In article , Pam wrote:

paghat wrote:

There are many negatives to consider. Looking on the web, most websites
about compost tea are selling products or services & are riddled with
myths, exaggerations, & outright lies designed to sell, not to inform.
Anecdotes are used in place of evidence, & there are "it worked for me"
testimonies up the wazoo. What most gardeners know of compost teas they
learned at local nurseries invested in building a clientelle for a
high-profit-margin product (dirty water) the components of which the
nursery cannot actually predict or control, promoted as good for sundry
benefits that are not actually proven. Tjere are many things about Compost
Tea that are potentially very harmful but all the "customer" is told is
it's an organic miracle doing only good.

A whole lot more snipped.......

Amazing! It only takes one, albeit your typical overly wordy and highly
opinionated, posting such as this to negate whatever potentially
positive input
I begin to feel you may share with this group. While you are very quick
to jump
on the 'down with the evil, money grubbing, environmentally raping and
pillaging Monsanto' bandwagon, you hasten to adopt the self-same righteous
indignation regarding the benefits of compost tea as those you castigate with
respect to the safety of glyphosate/ RoundUp - despite mounting evidence
to the
contrary (and yes, that includes a LOT of closely controlled and monitored
ongoing scientific trials), you dismiss it as a lot of snake oil hocus-pocus
and yet another wild conspiracy by shoddy nursery owners to dupe the
unsuspecting customer.

Evils being all relative, toxic chemicals promoted by industry are apt to
be far worse than "organic" options. But anyone who seriously believes
anything labeled "organic" is automatically good is going to make a lot of
bad choices.

What you don't know about compost tea is startling and you obviously have not
bothered with any firsthand practical experience to reflect on (no way those
sneaky nurseryowners are gonna pull any fast ones on you!). And you
continue to
demonstrate a remarkable lack of knowledge regarding the retail nursery
industry in general.

Your garden is obviously stunning and your plant knowledge impressive,
but your
understanding of the professional aspects of horticulture leave a lot to be
desired. Stick to the plants, ratgirl. It's what you know best.

No group hug necessary this evening, Tom :-)

pam - gardengal

Again, to quote horticulturist Dr Chalker-Scott of the University of
Washington, "In the peer-reviewed literature...field-tested compost tea
reported no difference in disease control between compost tea & water."

That's the fact of it! If YOU as a vendor of this stuff never promoted it
for disease control, but only as an organic fertilizer rather less
predictable & inferior to mulching with compost, then good on you, you'd
be the only one. That your angry commentary on my having negated anything
postive I've ever only almost done is very amusing, especially as I posted
only what could be gleaned from the actual science. If I was selling it at
work as you've done, I might feel more disposed to disbelieving the
science & preferring vendors' sales pitches. I won't go so far as you have
gone & suggest all the good you've done is now no longer any good because
you are also in favor of a fraud. I will say that when you decide to be
wrong, you can are quite often VERY wrong.

Because the uninvested, peer-reviewed science just isn't with you on
this. There are a few positive studies for which outcomes could not be
duplicated or which though positive still were inferior to topcoating
composts & other practices. For pathogens, control studies comparing
compost teas to plain waters tend to find them identical in effect. For
impact on microorganisms, the effects are slight & temporary & even when
effective, inferior to compost mulching.

Thousands of COMMERCIALLY motivated enterprises, including your vaunted
nursery trade, are saying LOTS of stuff that is outright false about the
values of teas. They exaggerate what is actually good, they trump up
scientifically unproven additional good, & they leave out useful
information on what is negative & needs to be taken into consideration
before selecting this option. Nursery interests have allowed themselves to
be convinced of many falsehoods in order to retain some self-respect while
duping others as they have been duped. But as the science IS accessible,
this self-deception that preceeds duping others is not a very good excuse
for what is ultimately dishonest & self-serving foremost, helpful to
gardeners as a distant third.

Pop-articles in journals that sell advertising to vendors praise it.
Nurseries that sell it praise it. Thousands of amateur & commercial
websites & bulletin board posts praise it. Alas for all these, the
peer-reviewed science looks for evidence & finds it by & large lacking.
Sadly for the gardening public, science ends up in journals read only by
other scientists, & pop bullshit is all most people tend to see.
Falsehoods begin to look true by weight of repetition -- but the fewer
ctual field studies conducted with controls do still trump the thousands
of promotionals & personal testimonies that deny the science.

It's a fertilizer sure & can be as good as other fertilizers. But effects
on pathogens turn out to be roughly equivalent to regular watering -- &
very good in preventing pathogens on THAT level. The slow chemical action
REQUIRED by both plants & microorganisms are achieved with topcoatings of
composts & natural leafmold, not by dousings with teas. The desire for
short-cut repairs that work instantly is threatening to watersheds; the
teas not retained in soils for long periods of time. You seem even to
dismiss such patently false assertions as teas functioning as pesticides
when they do not, including beneficial nematodes which in reality are not
credibly a part of the nursery preparations, stopping pathogens when they
in reality do so mainly at the level of proper watering, or repairing
anearobic soil problems which teas in no way do even to the slightest
degree. Yet these are standard claims despite that they are completely
baseless.

I don't dismiss that it is a liquid fertilizer which IF properly produced
at the correct temperatures & without chlorinated water & used very
quickly has microorganisms in it. I do maintain that better & more lasting
results can be had by other methods, particularly with organic topcoatings
& proper watering. Multiple peer-reviewed studies show that the teas leach
out of soils too rapidly to be of more than transient benifit, & find
their way into watersheds as would not occur with compost topcoatings.

There are two overviews by Chalker-Scott which compare the pop beliefs &
promotional claims versus the peer-reviewed science. And your attitude
complete with your catchy advertising jargon like "decanting a brew" when
describing dumping some manure-water out of plastic milk jug -- just don't
hold up as all that truthful or real. You represent the vested interests
of the nursery trade & so favor vendor-generated beliefs & editorializings
over the science, holding on to profitable delusions. Chalker-Scott
herself is an organics advocate -- like myself she has found ways of
maintaining the fertility of her soils without much fertilizer at all
(though she uses some bone meal & I will not dump rendering-plant products
in my garden), & is an activist against commercial pesticides, always
advocating natural alternatives (but alarmed when she sees vendors
claiming compost teas are one of the pesticide alternatives).

Certainly she is not invested in savaging a profitable fad on the basis of
it being a good idea she wants to ruin for no reason at all. Compost tea
is a mediocre-to-good idea with some positives & some equally real
negatives & a vast number of completely false claims for it that the
science does not substantiate. That's what she has stated in the context
of the extant science; it's what I find vastly more creditable than your
vendor-perspective that Paghat is a menace to gardening for dissing a
profitable product.

Besides her two overviews of the actual field-tested, peer-reviewed, &
published science world-wide (such as does not find compost teas the
end-all vendors claim), she has also been involved in original studies at
the University Arboretum testing compost tea against controls measuring
the incidents of pathogens -- & found compost tea sometimes useful for a
few things though never superior to surface composting, frequently
inferior to surface composting, & for fungal pathogens no more beneficial
than plain water (which is beneficial). She also outlines the reasons for
how each batch has radically different mixes of microorganisms so that
fully controlled studies are difficult, outcomes uneven, findings
unduplicable -- so when vendors promise specific outcomes & values &
specific values for various "brews" they are in essence promising that
which is a practical impossibility.

The main thing I keep in mind is that comparative studies found that
microorganism activity is best sustained by mulching with compost & proper
watering, or even mulching with leaf-fall, & compost teas do not equal
these other practices in effectiveness for sustaining a healthful
microorganism population & correct level of nitrogen.

So yes, absolutely, I do placed the field studies of uninvested
horticultural stations heads & tails above the vested interests of
vendors. This is potentially a cash cow, turning cowshit into dollars, &
it's going to be very hard on the industry to let go of the big lie that
compost is an intermediary product on the way to being tea, that teas
brewed by nurseries are worth blowing one's money on to get something
better than can be made at home for free,

There are ten ways of doing most things in a garden. Teas have a place in
the larger canon, but a place rather less vaunted than vendors require. If
people continue to be flimflammed into believing its as great as you, a
vendor, want them to believe, then its more limited but real value is
diminished by overuse for all the wrong reasons.

For Chalker-Scott the "bottom line" was this: Be reluctant to add
chemicals to your garden even if they are "organic," including compost
tea. No one really expects the nursery trade to be quite that honest &
tell people to "Go home & think about it, you probably don't actually need
what we're selling." But consumers had damn well better be aware before
hand that what they tell you -- that it retards pathogens, is an organic
pesticide, & all the others extravagant fibbery, "You definitely need our
product" is just one more thing that ain't necessarily so.

Would I ever use compost tea? I have made it, I have used, I will do so
again. But only for what it has been found actually to POSSIBLY benefit. I
have a few still-ungardened areas that I never water because there's
nothing I've planted in those areas, the soil is compacted & poor. Someday
I will enrich the soils, I might "blast" it with a heavy shot of
microorganisms in a homemade aerated tea that'll cost me exactly zero
pennies. But once the soil is charged I will expect good management to
sustain the micororganisms without further need of teas, using instead the
better maintanance of mulched composts & regular watering. If nurseries
only sold this stuff for what it was useful for, they wouldn't even bother
because they wouldn't be able to sell enough to pay for the time. And
they'd end up telling people who might REALLY benefit from it how to do it
easily & without cost.

-paggers

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/