanne the Seed Internship was a very important part of her learning here, she had previously done our PDC and several other workshops, and is coming back next Spring with her children to do the Bio Intensive workshop to ensure she is building skills and inspiration within her family to increase the chances of building family strength, health and happiness through food security.

Apart from the buzz of seeing serious students gaining serious skills to take back out into their lives I got a real buzz from two of our sessions in particular … they were were the conversations about hybrid seeds, the difference between F1 hybrids and open pollinates and coming to fully understand the profound differences between the two options and the session where we began to draw a series of pictures describing the life of a seed… to a seed … and learning more about what actually happens and how… and why … so we can support that process, to grow higher quality seeds… and food!

This is an Internship for people wanting to design serious gardens, food gardens, or self- reliance and resilience in an uncertain future, which must include seed saving… it could be a family garden, a bioregional seed bank or a national seed bank, a business or anything in between or a combination of all. It is an internship for those seriously wishing to take the plunge to reconnect with the age old circle/cycle of co-evolution… re-joining ourselves and our families to the earth and the sky of our place, via our food!

Half of the time on this Internship is in the garden and the seed processing room and we offer the possibility for 2 Interns to stay on after the Internship and work with the seeds in the garden and seed room to follow the processes until mid-April and gain more and more confidence to take back out there .

If you any questions about this Seed Internship do not hesitate to contact us, Kay will talk with you.

 Click Here to book your spot on the 2017 Bio-Regional Seed Bank Internship

** For an illustrated example of this recipe, check out the The Unconventional Farmer’s Blog here. The blog has all kinds of good stuff, sign up to get the updates via email!

Fish fertilizer is an awesome product for promoting plant growth. It’s high in Nitrogen for growing plants, can be naturally produced, and is an awesome food for microbes! Fungi love this stuff. Fish fertilizer can be expensive in the store, but it is easily produced at home. This is a great recipe for making your own fish hydrolysate fertilizer. First lets look at the two main types of fish fertilizer:

Fish Emulsion

Fish emulsion fertilizer is made several different ways depending on who is making it. The important thing to know is that fish emulsion goes through two stages of processing. The first stage breaks down the fish parts using enzymes, proteases, or chemicals. Then, and this is the important part, heat is used to break it down further and allow oils and other things like amino acids to be more easily removed. It’s this second stage of processing that makes fish emulsion less advantageous than fish hydrolysate. Fish emulsion fertilizer lacks many oils and proteins that fish hydrolysate fertilizer has in abundance. So let’s look at that!

Fish Hydrolysate

Fish hydrolysate fertilizer generally starts out the same way as fish emulsion. It gets broken down using enzymes, proteases, or chemicals. However, fish hydryolysate doesn’t undergo the heating and skimming process that you get with the fish emulsion. The higher quality fish hydrolysates only undergo “cold-processing” which just means they are never heated enough to break down significant amino acid chains. Good fish hydrolysate also retains the fats and oils that microbes love!

Our Fish Fertilizer Recipe

This method of making fish fertilizer is awesome because it is a cold process, chemical-free, completely organic way to make fish fertilizer right at home. While fish emulsion lacks beneficial ingredients vital to the final product, this fish hydrolysate recipe preserves all those active ingredients. You don’t want to miss out on those oils that microbes love. Try this recipe in the yard or in a raised bed garden (If you are a novice gardener you can view videos online to learn how to plant a raised bed garden)

How to make your own fish fertilizer:

1. Buy a fish.

TIP: Any kind of fish will work.  In fact, you might as well use trash fish, or fish discards like fish heads, guts, etc.  I like to use whole fishes though as I think that makes for a better product.

2. Now, ideally you would throw the fish into a blender to mash it up into little pieces.  I cut my fish into 8ths or so and then chuck it into my kitchen blender but I’m a bit of a caveman.  If you’re squeamish, buy a separate blender for this, just make sure it is powerful enough, mine is 500W and works fine for small-medium size fishes.  Remember, the finer the fish bits, the more effective the fermentation.
3. Add water.  You can use a simple guide of 3:1 – 3 parts water to 1 part ferment material.  1 roughly 8in tilapia comes to about 500mL when ground up, so I add about 1500mL water.

TIP: ALWAYS USE NON-CHLORINATED WATER.  Chlorine kills microbes.  Simply let your chlorinated tap water sit for several hours, allowing the chlorine to dissipate.  I let it sit overnight generally.

4. If you are using a blender, blend up the mixture.  The water helps keep it loose so it blends much betterafter you add the water.
5. Add lacto bacilli to blended fish mixture.  I use 2tbsp per L.  You can use more or less if you want.  2tbsp/L is plenty though. See our lactobacillus recipe for proper preparation and dilution of your lacto serum.
6. Add 1/3 parts sugar.  This should be 1/3 the amount of fish you’ve added.  Sugar will be either molasses or normal cane sugar.

TIP:  Try not to use cane sugar since it is chemically bleached.  Raw(unrefined) sugar like muscovado is best.  In the Philippines we use molasses because it is cheap, but any glucose source works – syrup, honey, etc.  Just use whatever is cheap.  Glucose gives microbes energy.  Whatever you have access to cheaply, go for it.

7. If using sugar, the equivalency is about 1KG sugar = 1L solution.  So if you have 500mL like my tilapia, you want 1/3 of that in sugar.  You’d use about 167g sugar, or roughly ¾ cup.
8. I blend the whole mixture up a bit.  It’s good to have it as fine as possible.
9. Up to you how much you blend it, I blend until I don’t hear so many bones crunching in the blades of the blender.
10. Now you have liquefied fish, sugar, and lacto.  Pour this mixture into a container.  Loosely cover the container.  No need to seal, because the container will explode as CO2 is released by fermentation.  You just want to make sure other things don’t get into it.  I use a container with a lid and loosely screw the cap on top (just make sure you don’t seal it because it WILL explode).
11. The process takes anywhere from 3 weeks to over a month.  How do you know its finished?  By the smell.
12. You know when it’s done when there is no smell anymore.  During fermentation there is a nasty smell, but once completed, there will be almost no odor.  You can open it, and put your nose right up to it.  Take a whiff.  Nothing but a faint vinegar smell.  Now you know its done.  Congratulations!  You’ve made your own Fish Hydrolysate!
13. Now, usually I transfer it to a smaller container, usually just a smaller water bottle, just for convenience.  At this time, I use a strainer and a funnel to strain the bones and scales out of the hydrolysate.  But don’t expect a lot.  From a whole 8-10in tilapia, you will only get a little tiny pile of bones/scales.  They will feel kind of rubbery, not brittle.  Throw these in the compost pile or garden, they are excellent fertilizer and microbe food, already inoculated with microbes!
14. Leave the cap on the strained concoction loose until you see no more little bubbles forming.  Then cap it and store it for use as your own natural fertilizer.

How to use this fish fertilizer:

Mix 2tbsp/gal for applications.

 Plants

• Use as a soil drench as opposed to foliar spray.
• Inoculate compost to boost fungal population.  This is huge – major growth booster of fungus.
• Use in compost teas to boost fungal growth, add Nitrogen.  Use at ¼ strength for this application(1/2 tbsp per gal).
• Mix in water when watering plants, as a natural fish fertilizer and to enhance populations of micro-organisms in the soil

Based on my understanding that my soil is low in magnesium compared to calcium and they both need to be raised, and that tomatoes need a lot of both but balanced, as well as a lot of phosphate. We have high levels of potash and need more phosphate. The more microbes the better and we need nitrate nitrogen to get growth and ammonium nitrogen to encourage fruit set and filling.

1. Apply 1 x 20lt bucket of compost per sqm of garden bed, along with 10 litres of urine (nitrate and ammonium nitrogen) charged biochar. U-bar all of this into the soil down to full depth of U Bar.
2. Dig a large hole for each tomato plant 30cm diameter and 20cm deep. (4 plants per sqm) In the bottom of each hole place 1 cup of dried toasted crushed egg shells some brown and rest the white for a calcium phosphate boost with our Homemade CalPhos and 1 cup of urine soaked biochar .. mix these into soil around bottom of hole.
3. Plant tomato plant, so that 2/3’s of its 30cm stem is in the hole covered with soil.
4. Drench soil with 1 cup Kay’s Liquid Fertiliser (micronutrient boost with calcium and balanced major minerals, microbe food) mixed with 1 cup of Homemade Fish Fertiliser Recipe, and 1 Tbspn molasses, added to 9 litres of water (no chlorine)
5. Install a dripper irrigation system
6. Mulch heavily with a thick layer of fresh alfalfa and comfrey leaves (calcium magnesium potash and phosphate) on half the bed and organic high brix cow manure (humus building complexes and nitrate and ammonium nitrogen, plus balanced calcium magnesium and phosphate) on the other half.
7. From then on I’m going to use my refractometer to test foliar applications and will apply weekly foliar feeds according to what my refractometer says. I’m going to try raw milk, sea salt, Epsom salts (in case I need more magnesium to balance with the calcium), CalPhos, my own liquid foliar, as well as foliar fish. I’ll test the brix of each end of the bed each week, then test various foliar possibilities, and decide what to use and keep in touch. I’m in the process of making all of these liquid fertilisers and will show you these processes and the results of the tests I have made on them by Bioservices as they come to hand.

Let me first outline the steps to make CalPhos, below, using chicken eggshells. You can also use other calcium sources like seashells or bones.

1. Pan fry eggshells (or seashells, or bones) until they are 50% brown/black.
2. Grind or crush the eggshells, to achieve maximum surface contact.
3. Put the eggshells into a jar or large bottle and pour in vinegar. The ratio of eggshells to vinegar is 1:5, volume wise. You will see a lot of bubbles appearing – that is an exothermic reaction in progress.
4. Wait for the bubbles to subside, then seal up the jar or bottle.
5. Ferment for 20 days.
6. Filter out the eggshells.

The steps above are just a rough guideline. For more details of making CalPhos and how to use it, do refer to this excellent article from The Unconventional Farmer.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way, let us step back for a moment and consider why we do the above. Some of us might be thinking, having to “ferment” the eggshells CalPhos for a few weeks is too cumbersome. Why not just dump crushed eggshells straight into the soil?

For sure, dumping crushed eggshells into the soil could work, by relying on the soil microbes to break down the parts, but this takes a long time. If we want a faster process, then we will have to accelerate it ourselves to make the calcium and phosphor immediately accessible to the plants.

Next, let us look into the chemistry of the process of making CalPhos.

The Chemistry Behind The Process

Our goal is to make calcium and phosphate compounds that are soluble in water so that plants can happily absorb them through their roots.

The chicken eggshell is made up of 95-97% calcium carbonate (CaCO₃). The remainder being calcium phosphate, magnesium carbonate and proteins.

Calcium carbonate is insoluble in water and cannot be absorbed by plants. It can however, be broken down into soluble compounds such as calcium oxide (CaO), either by heating up calcium carbonate, or by dunking calcium carbonate into acid.

Let us explore these two methods of obtaining soluble calcium compound that is accessible to plants.

Method 1: Extraction by heat

The process of applying heat to calcium carbonate will release carbon dioxide (CO₂), to form calcium oxide. Calcium oxide is soluble in water, but it is also unstable if left alone and will revert back to calcium carbonate when it fuses with carbon dioxide in the air. To keep the soluble compound stable, one can add water or vinegar (acetic acid). In fact, I would recommend that the eggshells are grinded first before applying heat; this way, we can maximize the preservation of calcium oxide.

Calcium oxide mixes with water to form calcium hydroxide (CaOH). All hydroxides are soluble in water. And like all hydroxides, its pH level is alkaline.

Mixing calcium oxide with acetic acid (CH₃CO₂H), on the other hand, will yield calcium acetate. It, too, is water soluble. Generally speaking, calcium acetate is acidic, and is known for its use as a neutralizer of fluoride in water.

Method 2: Extraction by reaction with acid

If eggshells were to be combined with vinegar sans heating, calcium acetate would be formed, just as it is formed when vinegar is combined with calcium hydroxide or calcium oxide. The minor difference being that the former reaction will produce carbon dioxide.

So, what about the Phosphate?

What about it? If you have that question in mind, you are on the right track! The eggshell also consists of calcium phosphate – a mostly-insoluble compound. That’s right! Most phosphates are insoluble in water, but they are soluble in acids, including vinegar. More importantly, heating phosphates will yield pyrophosphates. Pyrophosphates exhibit the highest solubilities among the phosphate compounds.

What this suggests, is that dunking eggshells into vinegar without prior heating will yield a pretty decent calcium acetate solution but the availability of phosphor to plants will be lower. This is in comparison to an acetate solution whose eggshells were heated prior to adding vinegar.

Bottom line

Heating up the eggshells is necessary unless your plants do not require immediate access to phosphor.

Here are the key points to take home from this article:

1. Do you need to reduce soil acidity?
2. Do your plants need immediate access to phosphor?

If you answered “yes” to 1, and “no” to 2, then heat up the eggshells and mix with water to get an alkaline solution. Your plants will obtain immediate access to calcium, but not phosphor.

If you answered “no” to 1, and “yes” to 2, then heat up the eggshells, mix with vinegar and let them “ferment” for a few weeks before use. Your plants will obtain immediate access to both calcium and phosphor. Don’t forget — the acetate solution is acidic and should be diluted appropriately before applying to plants.

So, figure out what you want to achieve. Your plants’ needs will decide which method to choose from.