Big Dean
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Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2022 10:34 am

Worm and Compost tea

I have seen a couple of studies, one from U of Illinois, stating there is no evidence the either of them is beneficial to plants. I find this hard to believe. Almost every Garden channel on Youtube is expounding on how great these teas are for the plants. Can all these gardeners be wrong?

imafan26
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Joined: Tue Jan 01, 2013 8:32 am
Location: Hawaii, zone 12a 587 ft elev.

You have to remember that the point of organic gardening is not to feed the plants, but to feed the soil. If the soil is healthy and has a healthy soil web, technically, it will have enough to feed the plants. Compost tea and worm tea do have some nutrients, but their benefit mainly is not the nutrients. Lets face it most organic fertilizers are not high in nutrients that are readily available to plants. What composts and worm castings do have are that they are also rich in good microbes. Like the effective mirco organisms or EM1, they actually provide food for the soil organisms.

I did not find that organic fertilizers benefited yields, at least not in the first couple of years. What I did noticed was that the plants were shorter, yielded less, but were healthier overall. After about 3 years, then yields do improve, but still with a lot of inputs. You have to continuously replenish the compost and organic fertilizer in an organic garden and you have to supplement heavy feeders or if you do intensive planting.

I always add organic matter to my garden whenever it is redone. I have been practicing no til for three years. But I noticed a drop in fertility of the longer rooted plants. So, I have decided that I probably should till, just not every year. I prefer not to use organic fertilizer because, I do intensively plant my garden space and I do soil tests, so I only need nitrogen and organic has a hard time delivering nitrogen on demand to plants. And synthetic nitrogen does not have a smell.

When I have it, I do add a handful of vermicast to my containers.

Vanisle_BC
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Location: Port Alberni, B.C. Canada, Zone 7 (+?)

Re comments by @imafan; Tilling has the added advantage of disrupting the pathways/colonies of pests like wireworms & symphylans. If you combine tilling with careful inspection you can recognize exposed baddies and dispose of them, letting the harmless ones - garden centipedes etc - burrow back in. Of course inspection is not practical on a small scale; only with small garden plots & raised beds.

imafan26
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Posts: 13962
Joined: Tue Jan 01, 2013 8:32 am
Location: Hawaii, zone 12a 587 ft elev.

The baddies in my garden are nematodes, and the best way to deal with them is not to move the soil around to other parts of the garden. I have to plant marigolds and nematode resistant plants in those areas. No till also has the advantage for me of keeping weeds down. My garden was infested with nut sedge. Impossible to dig them out so I just planted around them. By covering the soil with newspaper and cardboard and adding compost or basically potting soil (about 4 inches ) on top, the nut sedge is buried so deep, they remain dormant. The weeds I am getting are blowing in from the surroundings since I am using bagged soils. The garden drains well and it is not hard to dig. It is nearly impossible to dig in my garden without digging up earthworms. The geckos wait in the wings to pounce on them. I found one centipede. I don't know where it came from. But nothing else has shown up. I do have ants, not so much inside the garden, but they like to nest in pots. The snails like to hide in the aloe.

The bad part about no till is that organic matter sinks, like organic gardens, you have to keep adding more organic matter every time you plant. Because fertility is staying mainly at the top, the shallow rooted plants do fine but the deeper rooted ones seem to be suffering. This last time. I decided to fork my garden soil before adding the cardboard layer to see if it helps with root penetration. I did a soil test last year, so I know fertility is not the issue.

The other thing I don't do is mulch and I don't do the chop and drop. Mulching gives snails and slugs more places to hide. When I do mulch, it is only in the large pots and I use the plastic potting bags as the mulch mainly to keep the weeds down and keep the pots from drying out too fast in summer.

I do have a lot of diseases just because it comes with the climate. Those leaves have to be trashed. The good leaves go to the worm bin. Most of the plants in my yard are not deciduous. Plumeria, ti, gardenia, roses all have disease problems that don't kill the plants, but I am constantly having to clean up and dispose of leaves.

My garden is small 8x16 ft oval. Instead of mulching, I plant intensively. Mainly I try to space plants so the leaves almost touch. Sometimes, I guess wrong and they do touch. Keeping the soil shaded has almost as much benefits as mulching for keeping the weeds down and the soil moist.

As for the benefits of the teas. It depends. You have to realize that the people who use them are applying them at a high rate. If they only used it once, you may not notice a difference because the nutrients they contain are so minute. The beneficial organisms in your soil, you won't be able to see, neither will you be able to see the microbes that are cultured in those teas that are being fed to those soil organisms.

It is hard to measure effectiveness of compost tea, because technically the studies are correct. The compost teas do not directly benefit the plants. They benefit the soil organisms. The people who expound the virtues of the compost tea are not scientists and it is comparing apples and oranges. The science would have to understand and test how the tea affects the soil biota, not the plants directly.



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