FPJ/E: Fermented Plant Juice / Extract. It's a way of quickly breaking down vegetable material into "bite-size" chunks for your lovely green friends. Hyper-speed composting, someone i know referred to it as microcomposting, but i haven't researched that aspect of it.
Essentially, you take a weight of beneficial plant material. Nettles, h/t fern, comfrey, kelp, beetroot, whatever (i'll explain how to pick one in a sec).
Then, mix 1/2 that weight of crude-as-possible sugar with the chopped veg matter, stick it in a container, 30ml LAB , cover with about 5 cm of water, stopper container loosely, stick in the shade for a week.
Say you use comfrey: 250g comfrey + 125g crude sugar + 250ml water in blender (which you handily just sharpened with eggshells).
Grab a rinsed 2l cola bottle, funnel chunky plant gloop into bottle, rinse funnel with your 30ml of LAB, fill with water to about 1l mark. Stick in the shade (trust me, you're in Aus, it's summer, cool, cool shade) for about a week, loosely capped. (I'll tell you about the Incident with Exploding Beetroot FPJ before i'd had my Morning Coffee another time. It was tightly capped.)
All the 'net-info says to wait until the bubbles have stopped before use. At first, you'll imagine a bit if bubbling, then wonder if that's it. It's not.
You'll KNOW when it bubbles, and when it's stopped. I burp mine once a day to get rid of gassy build-up (Beetroot Incident. It went everywhere. I looked like Gorbachev's bald bit for 3 days.)
When the bubbling has stopped, strain out the chunky bits. Reserve liquid, store in a well-sealing container in a cool, dark place. Use this liquid at 10ml per liter for foliar feeds in veg, early flower, 30ml per liter as a soil drench.
Notes on method etc:
*You use LAB because it's a known, beneficial anaerobic bacteria. This ensures that the juice ferments with good bacteria, and you don't poison your babies with a nasty, lurking spore or something.
*the tinier you chop the veg matter, the quicker it breaks down. Great big palm fronds would take +/-700 years to decomp if you tried to use them whole, whereas blended soft veg matter takes about 7-10 days.
*Korean Natural Farming & Dr Cho speaks of using things like cucmber shoots, which grow rapidly, to encourage rapid growth in cukes & other garden plants. It also encourages using only 1 type of plant per batch of fpj, eg only comfrey not that + lucerne (alfalfa) + cukes + radish. I have a very long list of plant ppm values ito N, P, K, etc, and above makes sense when the ppm's of the plants differ greatly. I'm scared of them working against each other somehow, but i'm a bit paranoid for some reason. Tell me if i should detail this more later.
* choosing plant matter: i've been trolling forums & the net for years, so i forget where i learned some stuff, but SUPER simply: green leaved "superplants" = good for N feeds, coloured fruit & veg (mostly orange ones like pawpaw & carrot, also beetroot) = good for K (flower). A bit too tired to remember P beneficials right now.
* crude sugar- the osmotic pressure gets better the cruder the sugar is, so white will work, but not as well as muscovado sugar. You can use molasses iso sugar, but because it's a liquid, not crystalline, again, osmotic pressure (she says as though she has the slightest clue as to what osmotic pressure is. No effing idea, but it does something important).
* great plants to use: seaweed /kelp stimulates growth, has ooooooodles of nutes in. Beetroot: sugar boost plus lovely vitamins & minerals. Comfrey: N + trace minerals from deep within the soil. Alfalfa/ lucerne: massive N boost. Banana peels: K + sugar boost. Pawpaw: nice growth hormones + sugar + beta carotene.
Sorry, hun, i want to keep going, but it's 1 am & i have to be up at 5 for a site job again, catch up later!
Essentially, you take a weight of beneficial plant material. Nettles, h/t fern, comfrey, kelp, beetroot, whatever (i'll explain how to pick one in a sec).
Then, mix 1/2 that weight of crude-as-possible sugar with the chopped veg matter, stick it in a container, 30ml LAB , cover with about 5 cm of water, stopper container loosely, stick in the shade for a week.
Say you use comfrey: 250g comfrey + 125g crude sugar + 250ml water in blender (which you handily just sharpened with eggshells).
Grab a rinsed 2l cola bottle, funnel chunky plant gloop into bottle, rinse funnel with your 30ml of LAB, fill with water to about 1l mark. Stick in the shade (trust me, you're in Aus, it's summer, cool, cool shade) for about a week, loosely capped. (I'll tell you about the Incident with Exploding Beetroot FPJ before i'd had my Morning Coffee another time. It was tightly capped.)
All the 'net-info says to wait until the bubbles have stopped before use. At first, you'll imagine a bit if bubbling, then wonder if that's it. It's not.
You'll KNOW when it bubbles, and when it's stopped. I burp mine once a day to get rid of gassy build-up (Beetroot Incident. It went everywhere. I looked like Gorbachev's bald bit for 3 days.)
When the bubbling has stopped, strain out the chunky bits. Reserve liquid, store in a well-sealing container in a cool, dark place. Use this liquid at 10ml per liter for foliar feeds in veg, early flower, 30ml per liter as a soil drench.
Notes on method etc:
*You use LAB because it's a known, beneficial anaerobic bacteria. This ensures that the juice ferments with good bacteria, and you don't poison your babies with a nasty, lurking spore or something.
*the tinier you chop the veg matter, the quicker it breaks down. Great big palm fronds would take +/-700 years to decomp if you tried to use them whole, whereas blended soft veg matter takes about 7-10 days.
*Korean Natural Farming & Dr Cho speaks of using things like cucmber shoots, which grow rapidly, to encourage rapid growth in cukes & other garden plants. It also encourages using only 1 type of plant per batch of fpj, eg only comfrey not that + lucerne (alfalfa) + cukes + radish. I have a very long list of plant ppm values ito N, P, K, etc, and above makes sense when the ppm's of the plants differ greatly. I'm scared of them working against each other somehow, but i'm a bit paranoid for some reason. Tell me if i should detail this more later.
* choosing plant matter: i've been trolling forums & the net for years, so i forget where i learned some stuff, but SUPER simply: green leaved "superplants" = good for N feeds, coloured fruit & veg (mostly orange ones like pawpaw & carrot, also beetroot) = good for K (flower). A bit too tired to remember P beneficials right now.
* crude sugar- the osmotic pressure gets better the cruder the sugar is, so white will work, but not as well as muscovado sugar. You can use molasses iso sugar, but because it's a liquid, not crystalline, again, osmotic pressure (she says as though she has the slightest clue as to what osmotic pressure is. No effing idea, but it does something important).
* great plants to use: seaweed /kelp stimulates growth, has ooooooodles of nutes in. Beetroot: sugar boost plus lovely vitamins & minerals. Comfrey: N + trace minerals from deep within the soil. Alfalfa/ lucerne: massive N boost. Banana peels: K + sugar boost. Pawpaw: nice growth hormones + sugar + beta carotene.
Sorry, hun, i want to keep going, but it's 1 am & i have to be up at 5 for a site job again, catch up later!
