Compost extract was a great success but it seems to take time to take effect. The effect on the sweetcorn was marginally noticeable with only a month and a half, whereas the beans were very noticeable the next year.
If this hypothesis is true (other differences are the crops were different, and the beans and tomatoes were in the polytunnels and the sweetcorn outside) then we need to really get the compost extract out now for next year.
The 160901 compost isn’t really ready, although it has fallen back to ambient temperature, so we chose to run the experiment to get ahead. This is much more bacterial than fungal under the microscope, which is to be expected as bacterial reproduction is so much faster. But needs must in this case.
We adopted a tip from Nigel of Landews Meadow Farm in Kent and trialled using about 0.5kg of compost stirred vigorously into about 40l of water in a trug. This is more economical with the compost than the method we used last year, so we can make more extract from a given amount of compost if it works, and it is more suited to our volumes for experimentation distributing by hand. The other method is more suited to bigger volumes and mechanical spraying, because the net curtain filter screens the particle size so it is less likely to clog pumps and nozzles.
The aim is to stir fast enough to establish a vortex in the water and occasionally reverse direction. Shades of Steiner’s biodynamics here, but also a good way to aerate a volume of water by hand.
We applied this to the back of polytunnel 3, so that we have a control with the front of it, and also to two module trays of bean seeds, keeping the remaining trays as a control.
This method of making compost extract isn’t ideally suited to seed application, since it tends to clog up the watering can rose needed to soften the impact of the water jet.
We will declare this experiment 161028 in the usual imaginative way, which used compost 160901. We had previously looked at 160901 to check it seemed to have beneficial organisms in it.