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mint

URGENT: soil stertilization

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hi guys,

can you put vermiculite and perlite and soil mixture in overn to sterilize? will perlite or vermiculite catch alight?

out in the garden atm, and want to get this soil sterilized today so i can plant a few herbs and spices and vegetables.

thanks.

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i personally dont sterilize, and have no problems at all!!!

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Wet it all down a bit , to enable better heat transfer.

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I thought vermiculite and perlite were already sterile. ?

Doh, u mean it's already all mixed up. Oops. In the past, i've sterilized the soil first,added the verm' n perm' later and then gone on from there. These days i find using coco easier to control and when i'm finished with it, i remove whatever was growing in it, then i pour boiling water thru it a few times,shake it around,let it cool down and re-use it for my next application - that is, as long as there was no major problems with pests/eggs/etc. Sorry, if this aint helping/or rambling but i suppose this particular "soil mix" is important to you.

Just go ahead and 'shake n bake' it.

p.s Don't overcook the soil tho - it loses some of it's unique taste.lol

peace

Edited by etherealdrifter

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Do you really have to sterilise it?

IME pasteurisation is way superior to sterilisation for substrates. Sterilisation kills the good bugs as well as the bad, and the baddies always re-colonise the substrate way faster than the good ones

For example I often take discarded bags of autoclaved potting mix from work, and as a potting mix they're pretty barren til they've sat a while and been recolonised. Two months ago I used some the day after autoclaving to pot up some veggies as a gift for a friend and the plants and seed had a very low survival rate, some seeds which germinated well in my garden didn't even come up in the autoclaved mix. I threw in some garden soil into a corner of the pot ten days ago and things are only now starting to move a little faster

Pasteurisation takes place at about 70C, way more achievable as a bench tek than the 121C autoclave temps

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dark light,

i am flushing with CANNAZYM after i sterilize which will coat my soil in good enzymes. couldnt find a big enough steamer today so i bought 2 big pots, that are oven proof,

i think i might BOIL my soil in water, im not sure if it will sterilize any advice?!

Edited by mint

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i think i might BOIL my soil in water, im not sure if it will sterilize any advice?!

 

Boiling it means some of the goodies will go into the water and you'll lose them. No telling how much you'll lose

Why the desire for overkill? Do you have bad fungal or bacterial problems? Have you had stuff die for no reason in those patches in the past?

There is usually no need to pretreat substrate in this manner at all unless deflasking sensitive TC plantlets, good management and planning is your best bet. I wouldn't even recommend pasteurisation unless logic dictates. Can you tell us why you don't trust the soil as it is?

Gardening isn't usually this complicated

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http://www.avocadosource.com/Journals/SAAGA/SAAGA_1981/SAAGA_1981_PG_124-127.pdf

hope that link works, scroll down to the graphs.

on average the plants ran in the test showed that they would grow 10 cm higher after 60 days of growth compaired to non sterilized soil AND PASTURIZED. if i have to ability to pop a $30 10L pot in the oven to sterilize 9L of soil at a time, i would, little work. and good for your plants, if you care for them, key word being care then you would sterilize there soil.

happy lil plants :)

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Perlite and vermiculite won't catch on fire. I've put vermiculite in the oven plenty of times to sterlise it for use in mycology. Vermiculite is also used for fire insulation and perlite is volcanic glass so it won't be burning your house down.

Furthermore, as they are minerals then they should not really harbour contaminants, however, I like to be on the safe side and kill off any mold spores or other stuff that might have landed on them if they have been sitting around in the shed.

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"The ultimate problem in any soil treatment is, in fact, the subsequent

recontamination by pathogens. Overkill treatment by both full steam (100°C) and

chemicals produces essentially a biological vacuum, and the first micro-organism to

return will luxuriate. If this happens to be a pathogen severe disease loss may occur

in the crop. Treatment at minimal temperature tends to reduce the chance of a poststeaming

explosive outbreak of root disease in soils where antagonistic beneficial

organisms are present"

"With both cultivars the control plots gave the slowest initial growth but these plants had

tended to catch up to the other treatments by the time the experiment was

terminated on day 248, when there were no significant differences among

treatments for Zutano or Carton."

i think you should plant your herbs and spices and vegetables in the "dirty" dirt like everyone else! That is a crappy experiment that did not give any significant results at all.

Are you are growing something really valuable that you know is vulnerable to a soil pathogen that you know is prevalent in your soil?

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Are you are growing something really valuable that you know is vulnerable to a soil pathogen that you know is prevalent in your soil?

 

Or are you trying to start small or short/ uncertain viability seeds in the ground? Another reason I can think you might want to sterilise, but really, just start them in pots

If you look at the study posted above you'll see that all substrates were deliberately infected with Phytophthera, the control treatment being the only one which received no post-inoculation sterilisation treatment.

You e ever have that much Phytophthera in your yard you'll have beeeeeeeeg problems.

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Ferret,

how could you choose: NOT to appreciate this procedure its going for a completely sterile medium and introducing very powerful beneficial microorganisms (canna CANNAZYM) to populate the soil and creat billions of micro organims per tablespoon of medium. to try and grow the healthiest plant i possibly could.

and to note the cost is very little.

infact all it is, use of oven, and a little fertilizer, and your left with IMO better soil than you could purchase from any store in Melbourne, so you can eat your dirty vegies! but in few years time ill have super vegies!

and i am growing something valuble, its something that i am putting into my stomach, that my body feeds of and enzymes that get into my body, that to me is one of the most valuble things in this world, more valuble than cars, clothes and loans advertisement has us chasing.

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What makes you so certain that this "Canna Cannazym" is the sort of product that you want to be putting those vegetable grown with it into your body? There doesn't seem to be a great deal of information out there about how it is made and what exactly is it in. What wrong with more natural fertilisers and naturally healthy soils?

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While we're on it, I have some...well a bin full of coffee grounds and half/half potting mix in another.

The coffee has quite a lot of tricho and I want to utilise the grounds.....should I infect with say some oyster?

Mask up and pasteurise?

Sorry 4 the hi-jack :blush:

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so is cannazyme a microorganism innoculant as you are saying, or some kind of enzymes as the name suggests?

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Mint.

Ferret's already pointed it out, but is bears repeating:

The ultimate problem in any soil treatment is, in fact, the subsequent recontamination by pathogens. Overkill treatment by both full steam (100°C) and chemicals produces essentially a biological vacuum, and the first micro-organism to return will luxuriate. If this happens to be a pathogen severe disease loss may occur in the crop. Treatment at minimal temperature tends to reduce the chance of a poststeaming explosive outbreak of root disease in soils where antagonistic beneficial organisms are present.

The paper is referring to one particular crop, and to one grown in monoculture at that, which brings with it it's own problems. Avocadoes' vulnerability to detrimental micro-organisms at one locality does not mean that all seeds need to be sterilised in all contexts. Things like "a few herbs and spices and vegetables" are usually quite robust to the normal load of deleterious micro-organisms, and do in fact benefit from the natural suite of advantageous ones. Legumes especially need their symbionts.

Have you ever seen Peter Cundell growing vegies in the Gardening Australia patch? He never sterilised, he spread sheep shit and blood and bone and cow poop as though they were going out of fashion, and he grew the fattest, juiciest crops anyone could hope for. You start your plants in sterilised soil and you're as likely to have them stunted for the rest of their (short, annual) lives, just as keeping kids in a hermetically sterile environment makes them vulnerable to otherwise trivial childhood diseases. It certainly won't give them a boost above their normal growth, unless you do have a serious disease issue. And then there are probably other strategies that should take precedence in response.

infact all it is, use of oven, and a little fertilizer, and your left with IMO better soil than you could purchase from any store in Melbourne, so you can eat your dirty vegies! but in few years time ill have super vegies!

Try growing half in sterilised soil, and the rest as any normal gardener would. If you do it properly, the second group will win out just about every time.

and i am growing something valuble, its something that i am putting into my stomach, that my body feeds of and enzymes that get into my body, that to me is one of the most valuble things in this world, more valuble than cars, clothes and loans advertisement has us chasing.

Erm, I think that you might be looking at things through a slightly jargonistic and rose-coloured lens.

Enzymes are proteinaceous, and are hydrolysed in the stomach and the small intestine to give their component amino acids. It's the amino acids that we absorb, and these can be as easily obtained from any number of protein sources, whether they are myoglobin and collagen in muscle (ie, 'meat'), or chlorophyll in your vegies, or any of hundreds of other types of proteins from both plants and animals.

We don't "feed" off enzymes, and they don't "get into our bodies" in the way that many snake-oil vitamin sellers would have us believe... the word 'enzyme' is as abused as are the words 'quantum', 'vibration', frequency' and 'molecular'. And if enzymes did enter our bodies intact to any appreciable extent, they'd be pretty much useless in their original forms, because plant enzymes mostly do different things for plants than human enzymes do for humans.

Exogenous enzymes are only as valuable as they are, because they are a source of amino acids.

But seriously, just plant your vegies the way experienced gardeners do. Use simple 'organic' techniques, and your plants will never look back.

Edited by WoodDragon

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