I thought I was making progress. This week I fired up the compost tea brewer. A Martin Lishman 100 lt brewer – 72 hours of allowing the compost mix to mature; into the pot with 100 lt of water and catalyst – then 24 hours of aeration. The result a good frothy, pale tea coloured mixture to create a healthy soil food web – or in other words providing the soil with a boost of micro-organisms that come from the compost and are multiplied by the aerated brewing process and help provide the correct mix of beneficial micro-organisms in my soil.
It forms part of my soil/plant management strategy of creating a healthy plant from a healthy soil.
One of the more crucial parts of this strategy however is to also apply compost to the soil in order to improve the organic matter in the soil; provide a source of the micro organisms that are part of the soil improvement plan – as well as being a weed mulch.
This is fine and I started the season by applying green waste compost. My problem has been that the compost that is coming is not completely processed. In short it heats when it arrives to such an extent that a layer of it turns to ash.
The consultant that I am using for advice in this whole process is Simon Parfey – who was with Laverstock farm.
It was not happy words that came from him this afternoon when I heard that I should level out all the compost that I have been placing around my plants and dispose of the remainder of the load that last came in. In effect it is unusable.
It has helped to reduce the weeds around the plants, but the fact that it has not fully completed its composting cycle means the heating process is destroying the nutrients I need for the soil improvement.
Added to that the heating process is not a happy place for micro-organisms to multiply.
So back to the drawing board. Find a new source of compost. More importantly I need to buy in more help and get the compost to all plants as soon as possible.
So that is issue one.
Issue two is that one variety ( KLaudia) has berries that are already sweet. I would not call the berries ripe because officially the berries should not be ripe until August. But I have to consider that these plants have had a strange winter with little or no dormancy. The downside is that the berries are not mature, being small and needing to fill out. The colour is yellow. It may well be that this is just part of the gradual ripening process.
So my plan is to freeze some of the berries of each variety every week from now through to the beginning of September. This will provide a stock of berries that can be analysed at leisure over the autumn to see how the nutrients within the berries are changing.
One of the issues about this year is finding that whereas last year I had 3500 plants to manage – the extra 1500 this year is making managing the site really quite a challenge. I would almost say to the extent that one man cannot keep a clean, tidy, well weeded, fed and managed site of more than 3500 plants.
This is without additional machinery. I need to have a tractor an loader; a compost dispenser with quick pick-up fittings; a ride on mower/ tractor mower; strimmer; tractor mounted sprayer and a lighter weight sprayer for use in the winter/spring. With these implements the additional plants would be easy. That will make the difference of staying on top of the list of work that needs to be done.
So I need to start 2015 with this equipment in order to start applying compost tea/seaweed in January as the first plants start to break from dormancy. By regular applications through the spring and into the summer, I am hoping that the disease that is creeping into the site will be kept under control.
I expect that it will take three years of compost applications to build up a healthy soil profile and until then i will be fighting a disease battle. The current applications of seaweed and tea are holding the majority of plants in good health, but the more vigourous varieties – Etna and Elizaveta really need watching and tend to be susceptible to problems. The male Gnom also has issues. But it is something that seems to be manageable and given improving soil health – seabuckthorn will be a viable crop.
