[compost_tea] Re: The Crystal ball concept

From: chriscreid <reidchris_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 16:09:43 -0000

--- In compost_tea_at_yahoogroups.com, "John Cowan" <vivax_at_n...> wrote:
> If you put tea on your plants and they obviously grow much better,
does not this confirm in some way that the tea was "good"?

Hi John, let me ask another question: If you put tea on your plants
and they don't obviously grow better, does this not confirm in some
way that the tea was bad? I don't think so. That's much harder nut
to crack.

If people are doing a "side by side" test (see Elaine's cautions
about biology migrating into your control plot) and doing exactly
the same thing to two plots, except that you put tea on one and not
the other, then there's no discussion - it's likely that you have
your evidence right there one way or other. But this is not
evidence for all tea, it is evidence for your situation, your
conditions, and your tea. It is when we add up many many
experiences and begin to see patterns that we can make statements
about "tea", and even then we may be doing ourselves a disservice by
continuing to use a generic term for a distinct set of teamaking
conditions/ingredients/compost. Elaine is in a better position to
say whether she sees value in this kind of distinction since she
sees so many lab results. Others who do a great deal of tea testing
and applying and have varied their recipe may also say if they see
significant differences in what different kinds of tea are doing.

So, coming back to "I put tea in plot A and plot B and see no
difference" Does this mean tea doesn't work? Then I have to ask,
work to do what? What is it we are asking tea to do here and is tea
going to start at the place we want it to start? And how long will
we give tea to do it? And does the tea contain the biology that
will get us there? IF I can't see a difference in upper plant
growth, are the roots doing something I don't see? Is there another
process going on in the soil such as pesticide breakdown? Am I
doing something to both plots that is damaging the biology?

How can people get a handle on such endless questions? Again,
people who see a marked difference in their control vs. tea plots
will be sleeping well at night. And those with problems or no
control plot will either be in speculative heaven or in speculative
hell, I say from experience.

What makes me nuts in my own personal garden is Speculating. I have
no controls. I just waltzed around the garden and sprinkled and
spritzed my leftover tea wherever. I think my clematis leaves are
bigger than I have ever seen them before, but they are right beside
a rose I fertilized more heavily this year than ever before, too.
We have an arborvitae in the border that really took off this year,
and maybe the tea helped, but then it's been in the ground about 3
years and you know what they say - 1st year sleep, second year
creep, third year leap. And last year was a drought. Is it finally
kicking in? Is it making up for lost time in this rainy year after
the drought? Or is it tea? Then again, am I SURE I poured tea on
that plant??

Near the area in the back yard where I brew, I poured the leftover
tea on the grass a number of times. I have the healthiest crop of
broadleaved plantain that I have ever seen in my life. I have NEVER
EVER seen as many weeds in the yard as I did this year. Is it the
tea? Was a lot of grass damaged last year during the drought? I
have no means by which to separate out these things. There is an
area in my lawn that went all brown and fungal, near where I *think*
I have been pouring my tea. Could it be from the tea? I have never
had fungal problems in my lawn before.

In the driveway (stone chips and lots of weeds), I poured some tea
that went anaerobic when we had a power failure. I would say those
weeds went dead because of it. Seems like the weeds are lower here
than they were before. Did not do any before and after notes,
though.

So this for me is the problem with the crystal ball -- as with tea
leaves and tarot cards, the reading depends on the reader. If I'm
going to sell tea to customers, then I think I owe it to them and
myself to log what I'm doing and what I see on their property, so I
begin to get a more sophisticated picture of how things unfold when
I add tea into my plant and soil care regime. Where do I see
awesome -- or awful -- results? Have I controlled my variables so I
can say without having to make a leap of faith that the one variable
different is tea?

As an aside to others, not so much to John, one of the reasons that
we all are clear it's not cut and dried is that Elaine Ingham
approaches her work as a teacher. She shares information with us on
this list the way a consultant shares information. She challenges us
to come up to snuff to learn about the interactions going on in the
soil so we can think for ourselves. She doesn't just say "take two
pills and call me in the morning." She says "the reason your
stomach is bothering you is because we did a test and found out that
the acid secretions are very high...."

So, John says it's complex. Does it mean the tea was "bad" or "tea
doesn't work"? One of the downsides with our use of the generic
term "compost tea" is that we use it as a shorthand to mean a
particular mix of foods and a particular compost made a particular
way. So "compost tea works" and "compost tea doesn't work" are also
shorthand to describe our experiences and conclusions. What I made
and called compost tea may not have the same effect as what you made.

If you spray foliar tea once a month and get disease control and I
spray once every month and disease is rampant, does it mean your tea
is "good" and mine is "bad"? Well, we just don't know that.
Further, does it mean that ALL tea is good or bad? We don't know
that either. If you write a glowing report about your great results
and don't tell me what you've recorded about your efforts, should I
just believe you? If I wrote a nasty report about the plantain in
my lawn after I used tea and didn't do any documentation, should you
just believe me? And when we post this way, is it any wonder people
new to tea get confused? I know I sure get confused.

Okay, more "if" questions. If you spray tea and the plants grow
better, and then you keep spraying tea and things level off, does it
mean you started making bad tea? Tea doesn't work? You need to go
back to NPK approach? Again, it's not immediately clear if you have
been adding bacterial tea and to see continued improvement you might
benefit from a more fungal tea, or if your brewer is covered with
biofilm in some hidden places in a soaker hose and your tea is in
fact worse than before, or if the soil has now reached a pH where
suddenly heavy metal pesticides are now unbound and are becoming
toxic to your plants (I am making this up, so don't ask me any
quetions about this!). If there is no testing and no "field marks"
or proxies to use to figure out what you're putting down, it's going
to be a challenge to figure it out. I have started figuring out a
checklist for myself of common problems in tea making and my goal is
to make sure I've addressed all the points on it scrupulously so I
can rule them out as factors. That would be a discliplined
approach.

But often, what we do is we get creative and speculate and figure
out brilliant theories about why something isn't working. We also
figure out creative theories about why something IS better --
it's "because I put down tea". I'm doing that "why it doesn't work"
right now in trying to answer, "Why aren't there worms in this rose
garden?"

I guess where I want to be responsible is making sure what we
believe or the interpretation we make up in our heads as to why
something is happening can be externally verified. People who are
using tea and convinced they're getting great results "from tea"
will probably see this is as unnecessary hand wringing.

This becomes particularly important, I think, when one moves
from "what I'm doing in my garden" to my working professionally
on "what will work in *your* garden". I have come to respect the
effect of different soil and light conditions on the plants in my
customers' properties. I don't get the same response with my roses
at home as I do on my Garden From Hell roses.

So - a longwinded not so much reply as riff on only part of what
John had to say.




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Received on Fri Dec 19 2003 - 12:16:18 EST

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