And I've come to the conclusion that people who post extremely long messages
have made the internet their life. The garden is virtual.

--
Compostman
Washington, DC
Zone 7
"paghat" wrote in message
news
In two posts ,
screamed & scribbled:

I've come to the conclusion when this newsgroup is relatively quiet,
someone
will post something verbose and ignorant to get the hackles up with
people who
know the information, and who actually are professionals in the
horticulture
industry. [snip contentless tirade] not the way it's being described
in
the hugely snipped troll. I guess it got too quiet in here.

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


Tch tch. When someone has not a leg to stand on & has read nothing
whatsoever beyond some advertising claims, all they can do is resort to
"you're a stinky baby!" or pretend that professional retailing is
horticulture, or respond to specific & valid information with citation of
source as "ignorant!" "troll!" Attempting that feeby to counter the ACTUAL
field studies & research of ACTUAL horticultural professors who are
careful to sort out what is myth from what is valid in amateur organic
horticultural practices with nothing more rational than "ignorant stinky
baby!" reflects badly on no one but yourself. Having reality on my side I
don't have to resort to the contentless childishness of just calling you a
trolly stinky ignorant infant.

So for now you're angrily committed to not sorting out what little is
beneficial from the larger sales pitch the science does not support.
Perhaps when you get over having your illusions shattered you'll actually
read the research & see that it is quite different from the promo
literature.

It IS interesting to see, though, that the anti-organic people who just
LOVE chemicals are not always wrong about greenies not caring what is
true. Fortunately most of the greenies I hang with do know the difference
between evidence & a sales pitch & likely had their doubts about this
latest fad. It IS a tragedy that the science doesn't support more than one
out of ten of the wild claims for compost tea, but there it is, & you can
put your head in the sand & call your betters names till the cows come
home, but in this case (to put it at the intellectual level you're capable
of) I'm right, you're wrong, neener.

-paggers

"In the peer-reviewed literature...field-tested compost tea reported no
difference in disease control between compost tea & water." [Linda
Chalker-Scott, PhD, University of Washington horticulturalist]





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

--
"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/