 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hi, aloha. I'm Glenn Martinez of all of Mono Gardens, and this is my sidekick and farm manager, Natalie Cash and co-host. And we'd like to thank you for tuning in to Think Tech Hawaii. Yeah, because we are techie people. We are. Today is going to be about making tea. You know, I've had enough coffee, I'm going to tea now, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I've not worked until I found out there was more caffeine in tea than there is in coffee. Wow, that didn't work out too good. Oh, no. But the tea we're going to make is compost tea. Yeah. Right? And so, do we have some video or some slides to show today? We sure do. What do you want to show first? Video. The video. Okay. So, we've got a little video introduction into our compost tea. Now, this is compost tea that we make for our plants. I don't actually drink it. Even though I tell all the kids to come to the farm, I shampoo with it. And it has done wonders. Before, I was ball headed. And now, look at that. Isn't it looking much better? So, don't underrate what compost tea can do for you. Okey-dokey. So, let's show that little video that we have for compost tea. This pump, the hose attaches to here. And you simply place this down in the water. And this little part slides up. At the bottom, it goes up. That gives you some room to maneuver underneath the bucket here and to poke into the bottom of the bucket. Okay? There's just one fitting there. There's no glue on this fitting. It doesn't matter. Okay? So, you're going to have your hose here. The way it works is the air comes down here and it has a choice. It can go this way or it can go this way. Since this way goes up, it starts pumping. It sucks the water in here on the bottom. This thing goes, drops down. You stick it in. It hits the bottom. You go over and you plug into the bucket and it goes like this. This ensures you'll be taking the water off the bottom. Now, when it goes off the bottom, it's going to come up here and it's going to pulsate and shoot out like you saw earlier. This is the little wand I mentioned that you angle this. If it's angled up, well, the water is just going to come here and it's not going to pump up. If it's level, it's going to pump up to a certain amount and then release. If you aim it down just a little bit, you can fill the bucket up more and more. If you go down too far, you'll fill the bucket all the way up and the water will be coming out on the sides. It's pretty self-explanatory. It's on a threaded fitting so it won't fall off or anything like that. You can just tighten it up to whatever little tension that you like where it'll stay where you put it. You just walk over like this and you simply put this in your 15-gallon bucket, reach under and poke it up into the 5-gallon bucket. That's all there is to that. If that went on and running, you can hear it pulsating right now. Okay, so what you saw there was just a quick view. It's a 55-gallon drum that settles in center blocks. On the top of it, I put a couple of boards across and I put another 5-gallon bucket. The secret is inside the 5-gallon bucket, we go to bakeries where they sell things in metrics. All the strawberry toppings and the lemon-filled toppings, they come in metric. Turns out they're about 4-1.5-gallon bucket. The white bucket that went inside the orange bucket is really only a 4-1.5-gallon bucket. Why is that important? Doesn't stick together. Anybody ever got 2-5-gallon buckets and tried to pull them apart? That's agony, right? What we do here is in that top bucket, we draw lots and lots of holes through it so the air in the water can come through. I put in a $5 Home Depot Hardware Hawaii paint strainer bucket. It's like $2 for $5, $2 for $6. Basically, they're a 5-gallon net strainer and you strain the paint through it. Not to show how old I am, but I remember when we used to use ladies pantyhose. I don't know any ladies that don't stretch to 5-gallon. It takes a big girl. But we want to strain the paint so we don't get lumps to spray up our head. In my case, I want to keep all the worm castings inside the net bag. Today I brought, just in case Natalie wanted a snack in the middle of the show, some worm casting. This is it. It looks like coffee grounds. It's fine. It's very, very lightweight, as you see here. It smells very clean. We have 3 Arabian horses, couple of goats, 200 chickens and ducks, and they're pooping all over the place. We pick up the poop. We feed it to the worms. The worms digest it. It comes out odor-free and sanitary. Odor-free. That's what our farm is about. That's what our farm is about. Odor-free. In fact, we laugh sometimes when we go on the farm, if you're sitting over in the pavilion and you open up some pokey, the flies are on you. You go over in the barnyard where there are 200 animals and there are no flies, because there's nothing there to attract it. Isn't that funny? A lot of people say, so what's a big deal with the compost heap? Well, my inspiration in this is a guy named Sir Albert Howard out of England. About 1903, 1905, this guy graduates from Cambridge University in England and they send him off as an agricultural extension agent to a place called Indore, India. Well, I thought it was like Indore Outdoor. Indore Outdoor. I said, wow, he said Indore Gardening. Wow. No, Indore was INDOR. It's the name of a community in India. So they send him there and he's very well funded. He's got a 300-acre place and they have money for tractors and all the modern stuff at the time. And he said, no. First, he would learn from the Indians what they do. So he went out and studied what they were doing and then went to see how he could improve what they were doing, not just come with his English ways. Because one thing he quickly realized, the local peasant was not going to go out and buy a tractor. It wasn't going to happen. And I believe when people go to learn from people or get more information or teach them, you come back with much more information. That's right. And my boss, Dr. and partner, Dr. Vinnie Ron, who brought Natalie and I to the Philippines for several trips, he also brought us to America and Samoa and that. And referred us on to China. He's been a great inspiration in my life. And I thought it was odd when we go to the Philippines and we go to university and we're there to teach. And he would get up and say, I'm not here to teach. I'm here to learn. I thought, I want an odd thing to say, right? But after a couple of trips, now my favorite saying is, we go there to teach and we learn a lot. Because you learn a lot from the other team, what they're doing and what work. Plus that, we tend to complicate things. And when we go to developing countries in that, they tend to simplify things. And so one of the things is, people say, what's with the compost team? Well here, because I'm an aquaponic guy. So in aquaponic, we say we feed the fish, the fish eat the food, they poop in the water, they pee in the water, they breathe in the water, all this ammonia is in the water, it's going to poison the water. Anybody with aquarium knows, you got to change out a third and a half of the water every week and give them new water. Then the salt water guys come along, they go, wait a minute, we'll put a biofilter on it. Or we'll salt fresh water guys and salt water, they'll put an underground filter. The fish poop gets sucked down in the gravel, the bacteria decomposes it, and it's a nice balance, right? And it increases how many fish you can have in a tank, right? So before that you say one inch per gallon. So if you had 50 gallon fish tank, you'd have 50 little fishes or 10 larger fishes, et cetera. And so there was a ratio. But all they were doing is getting rid of the fish poop, right? I mean, they just want to get rid of the poison, right? Mostly ammonia. Well, aquaponic guys come along, they take the fish water and it turns the ammonia into nitrite, then to nitrate, and that's a form of nitrogen the plants can eat. So we love to grow leafy green things, think lettuce and bok choy and all the herbs and spices and that do great. Very nitrogen rich, like tomatoes and that. Or for our cash customer, marijuana. Boy, the fish water does fantastic. But it's kind of like living on chocolate. It will hold you over to a meal, it'll give you some quick energy, but it's not really a complete meal. So what we do here is we say we do the compost tea. Not for the nitrogen, we're getting that from the fish water, okay? We're doing it for all the trace elements, right? Yes, that's true. The zinc, the iron, et cetera. Yep. So we're in our ninth year without buying any chemicals. That's right. We don't buy any herbicide, insecticides, or pesticide. Think side means to kill. That's a sculling cross-brown side. It's a killer. So we don't buy any killing stuff, but we also, we don't buy chelated iron. I think the first year we fooled around. When we first started aquaponics and the plants were looking so anemic, it was like... The plants were yellow. They said, oh, they need iron. You need chelated iron. What's chelated iron? That's iron that will actually dissolve in water. Everything rests in water. Yeah, but chelated iron is much faster in that. Then they say, don't put too much. You'll shock the plant. Then they say, oh, you've got to add potassium because the fish food has no potassium or phosphate. So you've got to add that. So then we were certified organic, right? Full-long certified organic. So we go down to buy a potassium and it was $85 a pound. And I needed 20 pounds. And I went, wow. I'm a little pocket for that. Wow. Wow, $85 a pound for certified organic potassium. That was an eye-opener. That was it. So we said, what are the other ways of doing it? And they said, well, you could go down to Waimanala feed store or the aquaponics place and you could buy oyster shells. Take the oyster shells, throw the oyster shells in the water. If the pH is below 7.0, they'll naturally dissolve and bring the water up to 7.0, which is neutral in the pH scale of 0 to 14. 7 is neutral. It will come up to 7 and that's it. They'll just sit there until they're needed. So that was a way to be certified organic, not pay $85 a pound for some Fufu chemical to throw in the water, right? And so we got away from it. But then they said, oh, you need the chelated iron. Oh, you need sink. You need this. And people were buying sea kelp and everybody I talked to was buying stuff and I thought to myself, buy chemicals or buy beer. Yeah, well, I went for the beer, right? I thought the beer was more natural, right? But you came up with a tea maker, Glenn. So we did a tea maker. We did a 55-gallon tea maker with a five-gallon bucket on top of it, okay? Do we have some other slides to show? Yeah, so what we're going to do here is show you guys how we grow our compost. Grow the compost. Grow the compost. Okay. So we can start... This is our worm bin. Now, this is a worm bin and it was made in Australia and they won awards for it. They made everything out of recycling material. It's round and it has holes in each layer. So you put the worms in the bottom layer and you beat, beat, beat. Then you put the second layer. You beat, beat, beat. You get to the third layer. You just keep adding your garbage and adding your garbage. And you see all the little worms in there? Those little purple stripes in there? Those are our Indian blues, okay? They eat it up. No odors, no smells, no flies. Just to let people know this is actually food being turned over by the worms. That's 100% food going to become dirt, right? Like the bag of dirt I have here, okay? And we have people come to our farm. We have two things we do. One is our animal, you know, what do you might say from all the animals? The other one is all of our kitchen waste goes on top of it. That's what they like the best. Oh yeah, they like leftover pastries, leftover anything. In fact, the worms like things that are rotten, okay? Yeah. Now we specialize in doing worms. We're the largest worm farm in Hawaii, far as I know. We still are. And we sell worms. They're like $40 a pound. People come in, bed run, you pick it up, a whole handful of worms and you sell it to them. And it's just out of bins like this. Now some of our bins are 8 foot by 12 foot with chickens on top, right? That's right. Yeah. They're a larger commercial bin. But this is a little homeowner bin. And you take a little, if you don't want to stick your hands in there, you've got the little fork there. You just stir it up. You keep it moist. You cover it over. You keep them in the dark and they eat it up. Now every day, almost every day, we sell $40 to $80 of worms every day at the farm. That's right. Day in, day out. The school college went $600, $800 at one crack for worms. And that's to teach the kids. And basically, you just throw a wet newspaper on top, keep them in the dark, and they were 24 hours a day. Yeah. And then you close it up. You close it up. That's it. So we have these sitting all around our farm just quick and handy by the kitchen, just right outside the kitchen door. Bingo, there you go. Yeah. And it works out really well. Right. Yeah. So that's one way of us being able to make the black gold. Yeah. So we're going to take a little break here at Think Tech of Hawaii. We'll be back in just a moment. Stay tuned. We've got some more stuff for you. This is Think Tech of Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Ethan Allen, host of likeable science on Think Tech of Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for likeable science. We'll dig into the science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science, and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great. It's all entertaining. It's all educational. So I hope you'll join me for likeable science. Well, we go from likeable science to likeable Glen. Here you go. Yeah. No science here. So we want to go to some other slides we have to show. We want to show you some of our animals in that on our farm. We're a five-acre farm in my monologue. So what do we have for slides to show here? Oh, this is a worm tumbler. You're looking straight in the end of it. I dump in five gallons. I flip a switch, and that tumbles about five RPM, and the dirt will fall down, but the worms don't. They go sideways, and it's at an angle. They'll tumble all the way to the end, stick to the lid, and they come out. When they come out in their pure worms, worms are $10 an ounce. That's $160 a pound, folks. Okay. See these bins here? We have schools come out. They want to do a hands-on project. So they tumble our worm cassie. They fill those bins up in about an hour and a half. Okay? Right there. Yep, that's it. See, nice, loamy, rich. You can dig your hand down a foot or two feet into these piles. They're just really great. No smells, no odor, no fly. And it's just crawling with butt. Now, this is our team maker. We make 50 gallons every day. You see the water in the bottom? 55 gallons. We pump it up to the five gallon. That goes up and down every four and a half to five minutes. That five gallon on the top. And that will talk deep, rich, brown. And right now it's right there at the bottom. It goes up. So I put four cups of the worm cassies in each morning and I run it until the next morning. I walk out. I flip an air switch and the air pumps it out. So there you see it sitting in that sack there. Okay? So it comes up, the air in the water from the bottom and the whole thing will become fluid. You reach in, you can't even grab a handful or anything. And then it all goes down. When it goes down, it catches on the screen. And up and down, up and down every four and a half to five minutes. Okay? For 24 hour, rich, chocolate, brown water. Then we pump that out. Now our system is two 1200 gallon tanks. Okay? Got 2400 gallons of fish water. And we add 50 gallons of water a day to make up for the evaporation, et cetera. Well, look at these leaves. No yellowed out leaves there. Everything is dark, rich, green. Our pineapple, which is normally a two year crop, we get it in seven months. And that. So we have a lot of fun crops. We do a lot of pepper. This is ginger. We do a lot of ginger. And we're looking very similar. It's turmeric. This one is turmeric here. And that. And the ginger is just whiter. And so you break it. We grow on aquaponics in the center. Strawberries, strawberries are always possible. Even out of season, we're still growing strawberries. Okay? Lucky we live Hawaii, right? Yeah. And that. Passion fruit. Passion fruit goes absolutely nuts. Keep in mind the roots are in the water. Tarot. That is five tarot plants planted about four to six months ago. And now you have about 150 plants in there. Fantastic for propaganda. Is this a float bed? Yeah. Float beds. Deep water beds, right? Plants will grow on water. Right. Now 100% water. There's no soil in that garden. Chayote squash does really great. Now all these plants have different needs, right? Yeah. So what we do, we throw in the worm tea and it just satisfies everybody. Kind of a shotgun approach to nutrition. Here's the beautiful thing is, it doesn't matter if I have too much of something because it will not burn the plant. It's like saying you have too much topsoil. There's no such thing. Yeah. So we don't have to worry about it with worm tea with that. Yeah. So it's good fun. And so we'd like you to see this. This is tarot. These are four by four foot fiberglass beds. So water goes up and down every 15 minutes. Now we're not going to grow this tarot to maturity in there. We now grab it and take it out to the field and you spread it out. That's what we're into. This is called the mosquito plant. It's a zola. Water fern. We do water zola. It's a fern plant. And what it does, it will blanket the water. We take out half every morning and the next day is full. Would you like our ATM card? Yeah. You take out half. It's full the next day. You like that card? I want one like that. So you see here we just harvest it so you can see some water. Tomorrow morning there'll be no water showing. Yeah. It'll be completely solid across. Okay. And in Africa it's called the mosquito plant because no mosquitoes. Yeah. Pretty cool stuff, right? That's right. No mosquitoes. Yeah. I want to share something with you and that is Travis down at the aquaponic place. You know sometimes something creeps up on you and you don't realize that you've got a jewel in your backyard. And this is a little store on the backside of Waimanawa feed store. Yeah. And Travis bought out the fellow there that has. This is it. Common open shed area. He has aquaponic system set up. That's his little blue office air painted wall. But you've got different setup. But this is where I buy all my stuff. Okay. He sells complete units. And this is it. He has the fish for sale for like a dollar a piece for babies and that. I sell full grown ones ready for the restaurant, right? He'll sell you the main. He's got every kind of tank in that that you can think of that you need in all the trays that we use to double trays and that. So I would say that 99% of what we use comes from aquaponic place. He's been a great resource. Stan Kadama was the owner of Waimanawa feed store. His sons are still running that. And he sold off the aquaponic side of it. But he's a nice young man. He's knowledgeable. I bring in air pumps that I killed them. I bring them in. He sells me the parts for $20, $30. And he actually puts them in for me and doesn't charge me. You know, he just, you know, I mean, it's like pulling in and telling the mechanic, I need the oil change. He said, I'll take care of it and just pay him for the oil. He doesn't charge you for labor. Wouldn't that be wonderful, huh? But anyway, he's a great guy. He'd like to give me a plug. And plus that, I think he's the only guy on Oahu selling aquaponic supplies. We have a couple of hydroponic stores, one in Sand Island, one in Kahala, right? But they're strictly hydroponics. They have not really gotten into the aquaponic. But he's a great guy. His prices are very reasonable on it. Pretty much, I'm willing to buy local as long as it's within 10% of what I could buy on the internet. Because by the time you buy the internet and you ship it, well, you might as well drive down and support your local store. But Travis is really good people. Yes, he is. And that's important for him. And I brought him in some motors that are just basket cases. Yeah. And leave them, come back and pick them up two days and you say, show me $18. And I go, wow, it was a $195 pump. And for $18, I mean, he's a very nice young man. That's right. And he does it. Great service. But it's extremely patient with people. And he brings in things. Our local hardware stores do not shut off vows, the filters, different things for the fish. Palms, air palms, water palms. Yeah. Did you have any other slides on him? Was that it for you? Well, that was it for aquaponic space. But we don't, I never see our horse area yet. You never see our horse area? You got our horse slides in there? Did you have some slides for the horses? Yeah. Yeah. He says, Natalie says, oh, we have some slides on the horses and the critters. Just wanted for people to see how we grow our compost pile out in the fields. Maybe our film manager will just pull up those pictures. Here we go. That's the horse stall. Now, you see the bottom there? That is all wood chips. So the guys had trimmed the wood on the side of the road. And we were bringing the wood chips. I put it in that's two and a half feet deep. Okay? And then every day we pick up the freshman year, or we let the rest sit there. They pee in the water, everything. Only every four to six months, so I go on my tractor and I dig it out and I put piles of it outside. And then the worms just wag it. So you see, I have piles and piles of it. By the way, that pile sells for $2 a pound. We run it through the tumble, take out the sticks and the brambles and the raw, and it's $2 a pound. How many pounds do you think are piled up there? Well, there have been a lot of pickup trucks that go in and out of that pile. We've got a lot of marijuana growth. Legal guys, totally legal. They've got to show me they're significant. We don't do the criminal element. And look how beautiful. But see how fine it is? It is beautiful stuff. And people really like it. We had a sprouting guy come just yesterday and he came in and people are growing sprouts or they're spraying in nurseries and they inoculate the plant. They spray the worm tea on top of the plant so it sucks in through the leaves and that and does really well. And Sunset Elementary, Glenn, when we go there with a truck full of compost and they put it in their garden at Sunset. Oh, Sunset. Elementary with grass. Yeah, it's really cool. Bank of Hawaii had an employee day, you know, volunteer day. So we go out there, they must have 30 or 40 Bank of Hawaii employees. We pulled up with a big commercial double crew truck with an eight-foot bed. We had about $1,000 worth of worm castings and the bomb. Full to the top. And they took that. It was just brimming to the top. They took that and they put it into their mulch and they raised bed guarding. With 30 or 40 people doing it, it was all done by lunchtime, right? Yeah. When it sprouted three weeks later, they had government out there. We went back and it was just... And it blown away. It was like a drastic part. It was. They never had it like that. So we like annually make a donation to them and go out there and just give them a little shot in the arm. They're a great community. Sunset Beach. Can you imagine going to school across the street from one of the most beautiful surfing spots in the world? It's got to be hard to concentrate. And what better way to teach the kids of where the vegetables come from. From a little seed to the harvest of the plant and then you can eat it. Yeah. And the people out on the North Shore there at Sunset Beach, they're very involved with their children. Yeah. And that. I see more parents at Sunset schools than any other school I've gone to. And Natalie and I welcome farm tourists to all of my gardens. We have Waikiki Elementary School comes out like 80 kids one crack. Yes. But they also bring out about 20 adults with the parents, right, to help supervise that. That's a larger group. Most of them we do a lot of charter schools anywhere from 10 to 20 kids. It's only like $10 a hand. So we do senior groups. We do a donation. Pre-school. We do whatever. We go all the way down Kamehameha School for pre-school kids. And I'll tell you what. If you want to get to teach them a pre-school kid, give them a baby duck to hold. That does it. You know? I get the most jaded person in the world. Give them a baby duck, you know? But I held up a little baby duck right in front of my face. Oh, you're just so cute. And he pecked me right on the eye. Nobody had warned me. Never let a baby duck close to your eyeball. They'll hit you right in the eye. Oh, they're looking at themselves. Oh, I was blind for a week. Oh, that thing just, I could not believe. Then put your glasses on. Yeah, keep my safety glasses on. I handle them ducks. No more kissing ducks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, if you have any question about the worm team-makers, if you go to our webpage, which is www.allamonagardens.com, pretty simple. Allamonagardens is named after allamonamountain over there in Waimanalo. So is allamonarrant, allamonurnersery, where allamonagarden is the land of allamon. Oh, our Facebook page. Or our Facebook page is Allamonagardens in Waimanalo. Allamonagardens in Waimanalo. That's our Facebook page? Yes. Very good. And so if you go there, you'll see it. We also, we sell little books on how to make these team-makers, like 50 bucks or something like that. You can do it. Our people come out and buy complete team-makers. What is it out on the North Shore? Brigham Young. Oh, yeah, BYU. BYU. They have one of our team-makers. They're over in Kauai, the Big Island. We've shipped them all that. We've shipped our team-makers all the way from China all the way to Africa. We put everything inside, screwed it on, and you ready for this? I boxed the 55-gallon drum the first time. I went down to Young Brothers and they said, why do you put a drum in a box? We looked around there, all these drums, and they're picking up with forklifts. They come up, clamp them, pick them up. After that, no more boxing. We just put everything in the drum, and we just put packing in there so it doesn't rattle around too much. But the air pumps everything. You get everything you need. We ship it to them. And so, but it's simple enough, most farmers will buy one from us and then make the additional ones. So that's about it. We're coming close to wrap up time. I hope you enjoy it. Here at Think Tech Hawaii we try to make it interesting, but we also try to educate you. So make compost tea. You can't go wrong. All the micronutrients end up. One of the days I'm going to warm up a cup and try it in the morning just to see what happens. But we thank y'all a lot for tuning in Think Tech Hawaii, Natalie Cash, Glenn Martinez. Take care. Aloha.