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  • From: Lee Reich <lreich@hvc.rr.com>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Mulching and Composting Despite Soil-Borne Diseases?
  • Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 09:00:00 -0500

Cleaning up plant material infected or infested with certain pests is
certainly a good idea and an important part of controlling black rot, brown
rot, and some other problems. With that said, everything goes into my compost
piles, and has for the 40 years I've been composting. Given enough of some
combination of time and heat, pathogens are, for the most part, eliminated.
If you looked closely enough at every leaf, fruit, etc you were going to put
in a compost pile, you'd find some pest on just about everything.

My composting is done in enclosed bins and I do build the pile with some
care, turn them once, and use them the year after they've been assembled.

Lee Reich, PhD
http://www.leereich.com/
http://leereich.com/blog.html.

Books by Lee Reich:
A Northeast Gardener's Year
The Pruning Book
Weedless Gardening
Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden
Landscaping with Fruit






On Feb 26, 2011, at 10:24 AM, Road's End Farm wrote:

>
> On Feb 26, 2011, at 1:06 AM, Spidra Webster wrote:
>
>> Here's something I've had a hard time figuring out. I've read some books on
>> organic gardening, some material on permaculture. Ideally, I want to be
>> letting stuff that drops to the ground compost, as it would in nature. But
>> there are a number of diseases and pests whose control is effected by
>> raking
>> away the windfalls, leaves and detritus. Camellias, for instance, are prone
>> to that fungus that makes the petals go brown and part of controlling it is
>> to pick up the fallen flowers and dispose of them. I've ready many times
>> that people should pick up dropped stone fruit, apples, pears, etc. as a
>> pest/disease control. How to reconcile these things? On the one hand you
>> want material to compost, ideally in situ for some things, and on the other
>> hand you need to get rid of disease/pest vectors.
>
> If you just let the material rot wherever it falls, this is indeed natural,
> but it isn't really making compost. Composting, properly done, involves
> making a pile of materials which are chosen, mixed, and piled in a fashion
> that means that the pile will heat up significantly. The temperatures
> within a hot compost heap will kill many pathogens. At other stages in the
> composting process, beneficial microorganisms should help finish off
> pathogens.
>
> In addition, you can take compost that contained stone fruit, for instance,
> and use it on your vegetable ground, and vice versa: in other words, apply
> the compost on a crop not susceptible, or less susceptible, to whatever
> diseases you think might have been in the compost material. As home compost
> heaps often don't heat sufficiently throughout the whole pile, this might
> be a good idea.
>
> Some diseased material shouldn't go into compost at all, but should be
> buried or burned or even landfilled. It depends on the disease -- you need
> to try to identify what the problems are that you actually have, and then
> find out about those organisms. Co-operative Extension offices can usually
> be a lot of help with this.
>
> Modern society has caused a lot of pathogens to get moved to areas where
> their natural enemies haven't arrived yet and/or don't survive well; so in
> a lot of cases what we have aren''t well functioning balanced natural
> systems, but severely disrupted systems. Nature, given the chance, will
> bring them back into balance again eventually; but that eventual balance
> will take some considerable time to develop, and may or may not contain
> whatever species humans want to exist in that area.
>
>
> -- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
> Fresh-market organic produce, small scale
>
>
>
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