Unks and ununks
Colin Austin © 17th April 2023
This document is published under the Creative Commons system which means that it can be freely copied or republished without further permission – the only provision is the Standard Creative commons requirement that the source Colin Austin www.gbiota.com should be acknowledged.
Tumultuous meting
Hopefully you would have read about John and Sue tumultuous meeting. (read here) Now they are in a passionate, but heated relationship.
John is still claiming that the modern supermarket food system is providing a reliable and abundant food supply with hygienic and energy packed food from all over the world regardless of season.
Sue is arguing that the food is just packed with sugars and fats and lacking key nutrients and minerals and is deliberately made addictive and is the cause of the modern epidemic of non-infectious diseases.
But they have reached common ground that the food is inert lacking the life which supports our gut brain, which among other functions controls our appetite.
Even if we were surrounded by tempting food our gut brain should simply generate the hormones that would make us feel full so we would just stop eating.
Unks and ununks (knowns and unknowns)
John says look at the incredible improvements in food production since the days of Norman Borlaug.
Sue agrees is it was an incredible piece of research but at that time we had no knowledge of the importance of gut biology – it was an unknown unknown.
We conducted a real time experiment on the worlds population and we ended up with a food system that has led to a major health epidemic of non -infectious diseases. The results were clear – an epidemic which dwarfs Covid (read here and here).
We now know that our gut is a real brain which controls many body functions but at this moment we have no real idea of the coding that makes it take decisions so we should be very careful in thinking we can change our gut biology by breeding microbes under laboratory conditions.
Sue is very strong on this – our intelligent control system is made up of trillions of cells of thousands of different species – we need to recognise what we know and what we don’t know and look for solutions that have been tested in a natural environment over thousands of years.
Grow your own
So they have agreed to grow enough of their own food to feed their gut brain. But they have adopted a very different approach to poor Mary (read here) who just buys boxes with plants ready to harvest from George (read here and here and here) who gets his mate to deliver the boxes to her door and take away the old box and the bag of organic waste she leaves out for him.
She only grows a few species, mainly micro-greens like broccoli, alfalfa, lettuce, and the ever faithful flax and is quite happy to leave all the soil regeneration to George.
Mary’s thinking
Mary and Sue are opposite ends of the spectrum. Mary, to be honest does not care about the state of the world, her mum only just made it through her Covid and now has long Covid which is in a way worse. Mary learned that people with a strong immune system from eating food that feeds the gut are far less likely to suffer a sever attack so Mary is just interested in her and her kids Immune system.
Sue’s thinking
Sue, to be honest is a bit of an extremest, she sees that the way humans are destroying the natural functions of the earth is leading to an inevitable collapse of the ecological system. May be not the end of humanity but mass hardship and with a food crisis leading to mass migration of desperate starving people.
She says we see what is happening in autocratic countries but how much better are we? Large corporation have immense power, including power over our Governments – it is profits over people.
If we want peoples needs to take priority over profits for the mega corporations it is up to us ordinary people to take action.
You can be like me and become an activist or you can be like Mary and quietly work away growing food that will feed your gut brain. It may not lead to a dramatic change but it will influence people around you.
Gut health is all about diversity
Sue want to be much more adventurous, she knows there are literally thousands of edible plants she can grow from seed, which she cannot buy from the regular shops and she is well aware of the health benefits of the many herbs and spicies she could grow.
But she is well aware that although you can buy bags of potting mix which are full of nutrients this is not not the same as living soil, full of all those creatures from worms down to the microbes and fungi which George can supply in Wickimix.
She also understands the importance of the growing medium being both hydrophilic (easy wetting) and having a high water holding capacity.
Natural soil contains a huge range of micro organism in the main families of fungi, bacteria, protozoa, nematodes and viruses which can only be seen with a high powered microscope. But it also contains many small creatures which can be just seen with a magnifying glass and then there are the large creatures like worms and soldier flies which have guts not that different to ours where microscopic organism breed.
Sue says that soil is complex and so is our gut – we must recognised that we are just at the beginning of long learning experience and not be over confident of our understanding.
Types of Wicking boxes
She also knows that there are a number of different styles of Gbiota Wicking boxes she can choose from, each with their own benefits and limitations. This is very different to Mary who just uses a box with a single drainage hole in the side.
Mary’s box is supplied by George and is just a standard box with a hole drilled in the side, he fills the box with Wickimix and just pokes a pointed stick through the side hole to make what he calls a mole hole, to ensure proper drainage.
Apart from watering, Mary does not need to touch her box until it is swapped for a new one after the crop is finished.
Sue may well decide to go for the common design with a swivel joint on the outside of the box so she can regulate the water depth and drain when needed and with an ag pipe running along the base then up to the surface.
This means she can surface water while the seeds are germinating then swap over to water at the base and relying on wicking action to take the water up to the root zone.
The amount of water stored is limited by the void space in the soil and how far the water will wick, which depends on the characteristics of the soil. Read water to see how Wicking beds actually work.
She has an alternative of using the twin box approach. Wicks hang down from the top box and into liquid water in the bottom box. This means that 100% of the space is available for water storage and the bottom box can be made large to hold as much water as needed so giving a long time between irrigations.
While this system works quite well it is limited by the capacity of the wick to suck water up to the top box. With thirsty plants in a hot dry climate this can mean they just cannot supply water fast enough.
While cotton makes an excellent material for wicking it is prone to rotting with the intense microbial activity.
But Gbiota Wicking boxes are about breeding beneficial microbes rather than just watering the plants.
For Mary this is no problem as she gets new Wicking mix every time her box is swapped but for Sue she want to extend the time between refreshing the Wickimix.
The creatures in the soil, from the worms, through the microbes and right down to the minute viruses, are all living creatures which need to be fed and watered. They have short lives so they must have the conditions where they can breed, which they will do profusely if the conditions are right.
That is the topic of my next article.
