Re: [compost_tea] pH and nutrients - does this chart still apply?

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 09:42:21 EDT

The chart of availability of nutrients relates strictly to pH. Takes no
account of organic matter, salts, biology, roots, or anything else. It is
strictly true, based on just pH.

But biology is always changing pH around each individual. Roots change pH.
Bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, water-logging, and all kinds of other
things.

Take a soil pH, but that is just a sum of the pH in all the microsites, and
mixed together. It ignores the fact that pH was one thing next to the root,
something else
next ot the mucorrhizal fungus, somethign different yet again next to the
bacterium.

So, it is correct, once you add the organisms, pH is less important. And we
have data on a nearly 2 unit pH shift with addition of the biology to soil
wihthin a few weeks, and maintaining that pH shift for 6 months now over a large
acerage here in OZ.

And soil scientists will tell you that's impossible. They need to pay
attention to the biology.

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
www.soilfoodweb.com
SFI Oregon, USA
SFI Australia
SFI New York
SFI Europe
SFI New Zealand

"Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well,
but the conviction that what we are doing makes sense, no matter how things
turn out." -- Vaclav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic





Received on Tue Aug 12 2003 - 14:45:22 EDT

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