Re: [compost_tea] Plum Curculio Response to Elaine

From: <soilfoodweb_at_aol.com>
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2004 12:37:27 -0500

Sorry, my computer did a strange thing and sent the e-mail before I was done.

Can I ask your name, dakesian? I feel odd addressing all this to "you", without some name to put on here. You are in Michigan? Different place than I had you mentally located. My telepathic abilities leave something to be desired. Grin!

Did I, or did I not, see an e-mail from you saying that the organic approaches did not work on PC?

I hear a bit of a turn-around on that attitude in your last e-mail. In fact, the organic approaches are working, just maybe not 100% perfectly.

Steve Diver said that PC can be reduced by 90%, but still have 50% damage.

I just don't buy that statement at face value. When any pest is in plague mode, or an outbreak condition, there is no approach that will control it at that point. This condition is brought on by making the habitat perfect for PC, while making the habitat horrible for the things that keep the pest in check.

How about an example using a different situation? When grasshoppers are in swarm phase, reducing their populations by 50% does not make any difference to the destruction of the wheat crop. When in outbreak mode, reducing 2 billion pests by 90% still leaves you with 200 million pests, and no weheat crop.

When in that mode, the take-home message is not to say that biological approaches don't work. The take-home message is that the pest situation was ignored until it got out of hand. Next time, don't ignore it.

We've been through this with gypsy moth. We've been through this with pine bark beetle. We've been through this with codling moth. Learn the lesson.

Learning does not occur when every approach offered is rejected as not being capable of dealing with the situation. When in outbreak mode, there is nothing that will work except the weather. Fumigating everything to nuke the pest just leaves the few pests that do survive without any competition what-so-ever. Hello pest outbreak again next summer.

But now that winter is here, the adult pests have been frozen to death. Great, the pest is gone - NOT! Eggs and dormant stages are still present. You have until those eggs hatch, until the larvae moult, to knock out next summer's problem.

So, plum curculio, where does it over-winter? Send in the armies of consumers to eat the eggs through the winter. Send in the armies that will take the food resource away from the larval stages of the insect. Send in consumers. Send in some parasites of the eggs and the larval stages.

It sounds like dakesian has this going in his soil.

BUT -

PC is in outbreak mode, which means they are in such high numbers in your neighbor's yard that they are looking for someplace to move into that offers food. Sort of like Europeans moving into the New World (emptied of native populations because the natives had never encountered the diseases of over-crowded human conditions) from over-crowded Europe. Empty space looks really inviting when too many individuals are trying to divide up a limited food resource.

So, you have to make your food resource look un-inviting. Or you have to have predators, parasites and diseases lying in wait for the colonists.

It's what we do with white fly, mites, colorado potato beetle, and pine bark beetle. Look at the work with WormGold Solution (actively aerated compost tea by any other name) - they have 100% protected pine trees from bark beetle infestion. Take a look at their website - www.wormgold.com Those trees treated with compost tea, even AFTER the beetle attacked and the tree was dying, have been brought back to health (green needles, new growth).

Mechanism? Spray the surface of the treee - bark, needles, everything, with an ADEQUATE SET OF BIOLOGY. The beetles themselves carry the inoculum of beneficials into the tree. The other microarthropods that use the beetle tunnels (called galleries) bring the inoculum of good guys into the galleries. The fungus that normally causes the gumming up of the tree's water up-take channels is not a good competitor, and thus does not grow, does not kill the tree.

But you have to make sure that the biology needed is in the tea. The folks making the machine which can make this tea have figured out EXACTLY what you need to make a good tea with their machine.

They get adamant that you don't play games with the recipe. Try a different set of foods, or use a compost that doesn't have the right biology in the compost, is't known to be good, fungal dominated compost, then sorry, all bets are off. They will not accept that they are responsible for your "tea" not working.

Which is as it should be. If you take a microwave oven, and change it, the manufacturer of the machine is not responsible for you burning down your house because the machine explodes. If you buy a recipe for bread, and then add something not in the recipe, the seller of the recipe is not responsible when your bread doesn't rise.

Play game with the ingredients for the tea, and sorry, don't complain when the tea doesn't do what it should do, could do.

So, dakesian, I'll look over your responses to what I asked, but I think I'll do it as a response back to just you.

Unless people e-mail to say that I should keep the exchange going where everyone can read and learn, I'll do this one-on-one with dakesian. OK?

Elaine Ingham
President, Soil Foodweb Inc.
SFI Corvallis, OR
SFI Port Jefferson, NY
SFI Lismore, NSW, Australia
SFI Hilversum, The Netherlands
SFI Cambridge, New Zealand
www.soilfoodweb.com

 

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Received on Wed Jan 07 2004 - 13:00:42 EST

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