Creating soil is the number two challenge facing humanity, after climate change.
We know exactly how to do it, it has been happening for billions of years naturally covering much of the earth in a layer of fertile soil.
Then mankind had this idea that the only purpose of soil was to hold the plants upright and we could supply all the nutrients the plants needed.
This idea is not just wrong, it is one of the biggest goofs mankind has ever made, we need the microbes in the soil and our use of inert chemicals is at the root cause of the modern epidemic of chronic diseases.
The snag is that the way nature created soil takes centuries, we need to do it in twelve weeks. This is not just a challenge for the chemists and micro-biologists it is an engineering problem of how to create the right conditions for the microbes to create the soil.
I am an engineer so that is my job.

The Tribox is the grandfather of the latest Gbiota boxes.
The top box is essentially a normal growing box just like the millions of pots that are used across the globe. It is filled with soil or if no soil is available commercial potting mix, and then seeded and watered on a regular basis.
It has holes in the base to drain any excess water away.
The difference between a regular growing pot and the top Tribox is that a conventional pot is watered with fresh clean water while the top Tribox is watered with a brown liquid full of nutrients and living microbes which we call soil blood as it does the same job as our blood – circulates nutrients and living cells around the system.

What should I grow? Sounds so simple but it is not.
Gbiota is about correcting deficiencies in our modern diet
Gbiota is not about total self sufficiency – I have tried that and it is not easy, actually it is just plain hard work and boring.
Gbiota is about filling in the holes left by our modern food system.
This is dominated by shelf life. We get food from all over the world by a highly complex distribution system which may be effective but takes time from harvest to table.
Microbes deficiencies – they breed and die fast

It is approaching thirty years since I was invited to go to Ethiopia to see if there was anything I could do to help feed people in one of those terrible droughts.

I could see the two issues were lack of water and nutrients. Nutrients were the easy bit, weeds may be a pain but they are incredibly effective at extracting the last bit of nutrients from the soil and they can then be used as fertiliser.

I have written many articles on making and managing Gbiota bed, in this article I want to give a simple description of the state of the art, I do this by telling the story.
The original Gbiota beds were developed in the early 2010’s when the real problem was droughts and the lack of rain.
Sump and pump system
They were very simple – just dig a trench – line with a sheet of plastic – and lay a length of Ag pipe in the base.
The trick was to use a leaky dam at the end bed so the pipe was raised at the end which forces the water out of the holes in the Ag pipe and into the soil.

Gbiota boxes, as there name suggests are enclosed and separate from any parent soil.

They do not have the benefit of access to the life forms which live naturally in soil and they are also limited in size.

They do have a theoretical advantage that there is no loss of water to the surrounding soil as is inevitable in an in ground bed but that is largely just a theoretical advantage as it is easy to plant around an in ground bed to use up any water which does wick out from the main bed.

If you have a garden and want to grow a reasonable quantity of food then in ground beds are really the way to go – if you are not convinced by the technical arguments they are simply a lot cheaper and easier to build.

Floods are making it more difficult to grow any food giving shortages and price hikes – how can we grow food with floods

I developed the original Gbiota beds to grow plants which act as natural pre and pro biotics by having a moist, not wet soil. It is very easy to make soil wet, just hump on the water which will breed up the harmful microbes. It is much more difficult get the soil just moist which the beneficial microbes prefer.

I developed the original system using a system of pumps, timers and drains in about 2015 when weather conditions were very dry and they worked fine. But I learned two things.

Many people do not want the bother of installing and maintaining pumps, timers and sumps and then then in 2020 the weather changed dumping massive amounts of water – multiple rains of over 100mm in a few hours. It is not just the water falling on my block – it is all that water falling on blocks higher than mine which create a torrential flow over my block which the then Gbiota beds just could not handle.

Sump beds were developed first as a way of taking advantage of the partial flood and drain cycle. They have been used for some years now and being automated are probably best suited to commercial growers.
However many home growers were put off by the apparent complexity of pumps and timers so I developed the basic beds which are extremely simple and effective but they do need a manual check on water levels. This makes them very suitable for the home grower who just wants a dead simple system – all you need is a spade, some ag pipe, either clay or plastic film and a bit if energy to dig a small trench.
They are almost embarrassingly simple and we see the becoming very popular with home and small scale growers. They can even be partially automated. I describe the more complex pump and sump system first as they illustrate the basic principles and make it easier to understand the deceptively simple basic beds.

Wicking beds are now very common across the globe. Many have a base filled with some inert material – often stones. These are just self watering pots – nothing wrong with that they make life more convenient by avoiding frequent watering. But for a self watering pot the material and water in the base is – or at least should be – inert, when they may stand for extended periods without going putrid (or maybe not if you keep on topping them up).

The key principle of Gbiota bed is to breed beneficial biology both for the soil and for our guts – creating the conditions which favour the beneficial biology – so they can out compete the harmful biology.

Just don’t fall into the trap in thinking you can load up a Wicking or Gbiota bed with inert potting mix – a bit may be useful in conditioning the soil – but it won’t feed the biology. You must provide food for the friendly bugs – if you don’t feed them they die. No debate – sorry.

Modern food, full of sugars, fats, salts and flavourings provides us with abundant energy, is tasty, cheap and convenient but lacks key minerals and biology.

Gbiota beds are not simply a watering system to grow cabbages – they are to breed the biology to grow plants as natural pre and pro biotics.

What the difference between a Wicking Bed and a Gbiota bed. The answer could be nothing.
The purpose of Wicking Beds is better use of water.
The purpose of Gbiota beds is to create biologically active nutrient rich soil to grow gut food (Gbiota food) – they are about how to make soil that will improve our gut biology and hence health span.

This is the easiest way I know to grow Gbiota food, it is dead simple and works fine but lacks the automated flood and drain features of a full blown Gbiota bed – but it is a great way to get started.

With the lock down I have been focusing on helping people set up their own Gbiota beds to strengthen their immune system. Virtually everyone can set up a Gbiota bed to improve theit health

We have the technical ability to grow food, which is convenient, taste good and is cheap in a way totally divorced from the conventional methods of food production, no longer needing soil and biology as the core of production but relying on chemistry.

Wicking beds are highly productive and water efficient, the reason why they were so water efficient is that the surface soil was dry so there was minimal loss of water by evaporation from the surface or seepage of water past the root zone.

Here is a link to the quick gbiota beds.pdf quick gbiota beds which explains how to make a quick Gbiota bed.

GBiota beds are simple to make and very productive in small areas

Soil is created by biological action but the wide spread use of chemicals and mechanisation is slowly but persistently destroying the soil on which human life depends.

I get angry about the way a few wealthy people manipulate the truth for their benefit leading to health and climate catastrophes. But not Auntie Maud, if she were alive today.