Home Made Plant Food
The bucket-sized Nutricycler™ is an inexpensive system designed to automate the process for small to mid sized growing areas. It works by making plant-ready nutrients from organic biomass, such as grasses and food discards etc., through various phases of extraction, nitrification, carbon removal and clarification.
In terms of NPK value and plant-ready composition, the end product is comparable to manufactured chemical fertilizers. The advantage of making plant food through Nutricycling™ is that it is less expensive, organically derived and contains a wide range of plant specific trace elements, macro-minerals and growth enhancing ‘phyto-nutrients.’
For larger growing operations 5000-50,000 square feet growing area, Bioponica custom designs the NPK Brewery™ a series of medium sized Nutricycler™ modules, automated to handle up to 500 lbs of biomass per day.
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Nutricycler 555
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Loaded with nutrient rich organics! Oxygenating and biofiltering until liquid becomes clear brown.
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Vortex Aerator. Using forces of water cyclone to oxygenate and mix. Good for fertilizer tea and compost teas.
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Utilizing the Nutricycler™, Bioponica’s clients are able to extract and bio-process wet and dry organic matter between 2-5 days. As an example, by extracting 25lbs of wet grass in 50 gallons of rainwater, a liquid fertilizer can be created with a NPK nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium PPM (parts per million) value of 125-65-400. As is, this is an ideal PPM concentration, of the key plant elements, forgrowing green leafy plants in any hydroponic or aquaponic system.
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Primordial Soup™ are the Bioponica brand of blended biomass materials for making liquid fertilizer. These dehydrated mixtures provide NPK nutrient values of 4:1:2, 0:5:4 and 2:2:2, formulated for lettuces, tomatoes and all-purpose growing. Customized blends are also available with NPK fertilizer values upwards of 10:10:10.
Primordial Soup™, or similar dry blends of organic nutrients give us NPK-PPM value of 125-65-400 with a ratio of as little as 3-5 lbs per 50 gallons of water. When using the dry Bioponica blends vs wet grasses, etc. a smaller volume is required to produce organic liquid fertilizer
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Organic plant food making begins with sourcing a suitable green biomass. Grasses and yard trimmings provides an excellent source of nitrogen rich plant nutrients.
To start the fertilizer extraction process and to preserve the nutrients we like silage barrels. Plant matter is packed tightly into barrels with sealable lids to make air tight and the process of silage fermentation begins.
Silage fermentation is an anaerobic, acidification process that breaks the plant matter cell wall and releases nutrients. Grasses that have been properly silaged, can retain their nutrient value for months or years. The smell is sweet, like a brewing batch of beer and it makes an excellent tea when placed into a Fertilizer Tea Bag and submerged into a barrel of water.
If used on soil, the tea can be poured directly onto the ground. If used as a foliar leaf spray or as a hydroponic fertilizer, then there should either be media beds with lots of beneficial bacteria or else the extract should be processed using the Nutricycler™ to remove carbon and convert ammonia.
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Grasses are an excellent source of liquid fertilizer. Ever present, easy to harvest and full of nutrients!
To put things in perspective, a 5000 square feet yard will produce 1500 lbs of grass per year. Using the NPK Nutricycler™ we can convert that grass into 2500 gallons of a liquid fertilizer with a mg/liter NPK value of 211-62-544. A typical hydroponic solution for growing lettuces or other green leafy plants is about the same is about 177-52-219. This means that undiluted, the extract from grasses is suitable for growing other green leafy plants.
To maintain this level, we just add more of the fertilizer with each water top off. Without all the calculations and measurements of TDS and EC and pH, an DIY fertilizer process is pretty evenly matched to plant growing needs by volume as the plant grows.
Why are hydroponics growers spending a fortune on similar concentrations of liquid fertilizer, without the benefits of organic, when it is so easy to diy fertilizer with the NPK Nutricycler™?
Bioponica has spent the past 5 years studying and testing this process. It works!
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Kitchen discards are high in nitrogen and have higher values of phosphorus and potassium. By placing these fresh greens into a Tea Bag and submerging in water fermentation takes place within the bag. It is similar to a silo fermentation, except by forcing the biomass into the water, a more rapid extraction occurs. In fact, after the grasses are removed from the silage, they are also placed within Tea Bags and submerged in the water. This pulls the nutrients from the plant matter and makes soluble the plant derived organic fertilizer.
Restaurants, school cafeterias, breweries and coffee shops provide an ideal source of nitrogen and mineral rich fertilizers.
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Cut the grass
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Chop grass with mower
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Allow grass to partially dry
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Silage grass by packing in 55 gallon barrel
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Pack grass tightly in barrel
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Submerge grasses or kitchen discards into Bucket Extrator™ with Fertilizer Tea Bags™
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Through a rapid decomposition process of anaerobic digestion, teas can be quickly made from various green discards. This is done with Fertilizer Tea Bags steeping within 5 gallon or 55 gallon barrels. Process takes 2-5 days depending on size of grass clippings or food particles.
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Bioponica developed the Vortex Aerator™ after years of developing methods for aerating the aquaponics grow systems and fertilizer making kits.
Oxygenation is necessary to minimize odors and to support ‘aerobic’ bacteria that further oxidize solids that have leached from the Fertilizer Tea Bags.
The idea of the water vortex is something that has been used in biodynamic farming. Our greatest inspiration came from the research of Viktor Schauberger who spend his life studying the forces of the water vortex. Since Schauberger, many scientists have added their findings and to show the effect of the water vortex includes cavitation, implosion and hyper-oxygenation.
These are river like characteristics that give life to the water and restructure water molecules so that nutrients are completely dispersed and water is highly oxygenated. The benefits is that the elements in the water are better utilized by fish and plants.
We utilize the Vortex Aerator™ as an alternative to the air bubblers which require more energy and are prone to failure.
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Carbon Removal – decarboxylation takes place in the presence of oxygen and bacteria. Oxygen contributes by chemically bonding to carbon and ligating the soluble organic matter and converting to CO2. It also provides a key element to support the aerobic respiration process of bacteria which consume the organic compounds and further decompose, releasing the carbon in the form of CO2 and releasing the inorganic, plant ready nutrients, into the liquid.
Nitrification – after much of the carbon has been removed a second class of bacteria dominate. These are the nitrifiers. Their role is to convert ammonia compounds into nitrate, a more plant ready form of nitrogen.
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After making fertilizer teas, we mix or blend other brews to the liquid plant food. This includes other extracted and processed fertilizer teas with varying NPK values, as well as compost teas. Combining compost teas with fertilizer teas give us a powerful fertilizer that feeds the soil or soilless bed microbes and grows really healthy plants.
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What is ‘fertilizer’ really depends on who you ask. Manufacturers will tell you it’s primarily NPK, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. And most of the time you’ll get a petrochemical. Organic farmers and health consumers recognize the importance of all the trace and macro minerals that make up a balanced NPK fertilizer. Fertilizers are nutrient sources that nourish plants, ponds organisms and soil microbes.
Bioponica’s research, engineering and development goals are to close the loop on sustainablility with simple systems that make use of natural processes.
For making fertilizers we have developed the NPK Nutricyler™ to convert kitchen discards and lawn trimmings. Without waiting for plants to compost as in windrow composting, gardeners can quickly convert household waste into a complex nutrient blend liquid fertilizer.
The end product is superior to manufactured petro chemicals as it has a complete blend of nutrients, directly from the plant – for the plant. Micro and macro nutrients, hormones, phytocompounds and growth factors can all be derived from green discards with the NPK Nutricycler.
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NPK are the primary elements that plants are required for growth and so they are used as the most important of fertilizer ingredients:
Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P), and Potassium (K), each of these being essential in plant nutrition.
- Among other benefits, Nitrogen helps plants grow quickly, while also increasing the production of seed and fruit, and bettering the quality of leaf and forage crops. Nitrogen is also a component of chlorophyll, the substance that gives plants their green color, and also aids in photosynthesis.
- Phosphorus, also a key player in the photosynthesis process, plays a vital role in a variety of the things needed by plants. Phosphorus supports the formation of oils, sugars, and starches. The transformation of solar energy into chemical energy is also aided by phosphorus, as well as is development of the plant, and the ability to withstand stress. Additionally, phosphorus encourages the growth of roots, and promotes blooming.
- Potassium, the third essential nutrient plants demand, assists in photosynthesis, fruit quality, the building of protein, and the reduction of disease.
While these three elements only scratch the surface of healthy plant nutrition and growth, they are the main nutrients required in the development of healthy, productive plants.
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- Remove waste discards from the environment.
- Feed microbes and plants nourish plants without cost and impact of manufactured fertilizers.
- Grow more nutritious and healthy organic plants
- Gain symbiosis and understanding of microbes that reduce labor and effort in farming
- Reduce toilet flushing, water waste and waste treatment costs with urine recycling.
Organic liquid fertilizer teas contain sugars, carbohydrates and complex lignins and an NPK value that reflects that of the actual plant used, without loss associated dry composting.
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Primordial Soup Teas are biomass blends developed for growers to easily produce a home made plant food extract for growing plants in all environments, soilless and in-ground.
Starting with silaged and or dehydrated organic biomass we take our fertilizer calculator to come up with NPK fertilizer numbers that match the plant requirements. Our blends include a 222 All Purpose, a 054 Tomato Blend and a 412 Green Up Blend.
Bioponica developed a fertilizer calculator by researching plant and biomass nutrient content and calculating a formula that gives us the NPK we are looking for. It’s all there in the biomass. The difference between this and compost teas is that we’re drying and blending prior to composting. And the product is ready to make into a tea without having gone through a compost process. Within the tea bag, the composting takes place very quickly.
We can call this a compost tea but the “composting” actually takes place in the tea bag. Not on the ground where typical composting is done. As a result all nutrients are retained and not lost to the atmosphere or to leaching on the ground.
The Bioponica process was developed by a waste water engineer and a holistic physician to demonstrate an alternative method to how to make a compost tea. We call this tea a biomass tea or fertilizer tea. It’s much higher in nutrients. We did the fertilizer numbers!
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