What's going on everyone?

What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening

podcast. We're here again with Marco Thomas. He's a natural farmer focused on

building soil cultivating microorganisms.

Yesterday we kind of gave an overview of natural farming and in it Marco talked a lot about

indigenous microorganisms or in this world IMO. Is this the acronym that's used? So, Margot, can you talk to me a little bit about this?

Because I know it in name only and from seeing a couple friends of mine like yourself experimenting and teaching about it, but as far as I understand it, there's like different levels of IMO you can cultivate and I don't even know how to begin that process.

Okay, so yeah, like you said, indigenous microorganisms, you want to collect the microbes which are growing big strong trees in the area around your garden as close as possible as you can. So a lot of people see that and they think it's a complicated, you know, difficult task, but I'll tell you one of the biggest things I like about

natural farming is things are easy once you start getting into it.

Um so basically with your IMO you have IMO one two three four five and and people keep expanding on them and making their own creations and I'm not sure exactly what the top of I'm now but I know I'm working on going towards

the I am oh five with a pile and I'll stop right there.

So pretty much the way you start with IMO is you want to get those microbes into your garden beds, okay? So you say, you know, how do I do that? Well, you could at the very bare root of it go to the forest and dig up soil

from around these big trees and then put that into your garden. That will work. But what we want to do is we want to multiply the microbes

that are there. If there's one microbe and a handful of soil, and we know that numbers in the millions and billions.

But if there's one and a handful of soil, then when we're done with that same handful of

soil from the forest, we want that one to be thousands like we want to really take the

microbes and multiply and the first step in doing that the easiest way to

collect them is to take a wooden box, preferably cedar because cedar is a wood

that holds up a long time. So you want to take just a small wooden box with open slacks, not airtight. And you want to use white rice or brown rice

slightly undercooked. You put it in that box and then you set it out in the forest for anywhere from three to seven days

depending on how cold or hot it is.

And then what that does is you're going to the rice is going to attract the microbes and they're going to grow up from the soil into your rice.

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