Fermenting the Weeds Bugs Won't Eat

0:00 Richard Perea: I'm probably 95% of the people in the class. Even after working a hard day, I'm 65 years old, I'm beat up, I'm falling out of tanks, I'm falling off ladders, down mountains, everything else. And I feel like I did when I was 25, 30 years old, far as physically. So I work more than five hours and I get tired. This is Christmas Berry Hydrosol. Anybody know what Hydrosol is?

0:29 Audience: Yeah.

0:30 Richard Perea: And everybody knows what essential oil is. I made my own essential oil maker. And I'm using copper coils and it's basically alcohol still. Or still, right? This stuff here, if I have a headache, I'll drink a couple of tablespoons. I'll walk away and pretty soon, no headache. So if you want to take a swig of this, it tastes pretty good. That's Christmas Berry. Go ahead, try it. Christmas Berry Oil and Distilled Water mixed together.

1:00 Audience: What's the proportions? What do you balance? What are your percentages?

1:04 Richard Perea: This is what I do. I get a pressure cooker. I pack it two-thirds full with Christmas berry leaves, cover with water, put my distiller coil on top of it, and boil it. it and whatever comes out comes out. It's pretty easy. That's it, that's what you bought? That's with hydrosol, yeah hydrosol. Now this is what I call the mother of the Christmas berry which is an infusion that I make. It uses brown sugar and rehydrated Christmas berry leaves. Okay and uh it has exploded on me before that's why I was careful. But you can taste that.

1:40 I just worked on a batch two days ago that had a relieve the pressure because it started to swell up so badly. You know, it took a 25 gallon drum and it looked like a capsule. You know, but this is a half a cup in the morning, half a cup in the evening. I have a video on YouTube, on my Facebook, Kaʻū Natural Farming Facebook page, how to do all this stuff.

2:27 Yeah, I've done everything step by step in there. Sorry?

2:31 Audience: Is this called natural farming?

2:32 Richard Perea: Kaʻū Natural Farming. I've got some cards here with the...

2:34 Audience: Does that include the... I'm just sort of... There's a step missing for me.

2:37 Richard Perea: Okay.

2:38 Audience: Seven days to basically get the mycelium from the forest infused with the weed or crushed up up in the chip. Is that right?

2:45 Richard Perea: It actually... Actually, the next day it'll be fermenting, for the wild grass fertilizer, or liquid IMO, whatever you want to call it, whatever, right? I stopped using wheat mill run. For two reasons. One, we don't grow wheat on the island. Everybody is talking about cane and the pulping cane and everything else. And I was just like, you know. And then I remember Master Cho saying, look out in the forest and use what you got. So I got a lot of this stuff laying around so I started trying it and actually I've had better results with the liquid fertilizer than I had with an IMO

3:30 I made with a wheat mill. And I was just digging around some of my lavender plants yesterday and getting ready to plant something next to them. Some rare seeds somebody gave me, and worms everywhere, and it's, you know, it's it's working, you know, it's working.

3:52 Audience: Just back to your videos, does that include, you know, the observation? I call it curing, I suppose, or the fermentation. So how do you know when it's complete? Just by smell, or do you actually taste it?

4:05 Richard Perea: I think now this stuff here goes through a two-step process. Have you tried this one yet? That's honohono. That's honohono. Try to take a swig of that. That's honohono grass. Honohono grass is good. It's a lot of natural, a lot of Hawaiian uses for healing. It stops bleeding. But let me tell you, that stuff there, I was remodeling my daughter's house last year. I worked too many hours. And I got kicked back on a table saw and I ran my hand into the table saw and I got these three fingers to the blade. And also stopped the saw, you know.

4:47 And I wrapped it up, went to the emergency and the guy took the wrapping off and he says, there's no blood. There's no blood. You can see all that. I got pictures of it if you want to see it on my phone, right? He says, there's no blood. What's going on? And I said, Christmas berry juice. Because I drink a maintenance thing once a month for like two days. Before, I did it for like six weeks straight every day to get rid of the hip and leg pain and the back pain I had. You know, from the arthritis I got from the war. And other stupid things I've done as a kid. So, I go to a two-step process.

5:26 In a forested area, under the canopy of a tree. because I want to get the lactic acid bacteria that's in the forest, not in my house. Okay, I keep it from getting rainwater, and a little rainwater is not bad. And I'll stir it with a stainless steel paddle every couple of days, and I see it just bubbling away. And after day 15, I seal it tight, and I put fermenting vents in them, which I didn't bring with me, and then let it go for another 15 days. And then after that, I'll taste it, and it tastes like

5:59 the cidery kind of taste there and with a little sharp alcohol taste and i know it's ready to go i think this stuff is about a year old it's about a year old doesn't need refrigeration just put in your counter but you got to let it go that other 15 days on anaerobic because then also you're going to have things blowing up in your counters you know you water everywhere you know so that's how you go mostly by taste if you have a good palette and you're a good cook this stuff is pretty easy. It's pretty easy, by taste, you know.

6:30 Audience: So how do you explain the no blood in your fingers?

6:32 Richard Perea: There's a site I'm gonna tell you about, it's called rain-tree.com. It's a it's a rainforest medicinal plant and tree site from south america the woman that put it together she's uh was supposed to be dead by 1990 with leukemia she's a doctor and uh and she decided I'm not gonna die from leukemia, I'm gonna find out what I can do by going to the Amazon. She spent ten, twelve years there. She goes back there a lot. She got cured there. Not from the Christmas berry, but Christmas berries, or Peruvian, not Peruvian, but the Brazilian pepper tree was in there. And the way I decided,

7:15 everybody says it's poisonous. Everybody says, oh, I had a Christmas berry, cut it down, we're gonna kill it, we're going to poison it, we're going to get rid of it, it's just evil, evil, evil. So I thought the same thing and I started natural farming. I had one Christmas berry tree on my back part of my one acre lot there. I cut it with a chainsaw and I was going to go drill it out and rip it up, I forgot about it. Then I made some IMO4 and I used a coffee hole and I couldn't get it. And it took a long time to get it to break down.

7:48 And one day I came out of the back of my house, I looked over where that tree was at, and suckers were coming up. This thing is still alive! So I had to go to work, and I came back a couple days later, and the sun hit the leaves just right, and it just bounced back with radiant energy back in my face. I know it sounds kind of crazy. Plants, right? And you know what I mean. Radiant energy like that, surely God has not created something that's supposed to be so evil, that has so much will to live. Started googling it, and everyone, oh, it's invasive, I have a problem with this place, that place.

8:21 i found that one site rain tree and i looked there and cancer diabetes menstrual problems that women have regulated menstrual uh Gout. Now, some of these guys, I have a friend of mine, 78 years old, that three or four years ago he was walking with a cane in the morning, one foot in front of him at a time. Today he walks like a 40 year old man because of his Christmas berry. It took all his pain away. He just you know, he loved it. So yeah, it's wonderful.

9:03 Audience: So your critical path, as far as then making the fermentation, is gathering the leaves?

9:06 Richard Perea: First, the first thing I did was, I did like Master Cho taught, go in the morning before the sun hits the tree, before the photosynthesis starts taking, and pinched off the three inches of the real tender shoots, and I made a tea. Basically a pot of water, covered with water, boiled it, simmered for an hour, strained it off, put it in my refrigerator, because, you know, it molds and all kinds of crazy things. I drank it with local honey from Kaʻū every morning. That's how that curing thing started happening to me. And then I thought, well, not enough room in the refrigerator for this stuff,

9:47 so I'm going to try to ferment it. And I did the traditional FPJ method and had maybe a teaspoon of liquid at the bottom of the bucket. Not very much juice in there. Not enough juice in the leaf, right? So my friend La, she turned me on to this site in Thailand where this woman does a lot of fermentation, Madam Chang, she's a big deal there, you know, and they're all in Thai, but you can see what's going on. What she does is whatever thing she decides to ferment, she covers it with water, and then puts lactic acid bacteria in there, gets it kicked in,

10:27 and stirs it, and covers it up, and she makes all these wonderful potions in Thailand. So, I said, I'm going to try this without the lactic acid bacteria. and it worked.

10:37 Audience: So you just put water on top and you don't use the lacto?

10:40 Richard Perea: No, not for that batch, but if I wanted to get it accelerated, I'd use my lacto. I wanted to get it going quicker, you know, especially if it's cooling down in the wintertime. I put like a cup of lacto in it. When I made this wild grass fertilizer, I put like a pint of lacto in it, and the next day it was bubbling away and churning. You know, lacto says, oh, I'm free! And this bottle, and you start eating. Yeah, and it starts going, it's just wonderful. It just, it's beautiful and wonderful. And that place looks like a jungle now, where it used to look like a desert, you know.

11:18 And yeah, it's amazing. So, this, I use this wild oregano as an insecticide, and it's very drought resistant too, and helps my plants. But one thing that Gil Carandang said in his book: go look around and see the plants that bugs aren't bothering. Christmas berry: bugs don't eat this, but Japanese rose beetles do. But you know what? They won't eat it again. They won't eat it because it's poisonous.

12:05 I have one of my Christmas berry trees on my farm. The whole side was just decimated by the rose beetles when they came through the little tour here last year. And within days the Christmas Berry was coming back. But they never bothered it again. You know, when they came through there. So this is a very good, it's good for insects. Now, what I would What I would use it for spraying is, a little is better than too much, one teaspoon per gallon. That's all I would use, one teaspoon, don't go crazy. Do a foliar application, just spray it on everything.

12:41 Audience: Do you have any fire ants on your property?

12:43 Richard Perea: You know, they're down in the, they're down in Nāʻālehu, you know, and I thought I saw them on my, one of my, on my banana trees, and then I sprayed it, this stuff.

12:55 Audience: So with the Christmas Berry.

12:57 Richard Perea: The Christmas Berry.

12:58 Audience: Beautiful. Yeah, because right now, I mean, it's a scourge. People don't realize. I mean, people are leaving their farms in Tahiti.

13:02 Richard Perea: Yeah. And like you were saying, you know, my ancestors are Puerto Rican and Mexican, right? My grandmother has, I got this book in Spanish, and all the different things that they use. And guess what? A lot of them are the same thing that ancient Hawaiians used. How about that? Right? Because they knew how to live with the land, you know, and all of this is, we're living with the land. OHN, this is what you call this, Vince, the mother of all inputs, right? This stuff is four and a half years old. And it's still stronger than anything.

13:44 Audience: But I'm thinking about trying to make OHN. I don't have it. You just started to grow ginger in my brain. You know, one question that I have is, you know, early on in learning about herbs, there's demulcent, there's expectorant, so you know, different herbs and different qualities. And Chinese medicine, you know, you put them together and it buffers the effects on the kidneys. They may be hard on the kidneys. So that's what I would be cautious about.

14:20 Richard Perea: Yeah. And it might be genes, right? Or it might be this stuff. I'd rather say, it's this stuff here.

14:32 Audience: Is that the fermented?

14:34 Richard Perea: This is fermented Christmas berry leaves. This is Christmas berry bark and roots.

14:42 Audience: So what's your process with your roots and your bark?

14:45 Richard Perea: So I didn't change it. I got lazy. Instead of sitting there with each twig and just shaving it, I put it through a mulcher. And I took all the mulch, all the chips, and I put them in a five gallon bucket and then covered it with vodka. And let it sit for a month. And that's what this is. I was going to send this to my daughter in Utah, and I found this cool bottle at Walmart, it was sealed, but then she decided she didn't want to get into it this time.

15:13 Audience: Richard, where do you get those lids at?

15:15 Richard Perea: These are available at Home Depot.

15:19 Audience: No way.

15:20 Richard Perea: But I've seen them when I was in Utah, I saw these white. These were white too, so you could get the white lids. They got an O-ring in here. Yeah, they got an O-ring in here, and then they got an O-ring there, and you can see it now.

15:33 Audience: ...which is basically ethanol. Is that acceptable?

15:39 Richard Perea: I think it would be.

15:40 Audience: I would have thought so too.

15:42 Richard Perea: I mean it's pure alcohol. What does alcohol do? We were talking about earlier, right? Alcohol dehydrates, doesn't it? Right? And what's great about the infusion, it's a little alcohol-y, but then you're using sugar and that hydrates you too at the same time. So you get kind of both, you get a balance and it works real well. It works real well. So At Ace Hardware store, they got these 5 gallon, or at Lowe's or whatever. They got these hypoallergenic latex. Anybody use these yet? Very cheap, you know and so this stuff here if I was going to ferment I put this on there keep the flies out

16:36 because guess what if you don't keep the flies out it's going to ferment but then you can get a mother of vinegar. You're going to accelerate everything. Flies is what makes mother of vinegar. The flies do that. They have a purpose, believe it or not, other than irritating you. And then I use this to strain, but I also made another thing I use to strain too, which is just, I got these big fuel plastic funnels that I put these in there and I just pour off and I do gallons at a time or 25 gallons at a time. Yeah, so these are real good. You can use these because latex, these are not molds.

17:19 And so this won't transfer anything over. So once again, look at your property, see what you got that the bugs don't bother, ferment it. Ferment it with a brown sugar, or the rehydrated with water over the top, or do a, with alcohol, and use one eighth of a teaspoon per gallon of water. strong pretty strong I don't know if anybody has this this Spanish nettle on the property. It can become a pain, especially when the little seeds

18:06 go all over there. But they're very good when they're young, very good to eat you know very good to eat everything that I've seen has a purpose nothing out there that is not purposeful you just got to find its use you know and And this natural farming fermentation method is just wonderful, with throwing the Thai in there to help with the real hard to ferment stuff.

18:30 Audience: So the name of the website was rain-tree?

18:33 Richard Perea: Rain-tree.com. You can see what they're finding over there. I don't worry about that, you know. I have, like, most of the stuff I use for my health, this is what I do. I have sprayed it with an insect repellent. I've never tried putting it in a trench, a root trench.

18:54 Audience: I wonder if it's systemic, if it'll go up as a building immunity.

19:00 Richard Perea: It might. It might. Because I know that... Well, this is interesting. I bought an acre of land two and a half years ago. And there had a fire gone through there, and there's some dead Christmas trees there. And so we ground them up. We had a 12 inch grinder and spread it on the ground, sprayed it with IMO, liquid IMO. Right there my fig trees are three times the size of anywhere else on the property. Makes great mulch too.

19:37 Audience: And so did your weed pressure go down?

19:39 Richard Perea: Yes, but it depends what you want to call it, weed.

19:43 Audience: No, I understand, but I mean as far as...

19:45 Richard Perea: For the Guinea grass, what I did with the Guinea grass was, when I fermented the Guinea grass, then I sprayed or drenched in those areas, the trees with Guinea grass fertilizer, and in one part of my property, on the border, all Guinea grass. Just like somebody drew a line, wherever I sprayed with Guinea grass. So what does that tell you? Remember when Master Cho was telling us about planting tomatoes? How far? Four feet apart in the thing. feet apart you know. He said yeah because they got to get along right? And so I thought about that and every time I see tomato plants growing too

20:23 close I got to pull them out and sure enough more tomatoes come out. Well I have a friend that's a biodynamic farmer, been doing it for 40 years, he says grasses are places where there's low in calcium and silica. So if grass is growing there, the ground needs that. And that's what kills me when they spray Roundup, it's just coming back because the land is more powerful than they are. Right? You know, so when I use this drench, guinea grass or elephant grass or whatever kind of grass, even molasses grass drench, it doesn't come back as strong, it doesn't come back as long.

21:04 Homeopathic. Yeah, we don't need to be there, boys, let's go someplace else.

21:12 Audience: How do you do that?

21:14 Richard Perea: Guinea grass is, I take the root ball and everything, chop it with the machete or through my mulcher and I use 55 gallon plastic drums. I fill it two-thirds full with the material, put about a pint of LAB in there, and then go to the forest and get forest mulch. I get about a half of a five gallon bucket of forest mulch from some place where there's a lot of hypha. You know, I dig back the mulch and look for the hypha, right? And then this last batch I made, I used Christmas berry mulch and put it in there and mix it up and cover

21:54 with water. So you got about 35 to 40 ounces of water, and leave some air space in there. Why? To get more lactic acid bacteria in there from the forest, right? Mix it up and I cover it up with some shade cloth, and the next day it's fermenting already, it's bubbling and churning, little carbonization going on. I leave it. Master Cho says you can start using within 24 hours. I just leave mine 10 days. And then I just leave it stored like that. You know? If I want, if I have this stuff laying around for a long time in bottles like this, I always mix it with a little bit of LAB before I use it.

22:34 Because the LAB is a workhorse of natural farming, a workhorse of nature. And it just kicks it in. And it just comes alive and it just starts going forward.

22:46 Audience: So would you, okay, so you add, what, a teaspoon of LAB to that size and then give it a shake?

22:51 Richard Perea: Well, yeah, this is enough for 100 gallons of water. So here I would probably put maybe a half a cup of that into my mix, to get everything in the right place.

23:04 Audience: And do you let it settle?

23:06 Richard Perea: Straight away. Yeah, it just starts spraying right away. And once you start spraying with a mister or whatever, get the oxygen in there, and everybody, everybody does the job. I got a friend of mine, if you guys write this down, a Facebook friend of mine, his name is Chris Dernay, and he's, he uh has a facebook cycle um michigan uh western michigan permacultures and he's been working with IMO for many, many years, but the method he learned from some of the local Indians. He has all kinds of great ideas how he does biochar and using logs, you know,

23:48 to make all this stuff. He has a lot of great stuff.

23:52 Audience: What's his last name?

23:52 Richard Perea: Dernay. Dernay. You look to see if he has a post up today. Chris Dernay. and uh...

24:00 Audience: How was it again?

24:02 Richard Perea: I can't go out and really, people want him to go out and teach and you can't, you know more of that stuff.

24:10 Audience: How do you spell the name then?

24:12 Richard Perea: Uh, Durene, I don't know exactly but I can...

24:16 Audience: ...proportion wise, you're putting how much guinea grass in, how much of the forest mulch

24:20 Richard Perea: I use about half of it

24:22 Audience: I read it on Facebook ...and then you're going with a quarter of forest mulch? No sugar in the Guinea grass?

24:30 Richard Perea: No, no sugar. No sugar at all. Now, I, it's kind of interesting, you get that IMO, that wild IMO, and put it in with all that food you just gave it, and it just goes crazy. And I've actually had better results with that liquid grass fertilizer type that I've made than with IMO4. And guess what? It's cheap. You don't have to use a bobcat.

24:59 Audience: You have much soil where you are?

25:04 Richard Perea: Huh?

25:05 Audience: You have much soil?

25:06 Richard Perea: No. No, we got rocks. It's Ocean View. Yeah. So, another thing that, anybody here seen that Back to Eden website? What's that guy's name? Anyway, he's on YouTube.

25:22 Audience: Is that the one, Klaus?

25:24 Richard Perea: No, he's a guy, he's a Vietnam vet, and Agent Orange poisoning again, right? But he's also an arborist, right? And he really believes in heavy mulch, right? And on my other acre, we put a foot of mulch there, soaked it down with IMO, liquid IMO, and wild grass fertilizer. And one of the guys from Molokaʻi posted his papaya tree growing there with just papayas everywhere. I posted mine. It's the same, but I'm on rocks. But there isn't rocks in there anymore. There's eight inches of dirt on top of the rocks. So mulch is just, you guys, you've seen that, you know, mulch is just a key thing.

26:11 Whatever kind of mulch you can get.

26:13 Audience: I'm excited to try your method too, because I've been doing my worms in mulch beds. I'm excited to do your method, I can find a pipe that big from the island. You know, so if I fail, try to get a bare one. So just on the mulch question, because I live in a, we're sort of between tropical and subtropical. We do have a lot of sort of weed trees which can be easily mulched, but what's the indicator when it's sort of ripe? I mean, for compost it's a color thing, but are you looking for that white mycelium in it?

26:46 Richard Perea: Yeah, yeah.

26:48 Audience: So you want to see it all the way through?

26:50 Richard Perea: Well, you'll see it in different spots, you know, in different places. You know, you can see like on the surface where it's exposed to the sun, there's nothing. But you pull back and there it is. You got that net everywhere of mycelium going everywhere. And there's spiders and bugs and everything else. And I've noticed that my bug problem is almost non-existent. Yeah, almost nonexistent.

27:14 Audience: I stepped in a little late, so forgive me. But this wild grass fertilizer, you're taking, like in a container like this, you fill it about half with chopped guinea grass, including root ball?

27:28 Richard Perea: What did Master Cho say about that air space thing? He said, one third material, one third brown sugar, and and enough for air, fire, water, the natural elements to go in there. And you would think to yourself, well, if I have it open in the air, I have it all the way up here, what's the difference? No, there is a difference. You need that one-third air space you have to leave in there because it gets in there and it cycles through there. I can almost imagine is what I'm talking about, just sitting there and just swirling around in there and eating and doing its thing.

28:01 Audience: Sure as self-gassing.

28:02 Richard Perea: Yeah, and the gas in your tail. So I pretend this is a 55 gallon barrel. I would fill it up, pack down with the guinea grass, put that forest mulch in it, put like a pint, one of these, of LAB in there, and then cover with water, stir it up, cover it with the like I said, the grass smells like cauldron. But morning glory smells like morning glory. And this smells like it all has its own smell.

28:32 Audience: You lost me a second with the proportions. You said you fill up your 55 gallon drum with guinea?

28:36 Richard Perea: Three quarters of the way up, two thirds of the way up with water and material and about this much forest mulch.

28:49 Audience: So your proportion would be like two-thirds of guinea grass and one-third of mulch, and then water?

28:53 Richard Perea: Okay, so, what I'll just go with again. This is all my stuff mix, I'm I'm gonna throw it out before I leave anyway. Okay, let's say this is all guinea grass, right? Put that in there. And if I got a bucket like this, I'll get a handful of just forest mulch. And then cover it with water, stir it up, cover it with the netting, and in 24 hours it's ready to use. Longer the better, it ages. I let it go.

29:25 Audience: And you use it as a soil drench?

29:27 Richard Perea: As soil drench or as a spray. Either way.

29:30 Audience: Straight, complete strength? Full strength?

29:32 Richard Perea: No, no.

29:35 Audience: You know, I might want to suggest too, I use a flat spade. So I take a material like this to get a nice surface area, it chops up real nice.

29:41 Richard Perea: Yeah, I'm gonna try. I saw that, it's a great idea. No, I use a cup and a half of this full strength stuff to 55 gallons of water.

29:55 Audience: Okay, so don't go get carried away.

29:58 Richard Perea: Yeah, that's... You'll come out there, one or two things that happen, the plant will die off and come back so big it wants to get in your house, right? Or it'll die. You know, and I've seen that happen. A friend of mine overdid OHN or something on her mango tree. Less is more. Less is more. And they say a tablespoon, use half a tablespoon. until you get, because every, you know, once you start growing this stuff in a natural farming environment, it's much more.

30:30 Audience: Richard, if I may, remember when I first took the certificate certified in Korean natural farming, I was talking to Mike DuPonte, and he said, you know, if you do this stuff half right, it's still pretty good. So it's a matter of people just doing it, not thinking, oh, I didn't quite understand. Just do it, and it'll show up.

30:50 Richard Perea: And that's the thing is, I posted a video, reposted a video that Chris posted from something I did back when I came back from Utah last year after I did it for myself. I even forgot I did it, on how to be successful making IMO 2 every single time. And I learned this from one of my hānai daughters, Kalu Oyama. And what happened to her, she was trying to make IMO in her yard there in Nāʻālehu, and her big pit bull come up and eat all the rice. He didn't care. He ate the container every day, you know. He said, uncle, what am I going to do? I said, I don't know. And then she said, hey, I did it.

31:30 And I went over to her house and she got a trash can with a critter lid on it. And she put guinea grass in there and then her rice and protected it, covered it up and great bloom in three or four days.

31:45 Audience: So she was getting bacterial dominated from the guinea grass.

31:48 Richard Perea: Guinea grass roots in there.

31:50 Audience: Oh, I see. She actually put a root? She actually put a clump in there?

31:52 Richard Perea: Yeah, clump, everything.

31:55 Audience: And then the rice the rice was in a separate like la jalapeno. Yeah, it wasn't it was a la jalapeno.

32:00 Richard Perea: So I went and I went above me about 500 to 600 feet above me and got some of those ferns, and I pull them up, full of mycelium on the roots, right? And I got from some of the ancient ʻōhiʻa forests, I got some of the mulch from there, and I went to this spot and I went to another place another hundred feet this way the young different spots I came back and I did the same thing I put my critter lid on it and on day I was in my shop downstairs in my house on day two just starting to show some bloom but it was still wet in there because everything started to have

32:33 compost in there so I left the lid off the next day I came back and it always looked like cotton candy because all that led came in there and so it's every time it's worth 100 People fail making IMO 1 and 2 and give up. They just give up, you know. I mean, I mean i'm the times you see that people just go i can't do this you can't give up you gotta keep on trying you gotta keep on trying you know sooner or later something's gonna happen you're gonna make a mistake and keep making that mistake and it'd be fine you know but this has changed my life

33:09 physically almost like derek said you know it changes your life and you know it's changed yours even though you're doing it again after all many times, the Master Cho hits you back in the head. you know so it is uh yeah it's wonderful and i see people that do it they become happier or they're sad, they become happy. But by doing this. So, any other questions?

33:36 Audience: Are you making LAB in the traditional method?

33:39 Richard Perea: Well, not as traditional, because what I do, I got my best results from LAB from getting brown rice, soaking it outside, and then strain it off, and then taking that rice wash water from that soaked brown rice, and then taking it to my forest areas and cover it up, and then make my LAB out there. Where is the LAB in the atmosphere going to be stronger, in the forest or inside your kitchen? Yeah, right on. In your case, probably being one of those worm beds, you know who would be the strongest because everybody's working there everybody's working

34:20 I saw a time delay, a time sequence, I think Chris posted this too, of a dead rabbit in the woods. And the dead rabbit went from bloating to just not even hair anymore. That's LAB doing his work, you know, returning everything back to the ground.

34:41 Audience: Dairy, nothing in there?

34:43 Richard Perea: Am I? Well, no. Milk is expensive. $5.99 a gallon out where we live, right? In Ocean View. I don't know what it is here. So I thought, I'm going to try powdered milk. So I went to Costco, bought the box of powdered milk. Cost $2.20 a gallon. You can make it that way and it works. Powdered milk works. And it still tastes like apple cidery, and seems to do the same thing with powdered milk. And it's cheaper than $5.99. I don't know what it is in Maui, but it's $5.99 here. But if you had a lot of milk, you had your own cows or something like that, it'd be a different story. I got LAB that's

35:24 three years old in my basement.

35:27 Audience: What would you use LAB for?

35:32 Richard Perea: LAB is a workhorse of all this stuff. It kick-starts everything. It's the supercharger in nature. So I use LAB. Before I started making my own kefir, I was drinking LAB twice a day for my gut, to replace the gut bacteria that I've ruined after all these years, right? But I use LAB in all my inputs, you know, all my sprays, I put a little LAB in there.

35:57 Audience: Even on seedlings and stuff?

35:58 Richard Perea: I wouldn't put it full strength. You ever try that on your seedling? I wouldn't put it on.

36:02 Audience: But diluting it with water?

36:03 Richard Perea: Yeah.

36:04 Audience: But like one to a thousand?

36:05 Richard Perea: One teaspoon to a gallon of water. Like less is better. Yeah, I've done it the other way around and it hasn't turned out too good. Come back and everything's dead. You know you ever want to see fish jump out of a big pond throw too much LAB in there. They don't like it. You know, I was raising catfish, a lot of catfish, for a while, and I read somewhere you could use LAB in aquaponics, so I put five gallons of LAB into a 4,000 gallon pond, pretty soon they're jumping out and dying. So you gotta take it easy, just use common sense a little bit. LAB's real good for animals.

36:48 A lot of my friends spent tons of money on stuff for their animals, coats, the animals look sickly, everything. I said here try some of this. A couple weeks later, no scratching, no itching, you know, their coats are coming back. So it'll show you what's missing out of that. One of the things that i asked this morning a friend of mine asked me how many people have died from fermented products other than too much alcohol nobody nobody it's a big staple of a lot of musicians when i i grew up in a puerto rican mexican household my mexican grandmother had

37:27 chilies and carrots and onions pickled on the table you know all the expected tastes of two or three of them with your meal like puerto rican grandma it would have different veggies you know green peppers not so hot stuff and you were expected to take it and people didn't get sick and so on and stuff they're getting sick today you know so it's very important it's very very important So anyway, any other questions?

37:52 Audience: Richard, how...

37:56 Richard Perea: Not a lot, but usually we try to get 20 inches a year.

37:58 Audience: Every rainfall, and this, how much is the rain in your place?

38:05 Richard Perea: 30, 35...

38:07 Audience: Okay, so in my place, I'm in Puna, we get 120 inches of rain. Oh, no, I just put it in the... Compost, we don't...