Why duck? Since when do the rantings of someone who obviously has not read any
of the materials scare you into ducking?

The information is out there. Garden centers do NOT make a lot of money selling
the tea. It could take a few years or at least one year to pay for the brewer.
I believe The Natural Gardener in Austin has a 500 gallon brewer. That can't be
cheap.

I think, as I told Pam, nobody was paying any attention to the baby and the baby
had to stir her stink.


On Mon, 08 Sep 2003 19:26:08 -0700, Tom Jaszewski
opined:

God your so ****ing contrary!
Yes there are chalatans, and there are flawed studies like
Chalker-Scott. But there are also incredible successes and the careful
users would NEVER say ACT cures anything..
Instant lab tests are very close to fruition. Don't knock what you
don't know based on your limited experience.

ducking



On Mon, 08 Sep 2003 19:05:59 -0700,
(paghat) wrote:

Dr. Chalker-Scott of the University of Washington Center for Urban
Horticulture has written a splendid article entitled "The Myth of Compost
Tea" which you can find on-line with a google search & download to your
desktop as a PDF file.

A lot of the "professional" advice about compost tea is driven by a
"professional" desire to mis-educate the public into believing something
they could very easily make at home for free cannot be made at home as
perfectly or as easily as paying dearly for a gallon made at a nursery, OR
requiring a lot of expensive equipment & ingredients to pull off
effectively. All one needs is a water tight barrel or large can, a compost
pile from which to obtain healthy sweet-smelling compost, a water hose to
fill the barrel, & if you really want to be fancy, a fifty-cent aquarium
stone, a dollar's worth of air hose, & a cheap aquarium pump.

A typical tea vendor who was both wholesaling & retailing compost tea &
tea-making equipment was giving lessons to local nurseries which he'd
convinced to carry his products. He claimed that to spray fruit treas with
his tea would prevent every known fruit disease & stop insects from eating
foliage or fruit. His was all-purpose organic stuff -- the list of what it
cured or prevented left nothing out. When a hand went up & he was informed
of a Washington University and University of Washington studies that
showed compost tea was worthless for the purposes he'd just outlined,
without batting an eye or skipping a beat the guy insisted it wasn't HIS
tea that W.U. & U.W. tested -- and HIS tea would do everything those
studies indicated isn't so.

One wholesaler admitted many such petty frauds exist. Then, preposterously
pretending to being the only honest company, promotes the idea that in
order to escape fraud, teas should be purchased only from certified
brewers (overlooking the fact that there is no certification process), &
the certified brewer should be asked for a required laboratory analysis of
the brew (which would be a dead brew before any lab analysis could be
obtained, supposing anyone really had the nerve to ask their nursery for
laboratory proof that their brews were alive & well). It would be great if
each vat of the stuff could be checked to see if it even had anything
alive in it. When brewed from water straight from a garden hose & unaged,
the chemicals added by to the county or city water supply will be
sufficient to kill off many of the microorganisms, rendering the tea
vastly less effective than it might otherwise have been. There are several
local nurseries that fresh-brew garden teas for their customers, & not a
one has any way of aging the water beforehand.So the customers lining up
on Compost Tea Day are buying it chlorinated -- & if instant lab tests
were possible, the microorganism count would turn out to be a mite shy of
staggering.

If you take a "course" designed by wholesale vendors for retail vendors to
foist onto the public, you end up believing all sorts of nonsense such as:
1) these teas are good sources of nematodes (they are in the main ly good
for fungal & bacterial microorganisms); that 2) there are ten kinds of tea
for ten uses & ten more for ten different kinds of plants (it is not
impossible to make teas that target certain predators by the addition of
specific nematodes, but nothing from a nursery brewer is so formulated &
they should stop promising anything more than a balance of fungal &
bacterial organisms); that 3) you need fancy equipment so you might want
to save on that investment by bringing in some milk bottles & buy it
dearly from the nursery; that 4) it will even kill fire ants when used
properly; &5) sundry other falsehoods or half-truths.

Many of companies manufacturing overpriced equipment must first dupe
nurseries, showing them how they WILL get filthy rich (though few ever
will) promoting a mixture of bonifide & trumped up ideas about compost
tea, & retailing all sorts of unnecessary products to gullible dweebs who
probably THOUGHT that expensive vat wasn't necessary but were too
befuddled by the dubious claims to follow that thought to the logical
conclusion not to buy any of it. The wholesalers & equipment manufactures
are often the exact same people who previously (sometimes still) promote
vermiculture as an easy road to riches. They hornswoggled morons into
believing they could get rich raising worms -- but the flimflam became too
well-known & notorious so that by now only the dumbest hilljack would any
longer borrow all his elderly mother's savings to buy everything he needs
to be a worm farmer, believing the city dump will be buying billions of
worms from him any day now for their municiple composting needs. And you
too can get rich licking envelops at home. A lot of swindles went
unpunished on the municiple-dumps-need-worms lie, but now the swindlers
have moved on to compost tea as the latest "how to get rich selling free
horseshit" gravy train. Fresh ideas, & fresh marks, were needed, &
obtained. The worm farm deceptions are now compost tea deceptions aimed
first at convincing the nurseries they should spend a good deal of money
setting themselves up to thereafter sell dirt-water that cost them nothing
& made them $5 per little squirt. The promise of obscene profits conjured
out of cowshit & horseshit motivates many struggling nursery owners to let
themselves be fooled before they start fooling us.

What you likely won't be told when you go to the "instructional" course
which is framed to teach you to be a duped customer is that good watering
technique & good organic mix in the soil has a LOT more to do with the
healthful microorganism population than do teas, & that adhering to a
correct watering schedule & topcoating with leafmold &/or composted
manures will do every bit as much as teas at keeping the microorganism
population at maximum levels. The best soils around are loamy forest
floors, & no one added compost teas to that -- you'd be doing your garden
more good by not carting away all the grass clippings & fallen leaves than
by buying tea. Overall the sales pitch posing as instruction wants to make
compost tea sound like the end-all magic potion for all your problems, &
without it your garden is doomed. Second they want to make it sound
essential to spend a lot of money on this magic stuff, either for ghastly
overpriced equipment that'll work no differently that a laundry tub
dragged down from the attic, or to buy it in gallon jugs made from
chlorinated water & "discounted" if you bring in lots of white plastic
milk bottles for them.

A typical half-truth: Compost tea prevents or cures pathogenic fungal
diseases in the garden.
Truth: Pathogenic funguses are less likely to invade gardens with a
healthy balance of microorganisms.
Horticulatural station analyses have shown that using compost teas as
plant sprays for fungal defense has about the same practical value as
spraying with kelp or any number of other things -- for some funguses it
has no effect at all. Yet the tea vendors will want you to believe their
stuff is the only good stuff.

Another fraud involves compost teas used in further admixtures --
including admixtures of prepared compost teas & vinegar, which will NOT
assist the microorganism population & will probably harm it.

Yet another of the false claims for compost tea is that it infuses the
(vegetable) garden with homeopathic & allopathic remedies, because these
hornswoggling crooks do understand there is a direct connection between
the belief in garden rubble as herbal magic health cures, & manure water
as equally supernatural.

This relative new industry will never be policed any better than
aromatherapy & other crackpot ideas that people WANT to be suckered into
believing. There is more value to compost tea than aromatherapy of course,
but as tricked out by vendors, the very real value is mystified & expanded
& riddled with fraudulant claims all designed to part you from your money
-- for stuff you could've made with very little trouble for no cost
whatsoever!

In Canada the Canadian Standards Board's Committee on Organic Agriculture
has put its sights on the compost tea industry as a bundle of petty
frauds, deceptions, & intentional mis-educating methods of creating a
fooled & captive consumer base -- although so far they've mainly required
honest C:N ratio information (which doesn't address the primary deceptions
& half-truths this dubious element of the organics industry relies on) &
defines some temperatures & methodology requirements to at least keep the
industry from selling toxic fecal matter to their gullible customers. In
the US, alas, there is not even this moderate level of watchdogging. You
being misinformed about how to treat your garden organically isn't high on
anyone's consumer protection list, the attitude seemingly being that if
you're dumb enough to believe your own one-gallon milk bottle filled up
for $6 with dirty water is a bargain, then you deserve what you get for
being dumb as a stick.

Because the chemical companies have lied to gardeners for decades causing
gardeners to help infuse the environment with toxins of all varieties,
there's a strong desire to believe in any & all alternatives that come
along. "Organic" on a product or system is so often a scam, it is simply
meaningless. Compost teas assuredly have an important position in
gardening, but there is no strong demarkation between the people who
retailed PCBs yesterday & are now just going with what else can sell
today. At least you're not being convinced to cause great harm with the
particular pack of lies & half-truths surrounding compost tea
salesmanship, but neither are you dealing with strictly honest people, &
you may not be doing half as much good as they convinced you would happen,
& at the very least you're being bilked for stuff that could be made free
at home & be not one whit less effective.

-paghat the ratgirl