[dcarch]

I know, I should do a little more reading up on this topic to participate this discussion and I have not. I am indeed sorry if I make some uneducated comments.

What I don’t understand:

• If you let a gallon of whatever “compost tea” evaporate, what do you have left behind? Not even ½ of a tea spoon’s worth of substance? What can this do? Is this better than one cubic foot of compost?

• I have a hard time understanding tilting the soil can kill microbes and little good bugs. I tilt every year to as deep as 36” my soil is still very productive. I have a bread machine, it kneads the dough like crazy, yet the yeast gets even more active. Microbes are so small and pervasive, machining can never kill them.

• I understand if you have poor soil to begin with, any thing you do will be beneficial, but if you have a good amount of organic matter in the soil which is well balanced, I don’t see any need to add any more “beneficial microbes”. My problem has been to keep my plants under control; they are growing crazy. I don’t want them to grow any bigger or faster.

• If the beneficial microbes are more powerful than the bad ones in you soil, by the law of survival of the fittest, they would have been there to begin with.

• At the end, the most fertile soil will get depleted depending on how intensive you use it and you will have to replenish it with fertilizer, organic or chemical. I am finding it interesting that there are still people trying to convince others that there is such a thing as “perpetual fertile soil”.

• Assuming that the soil is in its optimal condition, the vigor of plants is governed by genetics, very few things can significantly change the growth habits except environmental factors (light, temperature, etc. Gibberellin acid can do crazy things to plants). Isn’t this true?

• “----by making nutrients available that are otherwise locked in the soil and unavailable to the plants---“

I am not challenging this statement; I am not sure what nutrients can be locked in the soil and become unavailable to the plants. Everything eventually decomposes. In any case, the nutrients which are “locked”, wouldn’t it be a simpler thing just to add more fertilizer?

dcarch ???