How Urban Agriculture Can Combat Hidden Hunger
This article is a summary of Colin Austin’s 2014 Shanghai–Wuhan talk on wicking beds and why “more food” is not the same…
Re-making My Gbiota Beds (Update)
This update shares a practical rebuild of a Gbiota bed after I noticed uneven water spread between rows. The core lesson is…
The Gbiota Project: Rebalancing Diet, Soil, and Gut Biology
The Gbiota project shares practical knowledge on growing “refurbishment food” that supports gut biology and long-term health. The core idea is simple:…
Principles of a Gbiota Bed: Building Living Soil for Gut Health
Healthy food starts with healthy soil biology. A Gbiota bed is designed to grow plants in a biologically active, mineral-rich root zone…
Principles of a Gbiota Bed
The Gbiota bed is designed with a single purpose: to grow food in biologically rich soil so we can restore our gut…
Preventing Chronic Diseases with the Gbiota System
Chronic diseases like diabetes and heart attacks are not just medical problems – they are the end result of how we grow,…
The Wicking – Gbiota Bed Story
For the past twenty years I have been working to change how we grow and think about food. I pioneered Wicking beds,…
Gbiota Soil Blood, Flood-and-Flush Irrigation, and Foliar Spray
Last updated 8th August with section on foliar irrigation Our basic inputs are organic waste, manure and volcanic rock dust. All cheap, readily available and sustainable. The microbes, particularly the...
Breeding Wickimix
Last updated 8th August with section on making Wickimix in Gbiota boxes Wickimix is simply a growing medium, soil teaming with life and nutrients and is central to the Gbiota...
Making a Gbiota box July 24
Update on how to make Gbota boxes July 24
Making a Gbiota box
Here I extract the key points from the many previous points and collect into one spost
Support
I often say that the process of growing gut brain food is easy and that is pretty much true but not as easy as tossing things from the shelves into...
Gbiota 101
Gbiota basics – collecting organic waste to make labile compost – starting a new box – regenerating an old box
Gbiota overview 2024
Gbiota is an evolving technology and when some new bit of technology comes along I write a new article to describe what is new. This has led to hundreds of...
Inoculants
It is easy when growing Gbiota plants to become focused on the plants, which you can see, and forget that the real aim is to enhance the gut biota, which...
Gbiota soil
Creating soil is the number two challenge facing humanity, after climate change. We know exactly how to do it, it has been happening for billions of years naturally covering much...
Tribox story
The Tribox is the grandfather of the latest Gbiota boxes. The top box is essentially a normal growing box just like the millions of pots that are used across the...
Gbiota Biobox – practise
The Gbiota Biobox system is about breeding beneficial microbes in organic waste to grow plants as powerful pre and probiotics for your…
Gbiota Biobox Theory
The Gbiota Biobox is designed to do one simple but powerful thing: turn cheap, everyday organic waste into living soil that feeds…
What to Grow (and Eat)
What should I grow? Sounds so simple but it is not. Gbiota is about correcting deficiencies in our modern diet Gbiota is not about total self sufficiency – I have...
Ecobox – how to
In this post I show how to build and maintain a Gbiota Tribox Growing soil is the key to the Gbiota technology so may I explain how it works. Plants...
Making a Gbiota tribox
The flower pot method, using 40 cents flower pots, I described in an earlier post how-to-gpots is the cheapest way I know of applying this method, the stacked boxes I...
The How too
I have written a lot about the theoretical aspect of growing gut food – it is time to get down to the nitty gritties of setting up a Gbiota system....
Upgraded Beds
It is approaching thirty years since I was invited to go to Ethiopia to see if there was anything I could do to help feed people in one of those...
The Gbiota Bed Update
I have written many articles on making and managing Gbiota bed, in this article I want to give a simple description of the state of the art, I do this...
Gbiota boxes – update
Gbiota boxes, as there name suggests are enclosed and separate from any parent soil. They do not have the benefit of access to the life forms which live naturally in...
Food and floods
Floods are making it more difficult to grow any food giving shortages and price hikes – how can we grow food with floods
Soaker beds
I developed the original Gbiota beds to grow plants which act as natural pre and pro biotics by having a moist, not wet soil. It is very easy to make...
In-Ground Gbiota Beds
Sump beds were developed first as a way of taking advantage of the partial flood and drain cycle. They have been used for some years now and being automated are...
How Gbiota beds work
Wicking beds are now very common across the globe. Many have a base filled with some inert material – often stones. These are just self watering pots – nothing wrong...
Making soil in Gbiota beds
The key principle of Gbiota bed is to breed beneficial biology both for the soil and for our guts – creating the conditions which favour the beneficial biology – so...
Making soil 101
Gbiota beds are not simply a watering system to grow cabbages – they are to breed the biology to grow plants as natural pre and pro biotics.
Gbiota easy
This is the easiest way I know to grow Gbiota food, it is dead simple and works fine but lacks the automated flood and drain features of a full blown...
Making soil work
We have the technical ability to grow food, which is convenient, taste good and is cheap in a way totally divorced from the conventional methods of food production, no longer...
Germination
Wicking beds are highly productive and water efficient, the reason why they were so water efficient is that the surface soil was dry so there was minimal loss of water...
Soil destruction
Soil is created by biological action but the wide spread use of chemicals and mechanisation is slowly but persistently destroying the soil on which human life depends.
Micro farms
I get angry about the way a few wealthy people manipulate the truth for their benefit leading to health and climate catastrophes. But not Auntie Maud, if she were alive...
Gbiota beds – manual
living manual for building GBiota beds