If anyone is hesitating about the three day compost tea and intro to... microscope course, don't. I had the pleasure of attending the course last week with Chris n Jo in Vic.
I learnt more than expected and the microscope work was great fun. I'm really looking forward to getting my compost going n using the teas on my new property as well as being excited about regenerating my land and building topsoil with mother nature’s help.
Fleur Tysoe from Victoria
I first met Chris Ellery and the team at Australian Soil Biological Supplies (ASBS) in 2012 when I attended a three day workshop on creating and analysing compost, compost teas and compost extracts presented by the Soil Foodweb Institute.
Our macadamia orchard was planted in the early 1980’s and until 2007 the orchard had regularly achieved annual production levels of between 4 and 5 tonnes of nut-in-shell per hectare. In the six years from 2008 until 2012 average annual production had fallen to just over 2 tonnes of nut-in-shell per hectare and the trees were looking very run-down.
The workshop helped me to get a much better understanding of what happens in the soil, how counter-productive some of our farming practices were and provided some very practical ways for rehabilitating our soils.
We subsequently undertook some Soil Foodweb Institute soil tests and sought recommendations from Australian Soil Biological Supplies.
Over the last three years production has steadily but consistently improved to average almost 4.5 tonnes of nut-in-shell per hectare and this year (2016) we have enjoyed our best crop ever.
I recently contacted Australian Soil Biological Supplies for some information about air pumps and in passing I asked if they had had any first-hand experience of a product that was being recommended as an aid to improving soil health. Chris’s advice with regard to the air pump and the relative merits of compost teas and extracts for our purposes was, as always, straight forward and practical and has saved me a lot of time, energy and money.
Chris also suggested a simple means of testing how effective any product is that makes claims about improving soil health – I strongly recommend you ask ASBS about this yourself!
Australian Soil Biological Supplies continues to be an invaluable source of good no-nonsense advice and competitively priced products for our business. I strongly recommend Australian Soil Biological Supplies to any farming business that is aiming to improve production or to target expenditure better.
Tim Salmon, Macadamia grower,Gympie, Queensland
For Soil Food Web Inc
"I would like to highly recommend the Soil Food Web Australia team for the delivery of excellent training and after sales service for anyone interested in properly understanding and creating highly productive soils. I found the training to be a perfect mix of theory and practical demonstrations, delivered by pragmatic and industry-leading personnel that have put a great deal of time and resources into getting things right. The team are always happy to talk soils, answer questions and maintain contact with students as they continue their personal journeys into creating healthier s
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John Moraitis
Hello Everyone,
My name is Craig Elliott and I am an avid gardener, my main interests are growing vegetables and flowering native shrubs. I am also a little bit obsessive about a lush green lawn.
Seven years ago my wife and I bought a house in a little estate of ten houses backing onto a nature reserve; the yard was twenty percent blue couch and eighty percent paspalum. I built a vegetable garden and a chook pen which took up a third of the backyard, and then we started to dig out and poison the paspalum.
Three years later after more poisoning than I would have liked, the paspalum was gone. I had been planting blue couch as we went along but was not having much luck due to the poor quality of the soil - a neighbour across the road had told me that it had been used as a fill dump. Hence the bricks and broken roofing tiles I found when digging post holes for the chook pen and fence.
I have always tried to use what I believed to be organic liquid fertilisers and any manure I could get from local farmers. Whilst this has produced some very nice vegetables, I still lost up to a third of my grass every winter over the next two years.
Robert Brooks is a life long friend and I had the pleasure of meeting Chris Ellery two years ago when my wife and I were home visiting family and friends. Rob had already told me about an organic fertiliser that Chris was producing and I was very keen to learn more. After a long conversation with Chris I was quite eager to get home and try my bottle of fish emulsion.
After only a week, the change of colour in the foliage of all the garden plants was amazing. Don’t get me wrong, the plants were healthy to start with, but now the colour was vibrant and had a gloss about it.
The next chance we had to go to Gods Country (Northern Rivers, NSW) I rang Robert and asked for a 5ltr bottle, when we arrived Chris informed me that they had a new seaweed emulsion and he had made a mixture of fish and seaweed blend with some other goodies (his words).
The day before we visited we had prepared the garden beds with cow manure and mulched with the old straw from the chook pen. Once home we planted a range of vegetable seedlings and watered them in with a light mixture of emulsion and then 2 to 4mls per litre in a 9ltr watering can every 7 days.
The plants literally hit the ground running. We first harvested some lettuce and weren’t able to pull the plant out without damaging it. The root system was so deep and wide I had to dig it out with a little hand shovel. I found an earth worm intertwined in the roots. Although I had noticed more life in the garden I was still surprised to see the worm making its home in the roots. Another big plus since using the fertiliser we have noticed a reduction in the bacterial speck and blight issue we had with our tomatoes.
After seeing the effect the fertilizer had on the vegetables I put 250mls into a 2ltr hose end pack spray bottle filled it with water, attached the hose and sprayed 300 square meters of grass. Within a few days the colour of the grass had changed, we received 5ml of rain over a few days and the grass exploded with colour and growth.
Since then I have repeated the procedure every three months and last year during winter we only lost an eighth of the grass. In the same period I started to notice little dirt mounds in and around the dogs manure. Whilst picking up said manure I flipped one over and low and behold - Dung Beetles (I have a little knowledge about dung beetle from a farm course I completed with NSW Tafe). Now we hardly have to pick up the dog manure as the dung beetles seem to love the lawn environment.
The soil has also become much softer to the point that, before you would be lucky to hammer a tent peg an inch into the ground, whereas now you can hand push one in twice as far.
This summer was a hot and dry one, so the grass did suffer a bit but we didn’t lose the root system this time and since the rains have come the grass has returned with a vengeance. I believe with another dose of fertilizer before winter we will have finally won the battle.
In my personal opinion the organic fertilizer that the gentlemen and ladies at Australian Soil Biology Supplies produces is the best bar none and I cannot recommend it any more highly.
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Craig Elliot
Waterhold is a mobile composting service which takes it’s machinery from farm to farm turning farmers by-products into compost for them. Waterhold Pty Ltd has been working with Chris Ellery from SFI Australia for the last 2 years; Chris has a vast experience in composting and worm composting.
We strictly follow the method set out by Dr Elaine Ingham and Chris Ellery of Soil Foodweb Institute. The Soil Foodweb Australia’s method for making compost is considerably noticeable in the look, smell and performance out in the paddock. Soil Foodwebs composting methods means you have a compost that is well balanced, diverse in microbes and active immediately.
This also means that the compost you have is more economically than any other. No other compost can make your produce look good and grow how it should or have lasting effect like Soil Foodweb’s methodology in compost making.
Because no other composting method really looks at putting the right amount of material into the batch to ensure that the microbes can perform as they should. After all, compost is produced to get as many different microbes as possible in balance as well as having a good N,P,K balance, not just N,P,K as most other method only look at.
Balance is very important.
A good Compost has to address both the chemical and biological aspects and Soil Foodweb do this unlike other methods. Soil Foodweb Australia has a Lab that can accurately test for microbes in your compost with definitive results. They also work closely with a Lab that do the chemical analysis that is second to none in their field. This kind of cooperation gives you greater accuracy in results. Making it easier for you to see what have in your compost.
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Waterhold Pty Ltd has a number of large customers that produce tens of thousands of fruit and veg each as well as employing hundreds of people each. It’s these customers to Waterhold that have noted the real difference in methods of composting.
They note that the Soil Foodweb gives them the greatest yields, higher quality produce and longest lasting effect in the soil. Making it more cost effective to them. Other notes are great reductions in pesticides, insecticides and a reduction in additional fertiliser to grow the intended crop. Which again come back to being the most cost effective.
Ross O’Halloran
Managing Director
0427 220 978
