I have the honor of taking part in a sustainable learning community in northern New Mexico this spring. Everything has been hand-built, including several wonderfully homey strawbale structures, enhanced with used materials such as coffee cans sliced up for siding, broken pottery shards and glass for ornamentation. I’m getting to learn more about earth plastering and passive solar construction, along with solar cooking. We drink, cook, irrigate, and bathe only with rainwater. The site aims to be zero waste and comes pretty close. It’s great fun and quite inspiring.
I’m also using this opportunity to practice my microscopy skills to test soils, composts, and even the (somewhat) controversial JADAM solution (spoiler alert: maybe not as controversial as people tout once viewed under the microscope!).
Other tests I’ve completed so far:
- In-ground vermicompost
- Vermicompost leachate
- Greenhouse soil samples (squash, tomatoes, chard)
- Aged (1 year) humanure
- Botanigard
- Batch 1 of the JADAM solution
JADAM under the microscope
The grower here was introduced to JADAM, a Korean Natural Farming technique, by another work-trader some time ago, and reported that it has helped her plants. JADAM has been a bit controversial in my own school of training, for its purported embrace of anaerobic organisms in the growing process. We’re taught that anaerobes are linked to plant disease and should generally be avoided. I decided to take a look at the solution under the microscope myself, to see if I could find any clues as to why some people swear by JADAM.
First, please know I am not well versed in all the JADAM solution preparations – we stuck to a basic microorganism solution that is applied to soil (not a foliar treatment). Perhaps this formulation was not one of those purported to be anaerobic – because guess what: no anaerobes found. Even after letting it sit for 10 days.
What I did find was a large diversity of bacteria (mostly aerobic, but some facultative, some flagellates, and some beautiful algal microorganisms. The bacteria were particularly interesting, as they formed colonies. Certain species of colony-forming bacteria are free-living nitrogen fixers, which can come in handy during spring planting season. I have not yet identified if these bacteria are performing a similar function, as they seem to be made up of many species, but it’s interesting to note that some of the colonies appear to have survived in her soil between JADAM applications (previous one being 3-4 months ago).
I also found some beautiful, motile, single-celled algae. Dr. Ingham of the Soil Food Web school mentions that cyanobacteria and other algal organisms are powerful nitrogen fixers, and she feels they should be utilized more in springtime planting.
See a theme here? Could the potential of this particular JADAM solution lie in its nitrogen-fixing microbes?
To experiment with the efficacy of JADAM, we treated most of her greenhouse plants with the solution, but left some untreated, receiving water instead of the JADAM solution, as the control.
We’ve applied JADAM just once and are waiting for the results. The grower is concerned that our solution didn’t get bubbly enough, from her past experience, so we intend to create a second batch and alter our ingredients just a bit (we used potato, sea salt, leaves, and home compost instead of “leaf mold” – the soil under forest leaves; next time, we’ll try the forest soil). I have found a bit of information online that suggests cooler temperatures will result in smaller bubbles and smaller microorganisms as well (?). Regarding the latter point, I would think that there would be fewer microorganisms in cooler temperatures, not smaller ones.
I am wondering if the potato has something to do with keeping bacteria in check; it is known to absorbs salt and has also been touted as a cure to ear infections.
More to come when we get the results and try another batch.
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