permaculture

[Dieter Brand <diebrand@yahoo.com>]

> Sensing points to a fundamentally new way of thinking about
> this in our farms.  We need to increase the r
>  atio of good-guy microbes in the soil and on the plant
> surfaces in relation to the "bad-guy" pathogen
> microbes.  Research on plant pathogen suppression with
> composts backs this up.  It's the amount of a plant
> pathogen species #s in a compost relative to the total pile
> of microbes that determines whether the plants will develop
> the disease.

And what does this mean in practical terms?

If I feed my soil with a wide variety of organic matter, this is likely to 
produce a wide variety microbes.  And the resulting fertile soil is likely to 
produce healthy plants that are capapble of withstand disease.  There is 
nothing very new about that.

Dieter