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Re: [compost_tea] Root nematodes in potatoes



Hi Merla -

You wrote:
A friend at the Farmer's Market at Sandpoint talked to me yesterday
about their problem with root nematodes.  She said they thought they
might have come in on some Yukon Gold potatoes they bought from Garden
City Seeds.  They have used hogs to try and get up every bit of potato
out of that field and then put a cover crop on it.  I told her about the
nematodes that eat root-feeding nematodes and that she could possibly
get some of these from SFI.  Does anyone have any suggestions as to what
they can do besides just wait three years in cover crop?  She also asked
whether root nematodes ate all other root crops or roots of all crops or
if there were specific ones they liked.

Best,

Merla Barberie


Your friends need to know for certain WHICH root-feeder is present.  Please have them get their soil tested so they know.  Let me suggest the Plant Clinic at Oregon State University as a good place to send the sample for analysis of the parasitic nematodes.

Once the nematodes have moved out of the potato and into the soil, rooting out the seed potato will remove any further infection, but the nematode is now present in that soil. 

The cover crop your freinds use HAS TO BE A NON-HOST plant for the lesion nematode.  The person to talk to about that is my husband, Russ Ingham, or the nematologist at Washington State University,..  Please e-mail my husband, russ.ingham@comcast.net

You MUST get the root system for whatever crop you are growing colonized with mycorrhizal fungi.  Inocula are available from EPM, Mycorrhizal Applications,
etc.

You need to get beneficial fungi into the soil.  The general diversity of fungi in AEROBIC compost includes a herd of nematode trapping and parasitic fungi.  I am not aware of any inocula that you can buy on the market, yet.  Stay tuned to the SFI e-zine, there are several places that are working on them

Beneficial nematodes are needed too.  Bacterial-feeding, fungal-feeding and predatory nematodes all interfer with the root-feeders.  But these are hard to get into the soil.  Compost with good numbers of the goodguys is needed.  See the SFI website for composts containing good diversity of nematodes.  SFI is working with other companies to produce nematode inocula, stay tuned to the e-zine for updates.

If you get all these mechanisms going, we have been able to drop root-feeders from near a hundred per gram to less than detectable within 6 months.  They should be able to grow potato again by next spring if they really get cracking on this. 

But testing is required to document that reduction.  OK?


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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