self-published promo literature for her compost tea company. You've as always done a terrible job of providing even moderately credible data of scientific origin. As promised, here is the:
REPOST WITH RELEVANT LINKS ON DR. INGHAM, HER FELLOW VENDORS' BEST-LOVED "EXPERT" ON COMPOST TEA:
Vendor Ingham posing as a scientific researcher set the standard for vendor-disseminated information. Ingham seems legitimately to have been mentally ill with some paranoid conspiracy theories on why her data couldn't be duplicated in any actual field study, so after several years of being a Big Cheese in a crooked industry, she finally became such an embarrassment she was by many simply cast to the wolves with some of her fellow vendors asserting that her tendency to falsification is an abberation & not the industry standard. She is not an aberration, & her "findings" are still the only ones the industry promulgates whether or not they attach her name to them.
The data to date supports compost teas as a tepid fertilizer & nothing more; its ability to enhance microorganisms is equal to the ability of regular watering to do so. Furthermore, though the vendors want you to believe aerating the tea is best & "safer" because non-aerated tea might be toxic, the few studies that indicate an unpredictable (so impractical) ability to deter disease as a foliar spray applies only to non-aerated teas. And it turns out aerated teas are MORE apt to contain harmful pathogens, rather than less apt as vendors of pricy equipment pretend, often on the basis of fraudulant sales-oriented "research" by the likes of Ingham.
Vendors want you to believe teas need aeration so that duped marks will pay $500 to $1,000 for special equipment to do for a high price what could be done for free & with no such equipment. By & large the whole fad for garden teas is hokum & what little good teas do is exceeded by any number of better metheds, such as organic compost topcoatings & sensible irrigation. And while the tepid fertilizer value of compost teas washes out of the soil with the first rain or the first regular watering, maintaining the soil with compost or leafmold topcoatings or other methods is a longlasting method.
If you have a compost barrel that saves the drippings, it does no harm to use that as the basis of a cost-free tea. But anyone spending money on equipment & tea mixes with the expectation that it is anything but the weakest possible fertilizer, they're duped marks & nothing more
In sum:
1) As a tepid fertilizer, okay, even though of less value than virtually any other method of soil restoration or improvement. 2) For disease control: it's an illusion. To quote University of Washington horitulturist Dr. Chalker-Scott: "In the peer-reviewed literature field-tested compost tea reported no difference in disease control between compost tea & water." 3) Never believe anything promulgated by vendors. There is no such thing as an honest garden tea vendor since the honest thing would be not to take people's money for useless equipment. It is ONLY profitable because bolstered with lies.For assessment of the Lies of vendors vs the Realities, see:
For definitively wasteful & potentially harmful nature of teas, see:
How the fraud is perpetuated through half-truths & lies & workshops at nurseries all on the worst level of hucksterism:
My old report on Ingham's "tradition needs no science" looniness & paranoia, written a few months before the embarrassed industry began to jettison her as their chief divinity:
Ingham's easily lampooned loony-tunes letter that publicly revealed her magical anti-science thinking & her paranoid state of mind:
Any website invested in selling you stuff is not going to provide you with the actual data of compost teas harming ground water, leaching too quickly out of soils to be of any benefit, being in every regard inferior to a topcoating of mulching organic compost, NOT improving the microorganism content of soils, NOT repairing anaerobic soils, and for the most part not even hindering pathogenic organisms (no more than would a good soaking with pure water in any case).
Not everything labeled "organic" is a good or useful thing. Anyone who uses good organic compost & a regular watering schedule is doing much more for their garden than can be done with organic tea, & organic tea would not add anything additional, so it is a wasted inevestment of time & money & electricity (since vendors allege it has to be aerated), & even the cheaply made expensively sold plastic brewing equipment these flimflam artists foist on the public are manufactured at the highest level of pollution & waste with none of it being necessary.
The pro-Chemical lobby just hates it when "ecofundies" refuse to believe cancerous toxic chemicals are good for us & go all insane in defense of their PetroChemical fetish. It's unfortunate that greenies get just as fetishistic & up in arms when their favorite organic fad is found out to be 99.9% flimflam.
-paggers