(9/26) The former gardener at Earthdance, Sean, started making his own EM-1 at the same time I met him Spring of 2013. He learned about it in Hawaii from a farmer.

I offered my EM-1 so he didn’t need to take the time to make it himself now, which is a long task of experimentation. The staff was keen along with Sean about using EM-1 so we started with a workshop and made Bokashi starter bran for fermenting food waste.

Turns out opening and closing the 5 gallon food waste buckets in the kitchen did not work nor adding the starter. The residents as well as the visitors that come for two days don’t catch on – but they can put their food scraps in the bucket. Forever the protocol has been at least 2 open 5 gallon buckets that get dumped every evening into the compost.

Over a month during the summer Sean trenched some buckets of food waste of inside the compost pile and poured AEM-1 in the hole then covered it with a rubber sheet. To his delight mushrooms sprung up and maggots (that never turned to flies) were gold for the chickens, the compost had no odor nor flies.

Now we are teaching more staff to activate the EM-1 along with appropriate ways to use it up – septic, personally, cleaning, laundry, garden… as a sanitizer and more. Sean is living somewhere else and brings us his experiments.. lasted is his EM-1 Seed Cheese. His partner was the head chef here, Ayla, who is also inspired to make fermented food items from the EM-1.

we have been advised by Shig, that it will last more than a month if we add cheap vodka and apple cider vinegar to the Em-1, molasses and water. (1-1-1-1-50 for bran, and 1-1-1-1-for 20 for AEM)

Ready for action