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I have some questions about application of
CT. I've heard that good tea can be used from 1 to 5 gallons per acre and
that good dilution rates from 5 to 1, to 10 to 1. How are people applying
the tea to get these types of coverage? Is there a difference between soil
applications and leaf applications?
Thanks,
Daniel
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, June 07, 2002 10:27
AM
Subject: Subject: [Compostteas] Homemade
Compost Tea Brewer
The question was, which
is better, using the air bubbles to mix and aerate and extract, or using a
pump that the tea passes through?
You can get good tea both ways.
The original, commercially produced tea maker, the Microbe-Brewer (www.microbe-brewer.com) used the tea
pump approach where the tea was pumped through a nozzle that infused air into
the water. A vortex was formed in the tank, and that was important to
extract adequately.
Because the basket design that the original
manufacturer of the Microb-Brewer developed wasn't a good idea, most people
learned not to use that in the design of their machines. The holes on a
basket are too rigid and the air bubbles produced don't get into the basket
and thus, don't manage to extract the organisms from the compost.
Inside the basket goes anaerobic and you now can have E. coli growing
if you use non-composted material. That is probably the case of
what happened in the testing that BBC reported, where they clearly did not
report the oxygen data from the SAME tea machine where they apparently grew E.
coli. The sad part is that the NOSB has used that flawed information to
develop a ruling on compost tea.
But, back to pumps. The
real problem is the design of the basket. The EPM or Earth Tea basket is
very different from the original Microb-Brewer basket.
Oh, and fabric
bags, that's mildew waiting to happen. Fungi don't get through a fabric
bag. And fungi are what we've killed off for the most part in the soil,
so we have to get them back.
So, tea pumps, air pumps - design
the rest of the system correctly, and it doesn't matter much.
Passing a tea through the pump does slice and dice the organisms
to some extent, but as Earth Tea Company is showing, their fungi are happy,
even if in small units. Some of the best tea out there is made in their
tea makers.
Air pumps - easier to clean, don't slice your
organisms, and some great tea is being made with these units too - EarthWorks,
Alaska Bounty, Sottilo.
So, put the whole system together and
see if you get the organisms needed extracted and growing in the tea.
Elaine Ingham
Soil Foodweb Inc.
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