|
|
Compost tea: Here's a spray we can live with
By Richard Houghton
April 23, 2003 |
|
Late spring last year I was shopping at the Farmers Market at the Depot and noticed that my friend was selling a new item at her produce stand.
Several gallon jugs of a dark liquid labeled "compost tea" were for sale along with her usual display of fabulous organic produce. A couple of jugs fit in the basket of my bicycle along with some carrots and broccoli, and so I pedaled home to give it a try.
At her suggestion I diluted it in a 10-1 ratio and sprayed it on the leaves of my hundred-plus fruit trees. It was a combination of faith and rudimentary scientific understanding that motivated my efforts. I could grasp that the liquid was full of millions of microscopic organisms that might displace or consume the fungus organisms that bedeviled my attempts at organic fruit culture.
I also understood that plants absorb many nutrients through their leaves and that the efficiency of foliar feeding is well-documented. But I could only wait and see what my own results might be.
One of the most exciting things for me was the experience of spraying something that I had no misgivings about. It didn't smell bad, the way lime-sulphur does, and I didn't care what it landed on, whether unintended plants, or the chickens that scratched nearby, or bees, or myself.
I had a profound sense that what I was doing was spraying the life on my trees, and though it might sound a bit visionary and idealistic, I had heard of a farmer in Eastern Washington who injected compost tea into his center-pivot irrigation systems and then flew over the fields taking infra-red pictures to see if they had missed anything. The infra-red photos were showing the heat of metabolic activity and the fields were bright with life.
Peach leaf curl has always been a problem on the 12 "Frost" peaches in my orchard. The leaves would emerge and almost immediately start crinkling and turning reddish purple until I picked them off or they fell off. Then a new set of leaves would emerge and the process would repeat. I had already lost one set before I sprayed the compost tea, and so I waited to see. But this time the leaves emerged flat and dark green and I saw no more curling for the rest of the summer!
Scab on the apple trees has always been my other nemesis. The skin of the apples would start turning blotchy with dark rough patches that would later crack and release enough juices for a dark mold to colonize. In severe cases the leaves would also get covered in dark spots and would shrivel and fall off.
"Cox Orange Pippen" was one variety that was particularly susceptible and I wondered if the trees would even survive. The apples would average about 2 1/2 inches across and many were unusable even for juice. Last year, after three or four sprayings of tea, I had pippens that averaged 4 inches across with no cracking, molding, or other signs of scab damage.
A neighbor who makes his own compost tea from his earthworm compost sprays it on his 1,500 roses and swears he has no black spot, the curse of rose growers in the Northwest.
So I'm excited. I bought my own tea brewer, a device that pumps a steady supply of air into the infusion of compost to stimulate the growth of beneficial microorganisms, and I'm looking forward to a new season.
If my own results continue to mirror the ongoing research and lab discoveries, then I foresee a bright future for organic agriculture in general, and a ray of hope for the planet.
Top of Page | Back to Articles |
|
|
