The Helpful Gardener
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Ch. 18 Compost Teas

Now as someone with a thirty page comopost tea thread on his website, I don't need to tell you I'm a fan of the compost tea. This is about the smartest way I know to move biology around and through the soil profile. it is a little more work but once you start you will quickly see it is time well spent...

Jeff is geared toward the commercial brewers and I think that is wise for most homeowners. Sure you can go cheaper or bodge it together yourself, but the commercial ones are set and rated for specific amounts and come with instruction; not a bad thing for the first timer. Sure you can do it with a bucket and airstone and Jeff shows you how, but if you need more than ten gallons at a whack (enough for about 10,000 sq. feet of lawn at 1:1 dilution, or a twenty five by twenty five garden undiluted) then buying one can make sense...

While I agree with 99% of Jeff's pronouncements, his last bit about E.coli needs an addendum. You brew with the biology you start with, and E.coli is a facultative anaerobe, perfectly able to survive aeration and just waiting for things to slip below the six ppm DO2 level. If you start with E.coli, you sure can finish with it, and it does not take much to overfertilize a tea, get a bacterial bloom that crashes the O2, and POW, you have E.coli tea. This is one reason we are adamant about making sure you have enough air; underpowered brewing can make something your lawn and garden are better off without...

HG

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rainbowgardener
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Agree that again it's not entirely backyard gardener friendly. I'm not going to spend $150 on up for a compost tea brewers and the reason I don't do teas is the equipment and the necessity for cleaning it all, etc.

But he threw in a little tip in there. Adding things like kelp, fruit pulp, soybean meal, oat bran, to your finished compost and "germinating" it for awhile, makes very fungal compost. So what was all the stuff in the compost chapter about different piles and recipes, if I can have fungal compost when ever I want just by incubating it in a warm place with oat bran...

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Well, RBG, if you just piled kelp or fruit pulp and got good fungal compost, I guess you wouldn't need recipes, but I doubt it's that easy...

I can't fault Jeff's recipes; they look a lot like Elaine Ingham's recipe's and I sure won't start second guessing her...

HG

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Now, this was a really great chapter.

I liked how it went in-depth (although, I'll admit I expected nothing less from this book, by now) on how to make the tea more bacterial or fungal and also showed how various supplemental additions affected the tea.

I've been wondering about the ramifications of running act through a pump sprayer and this chapter detailed how the sprayer should be set.

Although the disease-preventing effectiveness of ACT is often downplayed, the book really elaborates on it, indicating that it can prevent (or slow the progression of), among other diseases, the dreaded squash-killing powdery mildew. It also said that there is no such thing as too much tea :).

It also made me a lot more confident about my system. It said that for a pump, get the biggest aquarium pump you can and that the better ones are duel-outlet pumps. My pump is not huge, but it is a duel-outlet one and my air-stone is twice as long as the one in the picture (it is slightly longer than the bottom of the bucket), so I'm thinking that my setup is doing fine.

It also mentions that any bubble bigger than one millimeter is fine and will not harm the microbes. I'm thinking that just about any standard fish-tank airater is going to produce bubbles larger than that.

This chapter does conflict with our ACT thread, though. We came to an informal conclusion in our thread that it is best to use 1 gal. of water in a five gal. bucket. The authors, however, seem to indicate that a full 4 or 5 gal. is appropriate. I wonder if it really makes much difference?

I've noticed in the past few chapters that the author does seem to be adverse to using manures in our composting and mulching. I guess they must not be that essential to the soil food web that we need to add more than what is already naturally present.

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I have found manure based composts to have wider ranges of biology; for instance there is a particular fungi I have only EVER seen in cow based composts. There is a benefit in increased diversity in my mind that outweighs any hazard presented; I simply suspect Jeff doesn't share my view.

I understand the other side entirely; all it takes is one yahoo not paying attention and creating E. coli tea, and the next thing you know "Organics poisons thousands."

I get the damage done by such an episode, but the reality is that when done correctly with sufficient oxygenation, this is highly unlikely. Not impossible, but neither is getting hit by a meteorite, or attacked by a shark, and I don't lose sleep there. Heck, I even ride in cars; have you seen the statistics?

HG

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rainbowgardener
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Likely is true there's more microbial diversity when you compost with manure. Question is do the plants really NEED that. As a city dwelling vegetarian who has never used any manures or animal products in her garden/ compost, I can testify that my plants do just fine without it. Would they be better/ bigger/ higher yielding with it? I don't know, never did the experiment. But they are full sized productive plants....

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I see your point, HG. That's true that all it really takes is one person to ruin it for everyone else. Also, for some reason, whenever something that is found to be good does something bad, it is always published way more, even though it is rare.

RBG, like you said, it may make a difference, but the authors seem to have concluded that is wasn't so great a difference that it would have made the book suffer by excluding mention of it.



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