The BioWicked Urban Food Growing System is a complete food-waste-food method of converting food waste back into healthy fresh organic food. It utilises a modified bokashi microbial mix produced in Australia. This microbial mix is used to both ferment food waste and to inoculate the soil in the BioWicked garden beds. This modified bokashi is much more stable than conventional bokashi due to the introduction of an 8-step circular bacterial process where the products of one group of bacteria are used by the next and so on, finally circling back to the first. Due to this stability a one off application permanently changes the microbial microbiome of the soil, adding beneficial soil bacteria and improving conditions for beneficial indigenous soil bacteria to flourish. The other main difference between this modified bokashi and conventional bokashi is the addition of extra purple non-sulphuric photosynthetic bacteria that fixes atmospheric nitrogen in the soil when in anaerobic situations and sequestrates carbon when in aerobic conditions. When used on broadscale farms this bacterial mix, applied in the form of liquefied fermented food waste, boosted soil carbon dramatically with the soil carbon on one property rising from 0.09% to 3% soil in just one year. If we could just increase the soil carbon by 2% in all the world’s arable land we would sequestrate all the excess carbon in the atmosphere.
Getting back to the BioWicked garden beds; these are a soil-only wicking bed system with the lower soil layer inoculated with a biofertiliser that is produced by fermenting liquefied food waste with the modified bokashi bacteria. The reason conventional wicking beds have a lower layer of sand or gravel is to minimise organic matter in the saturated anaerobic zone. Generally if organic matter is sitting in such conditions it encourages the growth of methane producing bacteria. By pouring this probiotic biofertiliser on the lower soil layer it permanently replaces the methanogenensis microbiome with beneficial soil bacteria, including the purple non-sulphuric photosynthetic bacteria. Rather than creating methane the saturated soil becomes a high nutrient nitrogen sink. The nitrogen wicks up to the plant roots where it is taken up as fertiliser. When the bacteria wicks up into more aerobic conditions it switches function and sequestrates carbon into the soil, improving soil structure and water and nutrient holding capacity and turning the beds into carbon sinks.
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