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Re: [compost_tea] Re: CT Strawberries?



If you want to know if CT will help, you could do some testing. 

Even in mid-winter, you can do some testing.  Take your plants, whatever you want to use, and plant them in potting soil.  Pot up about 10 plants.  Easy enough.

Choose 5 of the plants, randomly.  Treat with conventional fertilizer, pesiticides if necessary.  The other 5 get CT, in the amounts and timing recommended.

See which set of plants grow and taste better.  but please, make certain the compost tea you make is good stuff.  The Bitti-brewer, the KIS machines, the small EPM machines would all be great to make the tea for a small experiment like this one.  Then repeat in the garden in the summer.  
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With strawberries, there isn't just ONE way to go sustainable.  You can do plug plants, you can do CT, or you can do the full-soil replacement with compost approach, where in mere minutes you can go from sick soil to healthy.  And the strawberries will taste like strawberries.  But you do have to make sure it is quality compost and CT.  And that pesticide drift doesn't reach the CT strawberries. 

If the strawberries die of some fungal disease, suspect that the compost wasn't really compost.
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Which is what happened in a Seattle study in which SFI was SLIGHTLY involved.  I was asked what to do to make a golf course in Seattle sustainable.  So, I came up to Seattle, and explained what was needed. 

There was SEVERE resistance to what I said, to the point that one of the golf-course people threatened me with a lawsuit because I said I work with John Moore, in Texas.  I said at the meeting that Jim Moore wasn't a part of the USGA, but the person didn't listen to that.   He called up some person, also named Jim Moore, who also lives in Texas, that happens to work with the US Golf Association, and told that Jim Moore that I had said that I worked with him.  So this person I didn't know calls me the next day and threatens a lawsuit. 

How many Jim Moores are there in Texas?  Probably thousands.  OK, ones that also work on turf?  At least two, apparently. 

Well, there has never been a lawsuit, because the whole thing was ridiculous.  But the experience put me off.  I didn't want to have anything to do with the project after that.  I have learned that if there is that much resistance, you don't push to do something that will be sabatoged.

Anyway, the consulting company doing the project tested ONE compost sample (snort, like a one-time sample tells you what any compost company routinely produces).  People have told me that the data from that one compost appears on some internet site. 

The consulting company then apparently decided to use a DIFFERENT compost company than the one from which they sent the compost for SFI to test. 

They never tested the CT they made.  Just because the compost is ok, does that automatically mean the CT is good stuff? 

As far as I could tell, they NEVER adequately cleaned the compost tea machine during in the whole study.  On my second visit, a full nine months after the first visit, I pointed out to them that their machine stunk.  And that was in late fall, when it was cool, nearly winter.  What do you suppose the machine smelled like in mid-summer?  Several of the people there told me that the tea smelled really bad when it was applied.  So, was it compost tea they applied? 

Was it a fair test of compost tea?

The study got published and SFI's names was associated with the situation.  But SFI was not involved except in a very minor way.  Our recommendations were NOT followed.  CT was never made.  Chemicals were routinely applied on the golf course, and then they had the gall to say they tested CT and showed it didn't work?    

If I give you a vitamin, and then shove poison down your throat, can I say that the vitamin killed you?   You died after receiving the vitamin, what else could have caused the problem?  

I talk about situations where compost tea didn't work.  But it has to be a clear situation where compost tea was made.  The Seattle consulting company did not make compost tea.  The study performed is a good demonstration of the failure of anaerobic, stinky, smelly putrefying organic matter tea. 

SFI was not involved in any significant, realistic, or substantial manner. 

Sorry for the rant, but it annoys me when this kind of poor "science" is foisted on people. 

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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