Micro-organisms

Blueaussi · November 1, 2009

Dice, as I understand it, one of the supposed advantages of so called effective microorganisms is that they replace and/or prevent proliferation of harmful microorganisms; Fusarium Wilt was the one mentioned specifically in one of the papers I read. If you switch to a beneficial indigenous microorganism, you'd have to test to see if it or they also prevented disease by blocking pathogenic microorganisms. To do that, you'd have to deliberately infect your garden to see if the plants treated with BIM resisted the disease or not. I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to risk infecting my garden!

The thing I wondered about the articles suggesting folks make their own was how would you know what it was you were introducing to your garden? It's been at least 10 years since I've done much micro work, but I can't see the average gardener being able to preform the battery of tests id'ing them would require. And most of the EM articles talked about removing fungi while keeping yeast from the mix, too. And who has the set up to do that? And what if you introduced a pathogenic organism instead of a beneficial one?

So, it seemed to come back to mulching your garden with compost to increase general soil health and sturcture, which most of us do anyway.

November 1, 2009	#1
Blueaussi Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: South Carolina Zone 8a Posts: 1,205	Dice, as I understand it, one of the supposed advantages of so called effective microorganisms is that they replace and/or prevent proliferation of harmful microorganisms; Fusarium Wilt was the one mentioned specifically in one of the papers I read. If you switch to a beneficial indigenous microorganism, you'd have to test to see if it or they also prevented disease by blocking pathogenic microorganisms. To do that, you'd have to deliberately infect your garden to see if the plants treated with BIM resisted the disease or not. I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to risk infecting my garden! The thing I wondered about the articles suggesting folks make their own was how would you know what it was you were introducing to your garden? It's been at least 10 years since I've done much micro work, but I can't see the average gardener being able to preform the battery of tests id'ing them would require. And most of the EM articles talked about removing fungi while keeping yeast from the mix, too. And who has the set up to do that? And what if you introduced a pathogenic organism instead of a beneficial one? So, it seemed to come back to mulching your garden with compost to increase general soil health and sturcture, which most of us do anyway.