On Day 2 of the Mid-Atlantic tour an organic landscape roundtable discussion hosted by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society included PHS project managers Mark Paronish and Julie Snell, along with SafeLawns founder Paul Tukey, Glenstone horticulturist Patricia Manke and organic lawn guru Barry Draycott of New Jersey.

I just returned fully energized this evening from a whirlwind tour of three Mid-Atlantic states. The topics at each stop were landscape sustainability and safety and the examples, at dozens of locations, were stunning.

Wednesday evening began with an overview of the Delaware Center for Horticulture with Lenny Wilson, Assistant Director of Horticulture and Facilities at the Wilmington location. The DCH has a clear mandate to care for its property without synthetic pesticides and Lenny offered rave reviews of their progress thus far.

The Delaware Center for Horticulture installed a rain garden at the base of a nearby parking lot in Wilmington to reduce runoff into tributaries.

The occasion for my visit was the organization’s annual Copeland Lecture, an endowed event with the mission of bringing in nationally recognized experts in landscape sustainability to Delaware. The audience included the general public, board members and a surprising number of professional landscapers. The event was even sponsored by the Delaware Grounds Management Association, which invited me back for a roundtable discussion next winter.

I remarked to several members that their openness to organic lawn care would have been unthinkable even a few years ago, but they all commented that their customers were the ones pulling them in the natural direction.

“I don’t want a thing to do with the chemicals anymore,” said one gentleman, who revealed a scar from cancer surgery. “Your book (the Organic Lawn Care Manual) is my bible.”

THE NEXT MORNING BEGAN WITH A MEETING in Philadelphia at the headquarters of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which also has a mandate to deal with its 80 city garden plots with organic protocols. This is year one, which hasn’t been without its challenges, so PHS asked myself and Barry Draycott of Tech Terra Organics in New Jersey to come by for a consultation. I, in turn, invited Patricia Manke, who is the head horticulturist at Glenstone, the site of our organic lawn research trials in Potomac, Md.

In organic lawn care and gardening, everyone agreed, the issue isn’t getting lawns to be green; that’s easy with organic techniques. The problem can be keeping weeds under control, at least enough to meet aesthetic expectations of an American public that still loathes dandelions. Barry gave PHS an overview of many of the products he carries, including Fiesta weed control — which is made from a naturally occurring iron chelate and sold under various brands. Patricia Manke has been trialing Fiesta at Glenstone and reported good results, especially with dandelions and thistle.

We all reiterated that weeds are messengers sent by Mother Nature to tell us something about the soil. In other words, if you lawn is mostly weeds, it’s because your soil wants to grow weeds and not grass. Weed killers are tools to treat symptoms, but the best way to treat weeds sustainably is to try to manage your lawn’s soil conditions.

PATRICIA WAS THE STAR OF THE SHOW at Penn Hort that day because of the success she is having at Glenstone after 15 months on the SafeLawns program we designed for her.

The lawn at Glenstone, which received its second blanket of compost of the year last week, is magnificently lush and green in its 15th month of the organic transformation. The grounds have only received one pound of organic fertilizer per thousand square feet this season.

I visited Glenstone this morning. The entire 16 acres of lawn were aerated and coated with a quarter-inch layer of compost just last week, then overseeded. The compost takes the place of synthetic chemical fertilizer and the seed takes place of any weed killer. Patricia and her crew have had to spot apply some natural herbicides this season and hand-pulling has been necessary in a few instances, but overall the weed pressure has been manageable — even at a facility that demands near perfection in its appearance.

The crew did learn one lesson in the compost spreading. Apparently it rained heavily after the compost was put down; the excess moisture caused the compost to seal over the lawn in some areas. When the sun did come out the compost trapped the heat, which began to yellow the lawn in a few spots. The crew quickly took action by using blowers to break the seal of the compost and the affected areas were well on their way to recovery as of this morning. If you look closely at the photo, above, you can see a few impacted spots.

We’ll be sitting down with Patricia and her colleagues in the coming weeks to do a full assessment of the first full year, including the financial impacts to the property. She gave me these general pros and cons of going organic so far:

PROS
Safety — “I feel so much better about coming to work,” she said.
Reduced Watering — About 75 percent less for the season than previous years
Reduced Mowing — About 50 percent less than when the property was maintained chemically.
Pesticide Elimination — Two years ago the facility spend tens of thousands of dollars on a routine pesticide maintenance program on lawns and trees; that’s gone entirely.
Appearance — When a fusarium outbreak threatened to overtake the property, an application of compost tea wiped it out almost instantly. The lawn has looked consistently green, even through the hottest parts of the year.

CONS
Weed Management — Some hand pulling and overseeding is required, rather than blanket spraying of a chemical.
Additional Labor — Spreading the compost over a lawn that had incredibly poor soils (less than 1 percent organic matter) is a lot of work; we estimate that by the end of next year the compost top-dressing will no longer be necessary.

Overall, said Patricia, there’s no turning back to the old ways.

“We spray compost tea everywhere, on the lawns, the trees, the pachysandra,” she said. “The plants are clearly responding. It’s a real story to tell.”

Early in October the University of Maryland researchers will be on site to begin a 30-month research project that we co-designed and Glenstone funded. The goal is to come out with a peer-reviewed research paper that states what the property is already showing us: ORGANIC LAWN CARE WORKS!

This is the compost tea brewing station at Glenstone, which includes a 250-gallon brewer, at right, and totes for fresh water. Keeping the tanks elevated allows the spray truck to back right up to the valve and, once attached, gravity feeds the compost tea into the spray tank.

A worker at Glenstone sprays compost tea into trees. At peak season, the crew brews three 250-gallon tank loads per week.

Healthy soil, ironically, can probably best be described as a war zone. Everything down there is eating everything else. And when the consumption, digestion and excretion cycles complete themselves, nutrients are released that can then be used by plants for optimum growth.

For generations here in the U.S. and many places around the world, that life underground and even disdained by the agriculture and horticulture communities. It was assumed, incorrectly, that all nematodes and bacteria were bad and that the best way to grow stuff was to fumigate the top layer of the soil to kill everything — then douse the soil with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides etc. to make plants grow.

The tide is changing of course. As the dangers of this chemical culture have revealed themselves in the form of human and soil disease, folks are turning back to a more natural way of gardening with compost, compost tea and natural soil amendments.

Look no further than this video of a This Old House episode featuring “America’s landscaper” Roger Cook: http://purplecoworganics.com/compostteacentral.html. Roger is widely respected by the old guard landscape community; when he starts talking about the benefits of compost tea at Harvard University’s campus lawns, you know middle America will listen. That same page, parked on the site of Purple Cow Organics, one of the premiere compost companies in nation, features a video showing soil biology in action.

And for a primer about how all this works underground, check out the Soil Food Web photo gallery: http://www.soilfoodweb.com/microscope_pics.html. The underlying message is that every organism has a purpose in the orchestration that makes safe, natural growth possible.

The Northeast Organic Farmers Association will hold a day-long seminar “Producing and Applying Actively Aerated Compost Tea” open to the public on Sept. 21 beginning at 9 a.m. at Stonewall Farm, Keene, N.H.

Here’s the official invite from NOFA:

Join us for a hands-on workshop on Producing and Applying Actively Aerated Compost Tea with Peter Schmidt of Compostwerks! LLC.

This workshop is a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience and to learn in a group setting. Some of the topics that will be covered include how to brew compost tea, customizing tea for specific uses, assessing compost tea quality and methods of application. The workshop will be conducted both outside on the farm and in a classroom setting.

Peter Schmidt, certified arborist and founding partner of Compostwerks! LLC has been involved in the horticultural industry for 25 years. He interacts with Dr. Elaine Ingham of the Soil Foodweb Inc. on a regular basis.

If you’re interested in fees and other details, email Ashley Kremser at akremser@ctnofa.org.

Commercial tea brewers are available from a variety of sources.

Applications of compost “tea” have been around as long as gardening has been around. Long before science proved the efficacy of compost tea, our forebears just instinctively knew that the substance — biologically active liquid — would have beneficial results in the soil.

And while many are still mired in the debate about whether compost tea works, or not, the more enlightened conversation these days concerns how, when and where to apply it. We’ll spend some time on that topic this week in the blog.

First things first: Where to purchase the necessary equipment? Homeowners can create their own rig with a 5-gallon dry-wall bucket and aquarium motor, or you can purchase compost tea brewing systems on-line through our sponsor, GardensAlive, at http://www.gardensalive.com/product.asp?pn=8798&ss=compost%20tea.

For larger more commercial systems, any number of companies offer variations on the same theme:

East Coast Organics: http://www.truebrewer.com/True_Brewer.html

Growing Solutions: http://www.growingsolutions.com/

Sustainable Agricultural Technologies Inc: http://www.composttea.com/

If you have other third-party recommendations to make, please post them here to share with the group.

In today’s Post, Adrian, a devout organic gardener himself, tackles the age-old question of whether or not compost tea works:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/13/AR2010041303646.html. It’s a subject matter we’ve tackled many times here in this blog: http://www.safelawns.org/blog/index.php/2010/02/compost-tea-does-it-work-or-not/.

I think Adrian’s article really sums up things nicely in that sometimes compost tea is oversold for its disease control properties — especially if the disease is already present — but tea almost always leads to more robust plants.

The timing of the Post article was interesting for me only in that I had been talking about the efficacy of compost tea with some representatives of Gardens Alive earlier in the day. They find it difficult to justify promoting compost tea in their catalogue when so many universities and other sources still denounce the benefits. Nevertheless, the company has introduced a vermicompost-based soil enhancer: http://www.gardensalive.com/product.asp?pn=3741. They’re going to send me some samples and I’ll report back to you on how it works later on this season.

This photo, supplied by Dan Corum at the Seattle Zoo, shows the rose gardens that are tended solely with compost tea.

I’ve long told the story of my Grandmother, Clarida Van Dyne, and her “manure” tea that she made on her dairy farm in Bradford, Maine. In recent years, as I’ve espoused the virtues of applying compost tea to the landscape to add valuable micronutrients and, most importantly, microbial life to the soil, I’ve had all sorts of feedback. Good and bad.

The official word from Cornell University, for example, is that compost tea doesn’t work. When it has measured disease suppression or the addition of “life” to the soil in terms of increase fungal or bacterial content, the illustrious New York institution insists that compost tea is bunk. Here is a passage from a 2007 article in the New York Times by Leslie Land, in which she pitted my “opinion” against that of Dr. Frank Rossi of Cornell.

To put this into context, Ms. Land was asking me how to hasten the transition from synthetic chemicals to organic solutions:

Asked if there was a way to speed things up, Mr. Tukey suggested compost tea. Applied monthly to a lawn that is also fed with organic fertilizers, it can reduce transition time to one season, he said, adding that compost tea ”is like a blood transfusion for the lawn.”

Frank S. Rossi, a turf specialist at Cornell University and a nationally recognized expert on golf course maintenance, does not share Mr. Tukey’s enthusiasm. Dr. Rossi’s research lab has evaluated compost tea’s effect on turf and found little proof of a major benefit.

And so those of us who see the results with our own eyes are left to scratch our heads, and even make a joke or two about it.

My friend, Sandy Syberg, of Purple Cow Organics in Wisconsin, told me he was heading off to California for a week of compost tea trials. “Haven’t you heard?” I asked. “Compost tea doesn’t work!”

We both shared a good laugh, but the serious question remains. Does compost tea really work?

The issue, of course, is that all compost tea is not created equally. In fact, there are probably as many variations in compost tea as there are variations in gardeners. Most essential is the quality of the compost from which the tea will be brewed. Then comes the addition of air to the brewing process, or the “feeding” of a food source such as molasses to the final mix. How much air to add? How much molasses to add? At what temperature?

It’s not all that different than brewing beer, and if you live in a state like Maine where I do, you know that dozens of different microbreweries churn out hundreds of different styles of beer that all taste differently — and all leave you feeling a bit differently both as you’re drinking, and when you wake up the next morning.

The bottom line is that the pros — the Elaine Inghams and Betsy Rosses of the world — have the compost tea literally dialed in. To even suggest that the application of their teas has no value is flat-out preposterous.

But will the tea you brew in your own five-gallon bucket have any value? Maybe. Maybe not. I have met hundreds of gardeners who swear by it and a few who don’t see the point. The good news is that it’s inexpensive, practically free, to make. And it really won’t do any harm, provided it doesn’t smell pungent or like ammonia when it’s applied. Good compost tea, like good compost, should have a sweet earthy smell. You can check out the compost tea video on the SafeLawns site: http://www.safelawns.org/video.cfm.

As for the teas you can buy at the garden center, you should ask the “fresh” question. If the tea has been capped for any period of time, the only thing living in the jugged tea will be bacteria. Fresh tea can be full of a whole rainbow of microorganisms and is definitely more likely to have a positive impact to your lawn, garden, trees or shrubs.

What’s your experience with compost tea? What pointers do you have, or comments — pro or con — to add to the debate? I’d love to hear them.