Re: [compost_tea] Root nematodes in potatoes

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 06:46:32 EDT

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_at_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





Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 11:39:16 EDT

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