hello and welcome to the build a soil youtube series [Music] this is season three we're on episode five today we're honoring a legend clackamas coote basically helped me start the company whether he knew it or not at the time and now he's worked right alongside with us making sure that we honor the original intentions and he's also taught me a ton about sourcing ingredients composts and everything in between so along with sharing all of our stuff with you making a coots-based soil like our living organic soil recipes i want to do one better i want to make it just like coot would make it i want to explain where the recipe came from why it's so important and also the ingredients that are in it and really do coot and honor right here on this episode by making it from scratch using all worm castings just like he was so coot if you're watching we really appreciate everything you've done for build a soil and i think that running your genetics in your soil recipe made the build a soil away is going to be a really good way to put a highlight on our season 3 10 by 10 series so to get started one of the things that you should know before i talk about the recipe is coot does this in a special way and nobody does it the same as he does he makes his own worm castings from scratch and then he adds special ingredients throughout that process so that when he gets to the soil mixing phase he's essentially just using his worm castings and not adding all the ingredients that we're going to add you can still add some of them but the idea would be to have the worms pre-work all of this into the compost and then you'd make the soil from it that being said we've tested it a number of different ways and could agrees mixing this with good castings at this ratio works really really well so if you're watching at home and you want to go a step further you can set up a worm bin and the way that he's done in the past is like a 100 gallon smart pot he's even recommended those dumpster bags that waste management drops off that like fold out you could fill it with compost and get worms in it but he makes a thermophilic compost and then he adds worms to it later once it cools down and he uses barley straw and that is one of the base ingredients that he adds in there for a lot of the carbon and then he adds a whole bunch of greens and so you can look up that recipe come free as the greens that a lot of people use essentially we need to make a compost then he adds a few ingredients now over the years they've evolved a little bit i want to grab the kit and show you and i'll talk about the ingredients so that at least you know where i'm coming from and just google clackamas coot's soil recipe and you'll find a ton of information about this soil recipe in particular and it's very simple so we can talk about every ingredient and i think one of the things that's neat is anywhere in the world no matter where you live if you understand each ingredient you can duplicate this recipe you don't have to buy anything from build a soil and that's a big part of the do-it-yourself philosophy so let's talk about it i've got the kit here which we're going to make available to you you can get all of this delivered to your home or you can go source all of it individually the bulk of what you see here is the base we have the aeration is one part and it's a three part recipe we have the peat moss which is the second part and we have all of the the worm castings which is the third part they're all equal parts by volume not by weight and so what i mean by that is rice holes one cubic foot lot lighter weight than one cubic foot of worm castings and when you find these old-school recipes a lot of times you'll see people say 40 pounds of worm castings like well is that wet dry so i like to go by volume when it comes to things that have moisture in them so that might help you if you're shopping on the market some people sell castings by the pound it's okay as long as it's a fair price but it can get a little confusing when it comes to moisture content a cubic foot for our purposes we like to say is about seven and a half gallons depending if it's wet or dry fluffed or smashed the equal parts that we're using to make 18 cubic feet 6 cubic feet of aeration 6 cubic feet of peat moss 6 cubic feet of worm castings now i'm going to talk about that because there's a few different ways you can break this up the peat moss this is a 3.8 cubic foot bale you'll notice it's in writing here on the bail you can get these locally you don't have to buy them from us and this is responsibly harvested from canada some people do use coco coir for this but that's not the coot's recipe he uses peat moss and he's adamant about it and we really like that as well so 3.8 cubic feet you might say hey that's not six cubic feet that's compressed so don't let it trick you it's actually more than six cubic feet when you fluff it but when you fluff it by hand and you measure it it's about six cubic feet so that's the number that we've always used that the guys on the forums have always used and so we're just making sure we keep the integrity of the recipe now on the aeration side we have two types of aeration even though it's one part we have rice holes and rice hulls is a natural way to aerate that's very lightweight normally perlites use which is black obsidian rock that's expanded under heat and it's puffed up like popcorn and it takes a lot of energy to produce this is more renewable in the sense that we're growing rice for food it's important and so the waste product becomes a stream that we can use and the rice holes they don't just break down right away they're made of silica kind of like glass kind of like rocks and so they last a lot longer and it's an organic form of it because it's made by plants and the rice holes are small you can see what they look like i'll show you on the tarp when i make the soil but this adds to the drainage capability of the soil and it makes it so that it doesn't make really clumpy soil it makes it so that the roots can go in there just like perlite wood and that's an important advantage now the reason why we use this particular brand that we bag up and we also sell in its original wrapping it's a lot bigger bale they do a lot of heavy metal testing and they do a lot of batch consistency they make sure that there's no germination of the seeds and that's really important when it comes to rice holes you don't want half of them germinating and ruining your soil like on a commercial scale that can cause a huge issue when you're germinating in little tiny cells so quality of rice holes is important next we have pumice and we use pumice that is also used for the dental industry and water filtration and the beauty industry and so it's a really clean material um heavy metal tested it's it's a great product it's a three-eighths by quarter and so you'll see the size but it's you know three-eighths by quarter inch and they mine it pretty close to here so freight's not that big of a deal and it's a great product but pumice and rice holes is the go-to living soil aeration if you have perlite you're like i have this i want to use it the whole point is to use this soil forever to keep it around never throw it away and in that way it becomes more sustainable and it becomes better over time but the perlite would crush and break up and it would float to the top of the soil with watering this does not do that the bulk of what we use is pumice the rice holes over years will eventually break down that's okay we'll have worms in there cover crop root roots all sorts of ways to keep the soil active alive and and fluffy if that makes sense where it's not going to compress i like to use a little more pumice than rice holes just for the long term knowing some of this will go away all right worm castings we're using build a soil worm castings they're very economic they test out phenomenally well and balanced but one of the things i like about the koko is they're old school they're made the right way and they are really nutrient dense and so instead of just loading this completely with those worm castings i'm gonna do one bag of it to make it price like cost effective load the soil with the nutrients like clackamas cootwood and this is a locally made product so if we just said hey all these have to be colorado worm company it would be super heavy it'd be super expensive and he would run out so this is a great way for us to give you the best of all the worlds make a soil that's not overdone right out the gate give you really good balance because we test a lot of this the lab we know what it's going to do but when you're going locally i want you to kind of play it by ear a little bit in the sense that coot recommends one part of worm castings but he's making his own this is the most important part to get right if you just go buy some local castings and they're really salty or something that could be a problem that's the one thing you want to learn about the great news is it's pretty easy to get really good worm castings nowadays especially with companies like colorado worm company the build of soil castings heck even if you just go get some stuff at the hydra shop and you mix it in and only order one good bag like this you'll have something similar here where it makes a really good profile last let's get into the additions and then i'm just gonna get out bust out the tarp show you my process we have a few extra bags this is the clackamas coots eight pound nutrient kit we just made it easy for you this eight pound nutrient kit mixes into nine cubic feet of soil well we're making 18 cubic feet so you're going to have two of these and you just dump them in it's already pre-mixed together this is everything that would be in the clackamas coots nutrient kit now normally when you get the clackamas nutrient kit back in the day you would go buy three ingredients you'd buy a kelp meal a neem cake and then you would buy a crustacean meal and that covers a lot of bases there we could go talk all day about these three ingredients the kelp comes from the ocean has the entire periodic table of elements it's been used by many civilizations it has a lot of health benefits to it has a lot of plant growth hormones for why it grows so fast a little bit goes a long way a lot of people would overdo this and you don't need to do that half cup per cubic foot or less crustacean meal half cup per cubic foot and the neem cake half cup per cubic foot now various ways to switch it up a lot of people do neem in karanja mix it's kind of a extra one up to the recipe that's what we do then last but not least he eventually started using malted barley seed it's a pre-sprouted seed it's super important because of the enzymatic activity it really kicks off soil production it's great to feed to worms and it helps break down everything that we're adding into the compost to really make the soil come to life enzymes are very very special for that reason we're going to include it in our clackamas coots nutrient we have for a while so i just want to explain that in case you've heard it as the neem kelp encrustation we have the neem karanja kelp crustacean add malted barley it's the full koots recipe at its full evolution and then on top of that last but not least we have the minerals and the biochar so let's talk about minerals this mineral mix is 27 pounds it's for nine cubic feet and so all in all we're adding 54 pounds of minerals and that's four cups per cubic foot we're making 18 cubic feet the original recipe i've done straight gypsum it's a little bit too much gypsum but it had a really good turnout and when i found out that he was really looking for minerals we started originally using glacial rock dust then he came to find that he really really preferred basalt rock dust for a number of reasons so to honor that in here is basalt and gypsum and the oyster shell and those were the three ingredients originally i think he was using the steve solomon three-way lime recipe it was like a dolomite lime or an ag lime and the gypsum and one other and so when you look at it that way this is kind of that similar effect you've got gypsum which is calcium and sulfur you've got the oyster shell which is calcium carbonate and then you've also got the basalt which is similar to kelp and that it's the entire periodic table of elements this is a volcanic rock material and we have the pumice from the volcano we have the basalt from the volcano re-mineralization is what you see when you think of healthy food places where food grows really well and so that's what we're mimicking here in this process that combined it's that simple there's just a few amendments not 15 or 20. there's a few minerals that's it and it builds the entire basis of this recipe and it's really long term and then the final ingredient is biochar this is our charged biochar we're adding two gallons to 135 gallons of soil we're not adding much as far as percentage but this will add a lot of carbon to it for the long term it's pre-charged with root-wise and a little bit of amino acid to make sure that it gives back to the soil instead of takes from it there's a there's a ton of research on biochar a lot of our customers are adamant about adding biochar and we want to make sure that that's included i've got my tarp which is how we used to do it i've got a shovel which you don't really need i've got a plastic one because i don't want to tear the tarp and this will make it easy for me to just move stuff around a little bit a lot of times i'll just do a lot of this by hand i want to break up all the clumps it's a lot of work and a lot of times people will just start by laying it out mixing a little coming back later mixing more coming back later mixing more than wetting it all down and eventually you get a pile that is even moisture fairly well mixed and it'll start to warm up a little bit and every day you can turn it just a little bit and we'll explain that the idea is you want to spread it out kind of thin so you don't have to lift lots of weight in one spot you can get it thin where it's easy to move around flip the sides of the tarp so think about that don't just go get like a five by five tarp it's gonna be off the edges like in no time okay so now i've laid the tarp out and i made sure it's oversized you can come to the edge and then i can grab it and flip the material back on top of itself kind of mixing it as it falls so that's one reason i like a tarp i've done it in these tote bags before 18 cubic feet in a tote bag it gets really hard to get to the bottom in there and accurately mix it you almost have to take it from one to the other and pour it so it mixes i think this is the better way for a larger soil volume i'm gonna grab the peat moss first main reason why is this has to all be broken up properly because i like lasagna it out so let's get going i'm going to cut the peat moss first there's going to be a lot of clumps and i'm going to spend some time breaking it up so i don't have big chunks of peat moss that are hydrophobic i want it to be all fluffed out so when i wet it this really comes together as a mix so what i like to do is just get the bag off of here completely cut around [Applause] and i cut where i leave a little bit on so i can just kind of take the flap and lift now you notice there's nice moisture in the peat moss depending on where you buy it then that may not be the case some people choose to add a wetting agent like the yamaha extract or thermax or homemade you can take some soap nuts and get it all soapy in the water and use that or you can just slow water and use your hands either way you don't want the peat moss to be hydrophobic where it really repels water but the compost should be wet and by the time we're done we're gonna add water to everything so if you really want to you can add water straight to this i think it's a little overkill i used to do that and i think it's plenty of moisture in this one so i'm just going to lay it out and get going and eventually all the moisture to the whole thing at the end we'll talk about that but right now like it's still compressed that doesn't help me so i'm going to start to break this up and then i rub it together like that so that it all just falls apart and i don't need to do it perfect but i want to get started on this some people will go around and smash them with their shoes on and some people will hit it with a shovel i'm just gonna get the big ones like this real quick a lot of times the edges get really hard packed where the center is pretty nice but it gets a little drier on the edges and so if yours is really dry it might be better to add some moisture before you start breaking it up might make it easier either way just got to get the job done now i'm not going to get it perfect but i wanted to show you the process and i'm going to be looking for clumps the whole time and we're going to be making the soil over a couple days i'm going to moisten it let it come to life as i remix it i'll look for clumps kind of the zen way i don't have to do sit here and just spend two hours doing it okay now i'm just gonna spread it out use the shovel to break them up there we go so i've made a layer it doesn't have to be perfectly flat i just want it to be thinner so it's not entire volcano that i'm trying to amend right you could spend a lot more time breaking these clumps but like i mentioned i'm going to do it as i go compost i want to add next to that i create that layer on there i'm going to do the koko last so i can show you what it looks like and then our build-a-soil worm castings if you're using our bags for the first time you find the part that has the tape strip on it and you go to the right side if you're facing the tape strip and you pull that removes it the reason why we use these bags is they'll make it a lot of times when you use the cheap plastic bags they just half of on the tarp they're already torn they don't make it in the mail these you can throw to the pickup truck they hold they're super durable so a lot of people will reuse these they'll fold them up and they'll store some of their amendments in here or they'll keep the compost and fold it down use them as a trash bag at least once to get another use out of them before you throw them away they're really great so please reuse them the black gold build-a-soil castings [Applause] we got a lot of this to add in here and that's really where a lot of the nutrition comes from break up the clods if you want but they're so moist and nice they're going to break up as we just start to mix this five cubic feet the sixth one is going to be the koa coat i'm gonna spread this out then i'm gonna put the cocoa and then i'm gonna put all of the amendments and minerals so you can see what it looks like colorado worm company the homie the local head stash he's got a decent amount available but still not enough we can go crazy on it so only one bag of this and i think it's more than enough we did an episode with alex from colorado worm company castings we go in a little more detail about his family farm how it's a homestead family property historic clean water rights they have an organic horse sanctuary if you will and they make all their own compost and then they turn that into vermicompost and the whole process is as how coot would do it and i think it's really really cool not exactly the same but it's a really good casting and kudus put his blessing on these castings and so i think that it's only right that we use these ones you'll notice a little bit difference in color it's a different feed stock source look at that there's a worm right here that's the type of stuff that we see in the colorado worm company castings that you see in nothing else because this is homemade it's not screened down to the little fine little castings this is like real thermophilic compost with tons of worms retained for like months at a time to make the castings before they're sifted it's not like some two week process or some one month process this is old school really good worm castings and so we like to add one bag it's super heavy it helps to hold the moisture i mean there's worms i mean we're gonna have we're not gonna have to add any this is an entire worm population in here because there's gonna be cocoons and worms this will ramp up into its own life on its own not only that but because this is fresh from the worm bin when we ship it to you there's going to be row of beetles predator mites the entire consortium that comes from the worm bin is going to be in here and that gets me really excited i'm just going to keep mixing and next is for me to spread these out a little bit and then i'm going to add the nutrients the clackamas cook nutrients and then the minerals this is peat moss that's not soil but what makes soil is weathered rock ground up rock and some organic matter and so it seems like adding a lot of rock dust makes a ton of sense when it comes to recreating real soil but with the characteristics that we require to grow in a container i hope that makes sense i'm going to spread this out a little bit try not to be too hard on the couple of worms that are in there i'm going to do the minerals then i'm gonna put the nutrients on top each one of these is already pre-weighed out and it's for nine cubic feet we're making 18. so we're gonna do two of them look at all those minerals beautiful dump it in here and get a little bit dusty now i've got the nutrients two of these for 18 cubic foot each one makes nine [Applause] the big chunks are kuranja seed the small seed is the malted barley the green parts we got the kelp meal it's everything that we talked about being the koots recipe the ocean and the land i mean it smells really really good it's something that i really like about making your own soil all these ingredients you can buy them anywhere right but these ones are all up to our standard so you've got karanja that has a little bit of oil content sometimes it sticks together a little tiny bit it's a really good seed meal it's got no heavy metals it's sustainable it like it's a nitrogen fixing tree it produces an oil product that is used for cooking oil and used to fuel and like there's so many good uses to the pongemia tree to the terviva karanja cake that we offer pongemia is another name for the kuranja in india and they're part of ayudevic medicine for thousands of years so the neem tree of utmost importance the karanja tree huge and they both are really good at improving poor soils fixing nitrogen and so this isn't something that is just like harvesting corn and saying it's you know green when the corn might be ruining the soil this is truly something that's good and that's part of the ingredients that we have in here kelp we only buy from one special company so everything we research we're happy to talk about that if you've got questions you can post them up in here and we can discuss some of the details the malted barley's organic everything top grade the whole idea is get this stuff in a pile if you're using it in really small containers it probably should be mixed well if it's going to be all in one container it arguably doesn't matter that much but we do need to get it mixed up so it's somewhat homogeneous gets the texture that we're looking for last what i need to do is i need to add the biochar and i need to add all of the aeration and then i need to start mixing it up we'll talk about watering and how to get that right i don't want you to over water this it'll go funky on you so if you're gonna do anything air on the side of caution we'll discuss that i'm gonna add the biochar and then i'll do the aeration last nice thing about the pre-charge is usually not as dusty because it had that moisture from when we charged it where the real stuff when you get it raw is so dry and just gets in the air it's crazy i'm gonna mix this at least once or twice and then i'm gonna start adding aeration what if you're somewhere and you're like you know they don't have this crustacean meal that you have or i can't find kelp meal or the one that i have is you know not the same type of kelp but i'm worried about it don't overthink it too much food grade stuff is great alfalfa is the kelp of the land and so that's one that people use to replace kelp meal it's the green portion that we're looking at and it has some growth hormones and it has a lot of nutrients in it that's why they feed it to animals it has the saponins that we're looking for from as a wetting agent so alfalfa is a great material and you can mix that in instead of the kelp meal crustacean meal that's calcium and it's also chitin and so another form of that would be another chitin product that's ground up insects you don't have to add that it could just be the calcium really that's building the soil from nutrients and so you could leave it out and add a little bit more of the minerals the neem cake the karanja cake those are seed meals it's a way to add nutrition to the soil and any seed meal would work but we avoid cotton because it's the most monsanto gmo sprayed like it's ridiculous corn it's gmo sprayed so i just soy unless it's you know organic non-gmo i stay away from those heavies and then they're not going to be an issue we use camolina meal it's a seed meal we use the karanja we've got a mustard that we're going to talk about there's many things that you can use that just ground up seed that's what we're looking to do worst case go buy some beans and grind them up into a flour and have a bean meal like let's get a seed meal in the soil don't overthink that okay so that's a replacement for this the malted barley is just a sprouted seed barley's easily available because of beer brewers you could sprout some organic corn you could sprout some organic popcorn from the grocery store you could sprout some barley you could sprout some oats you could sprout any seed that you have sprout it when the tail is about that long just when it's ripe and plump before it starts to grow that's when it's usually a peak enzymatic activity because seed starting is an enzyme-based process so then we blend those up in water and just dump the water in here or you grind them up and throw them as a seed meal so don't overthink the malted barley that's all it is it's sprouted seeds next we have minerals you might be able to find a rock dust in your area heck on the east coast might be granite rock dust that would be great on the west coast you might find the glacial rock dust or the stuff up from canada the basalt here in colorado i've got basalt right up the street from the grand mesa encapsulated it we love montana grow that's a silica volcanic rock tuft it's very clean and heavy metals by the montana grill that's covered in basalt too on top of that mine so find some volcanic material find a granite rock dust read bread from stones it's a rock dust book that's free online learn about remineralization and you'll see that glaciers either drug the rocks through volcanoes exploded but somehow we got minerals in the soil to make fertile soil that's the idea there then the other two in the mineral mix are the gypsum and oyster those are heavy calcium when you read about soil building calcium is king it's very very important to balance the cations in a real agronomic soil outside it's high high calcium and if it's not it needs to be added calcium too to be full productivity you can learn about soil testing read steve solomon's the intelligent gardener but really koot's recipe works it has enough calcium in it the only challenge we found is that if you add only the oyster shell flower not the gypsum and it has a lot of has a lot of carbon in it and you have to use ditch water that has bicarbonate in it or is alkaline it can combine and kind of lock the calcium out so gypsum might be a better choice for you at the end of the day lime is perfect it's calcium carbonate also we avoid dolomite lime because it's so much magnesium it tightens the soil it's not the correct ratio but a regular high calcium lime agricultural lime that would work too so you don't have to use the oyster shell and i hope that that helps you understand anywhere in the world how you might source these ingredients if you've got questions and you're somewhere where you can't find something drop a comment in here i think as a community we can support each other if we found good resources in our locale check out rock dust local he's got rock dust all over the country a little bit more about the coots recipe that was a thought i'm just going to keep mixing and getting this going okay so i like to once i've mixed it a little make a pyramid so it's just gonna flow down and that flowing mixes it then i'm gonna spread it out and show you how i use the tarp i'm going to spread it back out and i'm going to flip it back into the middle again you can grab the tarp and it just pours it back in the middle get a good grip and just whip it just go around [Applause] okay now i don't want to get too crazy so that's pretty good just spread it out add the pumps rice holes then do all that a couple more times two bags of rice holes four bags of hummus that's six cubic feet [Applause] okay if you get a couple of clumps like this we get it raw we've dumped the pumice in the same spot thousands of yards so it's basically just pumice and a little bit of clay we're trying to build real soil so that's fine and if you notice it's slightly different in color it's all raw and natural so there's a little bit of moisture in some of it some of it's a little bit drier depending on the top of the pile or the middle we get truckloads of this fresh dropped off almost every single day it's crazy how much we go through so that's what the pumice looks like and they literally pull it out of the ground like this it's pretty incredible stuff 18 cubic feet is 135 gallons and i hope you're ready for a little bit of a workout it's really fun to do but it takes a bit of effort and like i said you don't have to do it in one go you just dump it out come back later and mix it mix it again and again don't be too hard on yourself but it's really rewarding and i feel like when you get your hands in there and you break up the clumps you make the soil not only do you have better results but you have a better connection with your garden you're willing to commit because you made it and i think you're going to make it through whatever challenges you face in life i've noticed that when things are given for free oftentimes they're disregarded or they're not appreciated and when you earn this you understand it you understand the ingredients you appreciate it and i think it gives you a better go at organic growing in living soil so take that for what it's worth but a lot of people that make their own soil they feel the same way i'm gonna grab my shovel and mix it and then last we're gonna talk about adding the moisture and letting it all come together [Applause] this is starting to look like a soil it's still really rough around the edges got a lot more mixing to do but it's starting to look like something now you see how when you walk it with the tarp it flips the very bottom over that gets it all turned over it's really nice we've got a little bit more mixing to do and then i'm going to add some water let it come together we'll let it sit for a day or two then we're going to mix it again so this video will be done over a couple days okay so it's been one day since i initially mixed the soil together for the coots recipe i've got it here in the tarp and this is what i've always done in my garage i would mix it on the tarp i'd wrap the tarp up what'll happen is it starts to come to life in there but what we have to do to get it really to that point is add the water which we didn't do yesterday we were just getting it mixed together it's harder to mix it when it's wet adding the moisture is super important because that's what brings the biology to life and there's a couple things it's similar to making compost in the sense that we're combining carbons and nitrogens and it can actually make it heat up and when you make compost you actually have a specific balance when we're making potting soil it's not exactly the same because it's more finished but we did add raw amendments in here crustacean and kelp and that will hit the compost and the moisture in the biology and it'll cause a reaction that energy can create warmth the good news about the koots recipe is we're not adding like bone meal and chicken manure and blood meal and all this stuff that causes a huge thermal reaction so most people have found that the koots recipe in particular you can make it and you can plant into it the same day but there's an agreement between people that build their own soil that when you build a soil from scratch it's just mixed components the first day when you get the moisture right and the biology ramps up and it gets a little bit warm and it steams and you mix it a couple times it turns into a finished product it homogenizes we call it some people call it cooking because it gets warm but it's like the water-soluble stuff starts to come out with the moisture and it starts to glue together a little bit and the soil profile changed a little bit today what i'm going to do is get the moisture in there and talk about it show you what it looks like and then we're just going to wrap it back up put the shovel on and since the moisture is in there now it's going to get together perfect just like compost making if we add too much moisture the process doesn't happen in fact too much moisture could cause your biology to go anaerobic without air totally just muddy like soup and that's when you get a raunchy stench and it won't completely ruin your soil but it's against what we're trying to do we're trying to make it happy and alive with aerobic conditions which means that if we're going to make a mistake today we need to add too little water not too much water because guess what we can do the next day add more water again and the the ratios that we've always used when watering is about five to ten percent by volume there's a 135 gallons in this kit 18 cubic feet that means the most i would add today would be 13 gallons but i'm going to err on the side of caution i've got my chapen water sprayer it's three and a half gallons and so if i were to do three of those that would be ten and a half gallons right one more would take us close to that danger zone so i'm going to put two or three trait chapins on there of water and i'm actually going to put a little bit of the j plant speaker q aha a wetting agent to help make sure the moisture moves through there and as we get closer i'll do a little field check and i'll see where we're at with moisture then i'm going to wrap it up put it away and then we're going to come back in a day or two and we're going to show you what the activity looks like and how it's starting to come alive and if it is warm which i don't expect to get too warm we can turn it one more time get the middle to the outside get the outside to the middle because if it gets warm in the center there's this biological activity happening there and the outsides won't get it so then we fold it to the middle and we let that happen again just like making compost i pulled the part away from the pile so that it wasn't wrinkled right around the edges because when i get my shovel i don't want to catch the tarp and rip a hole in it you look at it it's mostly mixed i take a handful it looks like soil it's got a decent amount of moisture but there's like a little pocket of peat right there i can see the minerals and nutrients but it's not perfect it needs more mixing i've got a couple clods like this which will break up see how these clods roll out it literally filters them out for you when you make a pile and the big ones fall but i just like this smash them right you can use your hands but if you do that and you do it a few times as you turn this each time let's say you turn it four or five times the big clumps will fall down and you'll eventually get them all i need to get the moisture in there instead of me just mixing this five times with no moisture so let me just put a whole can on three and a half gallons then i'm gonna mix it all around again then i'm gonna put another can on mix it again and then i'll decide does it need any more water are we good where we're at if i feel like we're good i'll wrap it back up and that's it then the whole thing starts to come to life once there's enough moisture in there all the compost and amendments it's going to warm up a bit grow some mycelium so we'll show you as it happens right now i'm just going to grab the water can and get after it i've got one ingredient to add and i'll tell you how i do it this is the queue yaha extract it's a very high saponin extract from the soap bark you can use soap nuts you can use yucca you can use anything that makes the water a little bit foamy that way the water doesn't just rush right through it worst case if you don't have this and you're making your soil today you don't have a wedding agent it's okay like it doesn't matter just get the water on there this just makes it easier to do however literally taking time to do this you won't need a wetting agent it will come together like a sponge as long as you don't overdo it just be a little more cautious if you don't have this because some of the water will run out and you'll think you've over watered but it's not actually in there so it might just be slower watering more times if you don't have this i've got three and a half gallons of water in here just clean filtered water that's it and this is a sixteenth of a teaspoon per gallon so three and a half gallons let's call it 4 16. well that's a quarter of a teaspoon so i'm just gonna throw that in there if you're gonna shake this don't do it over your feet they got a sharp edge and this can release and drop even though it's locked it can twist so be careful you can use a hose whatever but this is filtered water in here plus i've got the wetting agent and i'm just going to kind of evenly throw the water around here and if i were to just spray this it would barely get like the top half inch this will penetrate a little bit more although it doesn't get it perfectly uniform i'm going to mix it with a shovel so it doesn't matter once i'm done with this three and a half gallons i'm going to get the shovel and mix this again this is not a lot of moisture for a pile this big so it'll still be really easy to mix but i still got to break up the clods and i'm going to add a couple more of these before we're done for the day and then we'll finish this video when i show you what the pile looks like as it comes to life okay now you'll notice i didn't add more cue there was tons of foam in here so i'm just gonna let it ride so this is the second chapin that i'm adding the first one didn't do much but it's starting a little more moisture in here totaling seven gallons so far that we have put on here well if this is 135 call it 140 gallons 10 14 5 7 so we're at 5 right now with two chapins that means the most we put is two more but five percent is usually a pretty good number and there was already decent moisture in here so this might be it it might need a little more but once i mix it right now the moisture will start to come together a little more and i'll make a decision if we need another one or not when it's time i'll do a squeeze test you can't do a squeeze test right away because the moisture might be in pocket still so sometimes i'll wait another day but when you squeeze the soil if it just runs water down you've over watered it you want to squeeze it and barely have a drop of water kind of bead through your fingers otherwise it's too wet so if you do the squeeze test right now there's dry it's not that's too wet in some areas dry in others i need to get it homogenized first if you've not done this type of work before and you're not used to working with a shovel you can really hurt your back and sometimes you go a little too far before you realize it i've done this a lot it's not really an issue but it might be good to have a buddy here help you out if you're physically active fine but a lot of people grow from medicine and this might be too much work and that holds a lot of weight you feel it full you do it offside your spine a whole bunch of times you can ruin your day so just be careful when you're mixing this oil just because i'm going crazy with it go at your own pace okay let's see we're at as far as moisture there's no moisture coming out at all like none coming out the bottom of my hand but see how it's clumping a little bit not staying together but almost like some pieces here we're getting there we're not at risk of over watering yet but this is close right see ya right there starting to clump that's kind of what we want so i'm good to add one more can here but i'm not gonna add the fourth can i'll just wait mix it just a little bit wrap it up and that's it my last go with this will be the last day where i show you that it's warmed up a little bit that's activated we'll show you what it looks like at that point i can decide to add more or not it doesn't have to be perfect i can put in my container and add more water later when it's easier lighter weight to move right at that point i'm going to mix it one more time and then i basically scoop it into buckets or whatever and put it in a four by four container so we're getting really close once you start to add moisture it starts to clump up a little more we want to make sure that these are broken that was a soil mix clump but that was a compost clump but the clumps of compost and stuff i'd like to break up if i can good news about organics is pocketed peat moss is not gonna kill anything it's not like chemical fertilizer then when i dump it into the 4x4 bed i can break it up then too so we have lots of chances when you're making it from scratch to do that i'm gonna spread this out and then put one more can of water [Applause] i like to go through the center and make two mounds that way you get the whole middle the thickest part done two piles then you mix them back together shuffle the deck separate two halves put it back together you can tell it's got a really nice moisture now it's not over watered it's starting to get to the point where it's holding a little bit of shape there no water is coming out so i could add more i can always do that when i pot it up though and that's pretty nice texture right there look at that it's holding that's all i want that's a good level of moisture i can add more later if i add too much now i can't take it back out it's got to dry out that's it for day two tomorrow in less than 24 hours like if you're making compost this will be 140 degrees tomorrow with soil and the coots recipe this will probably be 90 degrees 100 degrees right in the dead center tomorrow since the moisture is right and it's a thick pile tomorrow i'm going to show you that and if it does get warm i'll mention it we'll show you if there's any mycelial growth then i'm gonna break it down if it is warm and take the outside to the inside cover it back up at that point some people let it sit here for one to two weeks it's up to you i'm gonna get it in its final container waiting until we're ready to transplant we're gonna let it sit here and we'll be back tomorrow okay we're back again it's been one more day since you last saw us mixing the soil and yesterday we added the moisture so now the soil is basically done and ready i want to unwrap it right now i want to see if it's warm i want to see what the moisture looks like and then that's going to wrap this video up because if it's where i want it to be there's only a couple choices you can make from here one you can immediately start using this oil it's fine two you can let it sit for a week or two it might ramp up just a little more in temperature and then cool off you can mix it a couple more times but all of that is kind of extra work and it's not 100 necessary so as far as instruction goes if you're watching this to learn how to make your own soil to build a soil from scratch you'll be done at this point if you'd like to watch the rest of the series see what we do with the soil watch us load it up into the 4x4 grassroots fabric planner bed that we're going to use then you can follow along and we're going to document that as we move it will show us how we move it the whole deal so let me unwrap it let's take a look at it we'll wrap this up it looks really good tiny bit of dryer around the side so i'll probably mix it one more time and call it a day oh wow it's already warm that's really nice i'd say right on the surface here it's probably 90 degrees maybe 95 degrees because it feels very close to my body temperature it's about the same all the way through that's really nice one of the things about the cute recipe it doesn't heat up super hot some of the recipes would be thermal by now or be like over 130 degrees and steaming and see how that cavity is staying perfect that means we got the moisture right i mean i can dig a hole out of there and it really makes a cave which means that it's actually holding a shape that's what we're talking about and now the moisture has really come together and evenly spread throughout the soil while there might be a couple dry edges there this is so nice that if i flip this one more time and wrap it up it's done i can let it sit i don't think it's going to go too much warmer and that's one of the benefits of the coot's recipe but it did get a little bit of warmth it really has ramped up and the microbes that are in there do that as they start to break down the material that's in here i could talk all day about building soil but this video is to show you the process talk about the ingredients and honor clackamas coots and his recipe and how simple it is he has a reason for every single ingredient kelp meal crustacean meal the neem cake the kranja kick all these are important for very specific reason and they've been used for thousands of years that's why this recipe is so important is it's not just some fat ingredient or ditching something because we heard of the newest test that has to happen right if you're a home grower let's go with what's worked for thousands of years i'm gonna spin this one more time and we're gonna wrap it up get weird on it have fun make your own soil get your hands in there and i really feel like you're going to feel more connected and we've talked about that but it's like making a meal for your family or friends and then getting to break bread with them it's better than just ordering takeout there's a really big difference there so i'm going to spin this one more time just to make sure that all the moisture is even i'm gonna wrap it back up we're gonna let it sit a couple of days because the weekend's coming and then next week we're gonna record another episode for the youtube series where where we actually cut the pvc pipes and build our four by four bed and we're gonna dump it in we're gonna fill that entire four by four bed we're going to grow coots genetics the pacalolo the one from coot in kutz soil and a massive amount of it which i think is pretty epic and we'll be answering questions as we go the most important part of this is now that you've made this oil how do you use it and so if you follow along we're going to show us putting it in there then we're going to put the cover crop in it we're going to bring it to life and we're going to transplant into it we're going to show you what the plants look like when you're using a soil like this and because of the volume we're using we're going to be printing out our new 2022 build a soil feed schedule a lot of you ask detailed questions about what should i add and win and we made it so that it's water only and how to do that and one of the ways is larger soil volume and we also have a number of different tips for supplementing if you really want to or if you feel like you have to so look out for that you can download it and reference that thanks for watching if you've got questions put them in here if you've got a comment drop it hit the like button it really helps subscribe tell your friends and i'll see you guys on the next episode [Music] you