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Indigenous microorganisms: bringing the forest floor into a grow bag

By · First published

Walk into a forest and scrape back the leaf litter. The soil underneath is dark, soft and full of life: fungi, bacteria and countless other organisms breaking down leaves and feeding the trees above.

A bag of ordinary soil has very little of that life. So in every Nabhi bag, we bring some of it in from the forest. This is the third pillar: indigenous microorganisms, or IMO.

What IMO are

Indigenous microorganisms are microbes collected from the local environment, multiplied, and returned to the soil. The practice comes from Korean Natural Farming, developed by Han Kyu Cho in South Korea and used for more than 40 years, in which IMO are cultured as an alternative to chemical fertilisers (University of Hawaiʻi).

The word that matters is indigenous. Rather than buying a packaged culture made somewhere else, you gather the microbes that already live in your own land, suited to its soil, its rain and its heat. Ours come from the forest near our Gudibande farm.

How we collect ours

The trap is simple: a little cooked rice.

  1. Prepare the rice. We half-boil rice so it is cooked but not sticky, and place it in a mud pot with a lid.
  2. Take it to the forest. The pot goes under a bamboo clump or a sweet fruit tree, such as sitaphal or jamun, where the soil life is rich.
  3. Wait three days. Microbes from the forest floor find the rice and grow over it. When we lift the lid, a white fungal growth has spread through the inside of the pot. That white growth is what we want.
  4. Put it to sleep. Back at the farm, we weigh the rice and mix it with an equal weight of chemical-free jaggery, then store it in a glass or porcelain jar. Within a week, the fungi go dormant. Kept this way, the culture lasts up to six months.

From the jar to the bag

A jar of culture is only a starter. To be useful, it has to multiply.

When we need it, we dilute a small amount heavily in water and pour it over organically grown paddy husk, spread in a low mound on farm soil. A wet gunny bag over the top keeps it moist and shaded. After two days we mix it, add a little water if it has dried, and cover it again. Over the next few days, the fungi spread through the husk.

We then blend finished hot compost and garden soil, mix in the colonised husk, and let it rest for a week. This becomes the potting mix in every Nabhi bag: compost for quick food, and a living community of local microbes to keep the soil working in the months after.

What we can and cannot claim

We want to be straight with you. Farmers who use IMO, including us, see healthier, more active soil. But the science is still catching up: researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi, who studied the Korean method, note that little scientific documentation of its benefits exists yet (University of Hawaiʻi).

That is probably no accident. IMO cost almost nothing to make and come free from any forest, so there is nothing to sell and no company with a reason to fund the research. Methods that make money for someone tend to get studied first.

What we can tell you is why we do it. Living soil, full of fungi and bacteria, is how every forest feeds itself without anyone adding fertiliser. A grow bag is a tiny, isolated patch of soil. Giving it a share of the forest's life is our way of making it behave a little more like the ground it came from.

IMO work alongside the other pillars: the olla, hot compost and the aged-wood base, under a crown of mulch. Read how they fit together in the Nabhi method, or choose a plant grown in living soil.

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