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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Molasses - Sweet & Super?
  • Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2006 12:07:18 -0600


Dr. Melendrez, any thoughts on molasses in Beck's article?

Molasses - Sweet & Super
http://www.malcolmbeck.com/books/gv_method/MolassesSweetandSuper.htm


Molasses was one sweet treat we were never without when I was growing up.
We put it on bread with butter for a snack. It was great on hot cornbread
and really flavored up beans if stirred in the pot when they were very hot.
My grandpa would eat molasses over cottage cheese every morning for
breakfast, and he stayed healthy to his death at a very old age.

Back then I would never have guessed that molasses would have any value in
growing plants or use in insect control. My friend who grows organic cotton
up in the high plains uses molasses and a nitrogen-fixing microbe as his
only fertilizer. (Nitrogen fixing means the nitrogen is made available to
plants as nutrients.) I asked him what the molasses did, and he said it
made the microbes work better.

I had to find out for myself, so I did a test. I used two containers of
equal size with equal amounts of potting soil and the same number of rye
grass seeds. One container was given only tap water; the other was given
equal water with two tablespoons of molasses per gallon stirred in. After 8
weeks, the molasses watered plants were almost twice the size of the plants
in the other container.

I was amazed, but I didn't understand how molasses could make that much
difference. We had the compost in the potting soil tested and found that it
contained some of the same free-nitrogen-fixing microbes that the cotton
grower used. (He used an Agri-Gro product containing the microbes.) One of
these nitrogen-fixing microbes is Azotobacter, a microbe that can fix
nitrogen straight from the air without living on the root of a legume as
long as it has a source of energy such as sugar or molasses. Both are rich
in carbohydrates, a good source of energy. In lab tests, Dr. Louis M.
Thompson discovered that if given sugar weekly, the Azotobacter could fix
from the air the equivalent of a thousand pounds of nitrogen per acre in
ten weeks.

We recommend that molasses, 1 to 3 tablespoons, be added to each gallon of
liquid fertilizer mix. It definitely makes a difference. It is also used as
a binder in all of our dry fertilizer formulas.

Every gardener has his or her own favorite fertilizer recipe. Both Howard
Garrett and John Dromgoole have popular recipes that contain molasses and
other organic materials. You can experiment with your favorites and come up
with your own best recipe.

I always foliar feed my fruit trees early each spring with fish emulsion
and seaweed. Now I add molasses to the mix. The strangest thing I noticed
when using molasses with the mix was that the fire ants would move out from
under the trees. I also got reports from Houston that fire ants would move
away from the lawns after an application of dry fertilizer that contained
molasses.

I got an opportunity to see if molasses really moved fire ants. In my
vineyard, I had a 500 foot row of root stock vines cut back to a stump that
needed grafting. The fire ants had made themselves at home along that row
because of the drip pipe that kept the soil soft and gave them a good
supply of water. The mounds averaged three feet apart. There was no way a
person could work there without being eaten alive!

I dissolved 4 tablespoons of molasses in each gallon of water and sprayed
along the drip pipe. By the next day, the fire ants had moved out four feet
in each direction. We were able to graft the vines without a single ant
bothering us. With this success at moving the ants, I decided to spray the
whole orchard and get rid of those pests. I learned, however, if the ants
have no convenient place to move, they just stay where they are. I began
wondering if the energy-rich molasses stimulate a soil microbe that the
ants don't like. This was the beginning of development of Garden-Ville Fire
Ant Control.

A friend of mine up in dairy country uses a hydro cyclone to separate the
liquids from the solids in cow manure. He noticed when spraying the liquids
on hay fields that the fire ants tended to disappear. Tests of our compost
have shown it to contain insect pathogens. The manure liquids and the
compost tea both had some results as ant killers. The two together worked a
little better. We knew that dormant oil sprays killed some insects, and
that citrus peel extracts were used to kill insects, so we decided to mix
orange oil with molasses and liquid cow manure. After months of research,
we finally found the correct blend that not only killed ants, but any
insects. It even smelled okay and would not burn the leaves of plants. It
quickly degraded into a good energy-rich soil conditioner.

Needless to say, we offered our product to the market as Garden-Ville Fire
Ant Control. We have many happy customers. You can even make your own if
you don't want to buy ours. More information is included in the article on
fire ant control.



The Garden-Ville Method - Lessons in Nature






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