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Re: [compost_tea] Deer Repellants and dormant or hort oils - do they mix with...



We don't remove all the organmic matter from the ground around the roses.  that's food for the fungi, 

But we have to make sure that the fungi that use the dead plant material are the beneficial fungi, not the disease fungi.  So, the trick is to inoculate the dead plant material with the beneficials, and get them growing, not the diseases.

If you use AACT, then you reduce the disease on the leaf material, and managing the dead litter material is less tricky. 

Total sanitation is the way IPM has to work right now, because they still kill off all most of the beneficials.  We all know how impossible total sanitation actually is, so doing something about the disease burden using compost or tea on the litter - even a couple time if you have really bad black spot - and reducing disease through use of the tea, coupled with sanitation of leaves that escape the tea spray and get diseased, works well.

Removed plant material should be put in a compost pile THAT HEATS PROPERLY.  So, if you aren't willing to make sure enough high N is added to the pile to get adequate heating, then you will need to compost with worms, who also take out the diseases.  Or compost for a couple years, making sure the pile is occassionally turned so any disease gets well competed against by the complex set of biology that should be present in a good compost pile.

If you throw organic matter in a pile, that doesn't mean you are composting.  If the pile starts to stink, you may well be helping the diseases grow faster and better than the good guys. 

Sanitation is a good thing, but it is far from our only tool against diseases.

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
www.soilfoodweb.com
SFI Oregon, USA
SFI Australia
SFI New York
SFI Europe
SFI New Zealand

"Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what we are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out."   --  Vaclav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic


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