Compost Tea

So we've made some compost tea, and I have a lot of thoughts about it as my 1 year old climbs around making it hard for me to type.

It's almost a spiritual thing, where soil science and gardening meet witchcraft, and witchcraft is vindicated as a legitimate lens through which to understand nature (which really only makes sense if you aren't torquing yourself into knots trying to fight it).

I read something once about native hunters who used a kind of divining rod to determine where they could find game to hunt. It had worked for countless generations, no one knew why, and no one really questioned it. Of course, any kind of superstitious nonsense that isn't officially sanctioned by Christian churches recieves near unanimous scorn from our Western culture, so someone set about the task of determining how this could possibly have worked in a way that we could understand.

The explanation that was arrived at (by whom? I can't remember - it could be made up for all I know) was that the divining rod randomized the direction that the hunters went each year, allowing populations in the other directions to recover in off years. There wasn't a predictable pattern, which the animals may have been able to adapt to, but there was, over time, an averaging out of the number of times the hunters visited breeding grounds in each direction.

I've got to read more about biodynamics but it seems to me that we can (and did for all of human history) arrive at an understanding of nature that is intuitive - which the science in turn will support whether we choose to care about the science of it or not.

A word on science - it is political of course, something that scientists, many of them convinced of their objectivity, struggle to recognize. What research you choose to fund, what conclusions you pursue, what you hypothesize in the first place - none of this is objective. The bad and sloppy science that gets published regularly does little to advance the case of the objective nature of science (which we only understand through our objective perception). For all the good science, nothing that is published can be considered a foregone conclusion. Anyway-

Back to the compost tea. It appears that an agency called the National Organics Standard Board put together a task force to set regulations for compost tea (this must apply to commercial operations). The tests that were run involved putting material containing ecoli bacteria in conditions where it was encouraged to multiply (compost tea involves multiplying "good" bacteria), and then proclaiming compost tea dangerous because it contained ecoli. This information comes from a seven year old post on some list serve, but it looks credible, and seems to come from a credible person, Elaine Ingham of Soil Foodweb (decide credibility for yourself). She gives the analogy of banning coffee because some tester put manure in the coffee filter and the resulting brown liquid contained ecoli (ergo: coffee must be dangerous).

Compost tea, however, seems to me to be as much about magic as it is about science. You can measure what is in compost tea, all the microbes and bacteria and fungi and other little life forms that inhibit the soil. Then again, you can only measure what you know is there, so there may be all sorts of unknown activity that may as well be magic for all of our ignorance of what is going on in the soil. After all, breastmilk is that way. We think we know what is in it, but who knows what we have yet to learn.

If you search the internet for information on compost tea, there is a lot of conflicting information out there. A series of Youtube videos of a compost tea seminar by a guy named Bruce Deuley that put it all together for me. Aside from the basics, that microbes need air to grow and multiply, but there is a limit to how long they can grow and multiply before they outpace the available oxygen and start dying, causing undesireable conditions, there is a way of thinking about compost tea that reminds me of the native hunters. There is no one "formula" for compost tea. "Diversity is the formula" says Bruce Deuley. Aside from keeping your microbes alive, doing different things all of the time will create, over time, a diversity of microbes in the soil that provides a complete microbial spectrum for the soil.

When making compost tea, as long as you keep your microbes alive by giving adequate oxygen and not brewing for too long (shorter times in warmer weather when microbes multiply faster), the rest may as well be magic. Whether you use earthworm castings, homemade compost, fish emulsion, seaweed, molasses, oats, alfalfa, or whatever else people put into compost tea, you can use a divining rod, you can consult the I Ching, you can meditate on the ingredients until the choices of what to add come in some sort of vision - over time it will all work out.

And isn't that what magic is, in a way?