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Re: Compost Tea Confusion

At 10:30 PM 9/23/2003 -0500, you wrote:
At the Symposium in Chicago, I spoke with someone who said that while adding mycorrhizae to garden soil was worth doing, it was worthless when added to a sterile potting mix such as that used by Monrovia and others in the green industry. Does anybody know the truth of this, one way or another?

I'm not a science guy by any means but I remember reading that mycorrhizae react negatively to excess levels of nitrogen. The incorporated long-term fertilizers used in nursery container growing *may* react with the critters in a negative manner. This may be what the person was referring to.

Just for the record - the excessive pumping of N into our environment and how the ecology is responding to this is sure to be one of the next great ecological disasters we'll be writing about in the future. ;-)


I would dearly love to see some seminars on basic science, especially as it pertains to these new products, at the next GWA Symposium. We can't proselytize responsibly until we can go forth armed with facts rather than opinions.
For me, that's the challenge of being a writer. I write about a wide range of topics for more than just gardening magazines and one has to find the sources and figure out how to translate the esoteric info into manageable language your reader can understand. And interestingly enough, that's why publishers pay you the money. ;-) A writer's job is to arm themselves by digging out the facts - imho it is difficult for any organization to keep up with the developments in technology - by the time you organize a seminar on the subject, the developments are long past what is being presented.

A perfect example of this is the Internet. Presentations made at professional conferences (including gwa) tend to focus on rear view mirror events rather than the fluid nature of the Net and where it is going/is currently. In our publishing world, it is the challenge of staying current in our field of knowledge, and of monetizing that knowledge that has to concern us as writers. A speech contracted for within the timeframe of a national conference would have to be written a week before the event to be current - often not possible.

And to keep this in the context of the mycorrhizae thread - there are as many viewpoints on the future of publishing as there are on the usefullness of small organisms in container mixes. The fun part of being a writer is to find these divergent stories and make sense of them - to revel in their diversity - and to communicate that to readers. In my experience, there is no "truth" in science. There is only what we know now - and there's often a divergence in what folks think we know. :-)

A writer's job is to find out what we know now and to tell a story about it. And ahh, the nature of "story" in writing... but that's another post for another day. :-)

Doug
Doug Green,

Your gardening questions answered http://www.gardening-tips-perennials.com
Syndicated gardening columnist, award-winning author


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