Health starts in the soil
Every day we here stories of doom and gloom about food, price hikes from floods and droughts, problems with the supply chain from Covid, lack of nutrients and beneficial biota leading to diabetes, heart attacks and dementia.
It all sounds pretty miserable so why not do something about it. Here we are focused on solutions.
You can read many articles analysing the food situation here.
Before I start I just need to make the point that we are not facing a general shortage of food, we are producing more than enough energy food to feed the entire world now and into the future. While most of the food we eat is simply burned as fuel it is essential that we eat food that will feed our gut brain.
Our gut brain is really important – there is simply no way to be healthy without a healthy gut. It is a real brain which talks to our head brain though the Vegas nerve to control our appetite so we don’t overeat on the wrong sort of food and start down the road to diabetes, it manages the complex chemicals needed to replace our body parts as they age and wear and host much of our immune system.
The Gbiota Biobox system allows people to have fresh vegetables which feed our gut brain growing in their home, even if they have no garden, time or gardening skills.
There are two groups of people in the scheme.
Group 1 consumers or biofoodies
There are the people who just want to eat the food that will make them healthy. It is just a reality that the minute a plant is harvested that it starts to deteriorate. Within twenty four hours the level of some critical nutrients will have dropped by half so there is no real alternative but to grow gut food at home.
The Gbiota box system makes this very easy – really just watering, adding nutrients and harvesting.
It is a lot cheaper but above all the quality is just so much better – full of minerals, nutrients and beneficial biota which feeds our gut brain.
However the Gbiota Biobox needs soil, not just any old soil but soil which is full of nutrients and living biota such as microbes, fungi and worms.
This is where the second group comes in.
Group 2 community growers
Community growers are typically experienced growers with a garden who are prepared to grow the special soil – Wickimix – for their local community. Naturally they get paid for this service so it can be a nice paying hobby.
They agree to work to a protocol of adding the required minerals and inoculants to grow the Wickimix – supported of course by the Gbiota team.
How it works
This is the way it works. It starts with a box, any box of any size that suits – just a small 20 litre box if you want just want to grow baby greens on your windowsill or a bigger one if you want to grow large plants.
A simple irrigation fitting is installed at one end to form the swivel drain and a piece of drainage pipe connected to distribute the water – and that is all there is to it.
Now we start with food scraps from the kitchen.
Food scraps are one of the crimes of the century, we just throw them into the bin where they end up as land fill decomposing to form the worst sort of green house gases.
Yet they are full of nutrients which can be recycled into fresh healthy food – future generations will just laugh at us.
Now there can be a bit of a problem with smells and flies if they are not handled right but if you do it yourself there is none of these problem that occur when food scraps are left lying about for any time.
We just fill the base of the bed with fresh food scraps. It may seem that we are overwhelmed with food scraps but when we start to recycle them they become a valuable commodity which is in short supply so we may made need to add other organic waste like grass clippings.
But that is not enough – we need minerals like magnesium, iron for the ladies, zinc for the men, copper, selenium, iodine, vanadium and chromium.
These are readily available in volcanic rock dust but they are still rocks that are insoluble so we cannot absorb the minerals – for that we need micro-biota, the bacteria and particularly the fungi that can dissolve the rocks.
So we add Wickimix which looks like and acts like soil but is actually made by breeding beneficial micro-organism in an in-ground Gbiota bed. This is a bit more complicated but you can buy Wickimix on line from a licensed local grower.
The bed can then be seeded and covered with a thin layer of Wickimix.
It is that easy.
Now that is fine when first setting up a Gbiota box – there will be plenty of nutrients and beneficial biota at the start.
But you will be taking these nutrients out of the bed so after a period the soil will become old and tired.
This is where the compost tube comes into play. It is simply a tube which is pushed into the soil, the soil is soft so just a bit of wriggling and the tube will go to the bottom of the bed.
The excess soil is simply cleaned out and used as a mulch then the tube filled with fresh food waste.
Food waste may be good stuff but it attracts the tiny vinegar flies and those pesky blowies. This is why you add extra Wickimix on top of the food waste so the worms and the microbes can get busy breaking the food waste down.
Some people like to save up their food waste in a separate container for a few days and then put into the Gbiota box but an alternative is to set the box up at a convenient place and just add the food waste as needed, a plug is needed to stop flies getting at the waste until they are covered with Wickimix.
Recycling food waste make economic and environmental sense, and cost little money and is easy.
The plants we grow acts as natural pre and pro biotics feeding our gut brain which is critical for our health.
First step
First step is get your copy of food for health, it is free you just have to download. Below is the official automated download system which like most over engineered computer systems works when it feels like it, don’t go away just email me directly at colin@gbiota.com
