Re: [compost_tea] same recipe

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 14:00:48 EST

I'm catching up on e-mails from being in OZ and away from phones. I like
Darwin a great deal......

So the brews were run subsequently, which may explain the differences in
oxygen use. If the temperatures during the yellow run were higher, that means the
organisms grew more rapidly in the tea using the foods you added.

There is a direct relationship between oxygen use by growing organisms and
temperature. The higher the temperature, the less efficient the growth of
bacteria and thus the more rapid their growth, but the more energy that is expended
in respiration. There is a cost to rapid growth.

And if temperature is higher, then the precise species mix is different in
the different brews. So, different species growing, different efficiencies on
those food resources.

If we were dependent on a few species to do the job to improve plant growth,
then we'd be up a creek without a paddle as temperatures shifted.

Luckily, one of the major things in good compost is that we have literally
tens of thousands of bacterial species, and maybe ten thousand species of fungi.
 They ALL get transferred to the compost tea. They all get to the plant
surfaces, and the ones that the plant is going to feed get to grow on the plant
surface. That may be a different set of species than what we grew up in the tea
brewer.

So why do we brew? We need to overwhelm the surfaces of the plants with
those organisms that will occupy the infection sites on the leaf surfaces. Just a
few hundred, maybe as many as a thousand, species actually grow to high
number in the tea during brewing, but we need that so the leaf surfaces get fully
covered. Putting on lots of species means that even if they are not exactly
the right set, some of them will be close enough to protect the leaf, and some
of them are ready to grow ASAP.

That's why most compost extracts don't work that well - they don't
concentrate the organisms enough, and the organisms are not awake and ready to grow when
they reach the leaf surfaces that need protecting.

Compost leachates don't generally get the organisms out of the compost - just
the soluble nutrients, enyzmes and growth hormones come out.

So, different growth conditions mean different species mix of bacteria and
fungi growing, so the oxygen curve may be different as a result. But notice how
similar the curves are with respect to shape. The max oxygen use occurs at
about 6 hours, so your compost must be pretty well activated, or you are adding
someting where the organisms are already active and growing to get peaks in
oxygen use that early on.

As temperature was lower in the other runs, the peak in use of oxygen
occurred later and later, as organism wake up and growth was less and less rapid.

Hope this helps!

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc,
1128 NW 2nd ST., Suite 120
Corvallis, Oregon
Soil Foodweb Inc., Australia
Soil Foodweb Inc., New York
Soil Foodweb Inc., New Zealand
Soil Foodweb Inc., The Netherlands
Soil Foodweb Inc., Mexico
Board Member, Sustainable Studies Institute, Eugene, OR

"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 Wed Mar 17 2004 - 14:59:07 EST

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