Cleaning out the grain fermentation bucket

It’s time to clean out the fermented grain bucket. It’s become a bit stinky even for my tastes but is gold around the garden. The lovely microbe rich liquid that’s stinking up the place is a super food for the soil so doesn’t go to waste

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Regular readers will know that I ferment an assortment of grains for the chickens eat. This has many health benefits for them as well as adding variety to their diet. It’s become a favourite part of their daily diet and given a choice, the girls will eat from this smelly brew in preference to everything else except for bacon rind (that’s their real number #1, 100 percent favourite)!

To use it, I add about a cupful to each watering can full of rain water and distribute it around the garden, especially to the pot plants as potting mix is often short on microbial life. The brew is full of anaerobic bacteria and yeasts and all the good stuff that has come from their digestion of the carbohydrates in the grain, plus whatever other goodies that I added to the mix when I started it. It’s a little acidic too and that’s good because our garden has become a little alkaline over the years. It’s literally, liquid gold

When it’s watered down and poured out onto the garden, the microbes will either find their own places  in the soil or die and become a food source for other critters. I leave a couple of cupfuls of already fermented grain and a little of the liquid in the bucket to kick start the next batch too.

Because microbes do so much of the work around here, my official title at Ligaya Garden is ‘microbe wrangler’ and this is one of the reasons why…