isa effectiveness

Gotta watch out for teas though, brewing a bad batch.........can be devastating. Training and education is paramount, otherwise a ignorant brewer/treatment provider is nothing better than a witchdoctor.
 
Well I think you would find most people believe that treating "naturally" is witchcraft. Imagine, a little worm crap, some fungus, a few bacteria, a handful of protzoas. Not a recipe that most would trust.
 
I've been reading and learning about tea and other organic strategies for quite a few years now. What I WANT is to be able to give clients PHC progammes that are 95% compost oriented (ammend soil, improve soil ecology, reduce pest and disease occurance) and use pesticides only as a last ditch solution. Right now I offer nothing because of my views on pest control products and the GTA's tendancy for cosmetic, commercial, calender controlled, integrated pest iradication plans. One day when I know enough to offer a superior solution, organic in content, quantifiable and with documented backgound, I think I'll do a better service and make a little money in the GTA market. Some of our peers that might be considered high ranking officers with various Ontario Arb. associations have scoffed at my interest, and in fact were the ones who suggested I might become the witchdoctor with my backward ideas.
 
Remember when you own a big sprayer, you need to spray.

I can tell you the single most important thing is to use composted wood chips and green matter. This will do wonders. To my knowledge there is nobody making this sort of product.

BY composted wood chips I do not mean bagged products such as pine bark or dyed products.
 
Absolutely, and if you can have the chips sourced from the same species as the tree you're treating. try to get hold of some of the papers written by Dr Elaine Ingham, I don't agree with all her conclusions (in fact we had some pretty full on arguements at her seminar) but the rigor of her method and data is excellent.
 
[ QUOTE ]
Absolutely, and if you can have the chips sourced from the same species as the tree you're treating.

[/ QUOTE ]And while you are at it, go one step further and pile your white oak chips next to a white oak tree and let them rot a while. then when you harvest them you will also be harvesting fresh species-specific mycorhizae for inoculating white oaks with.
smile.gif


www.soilfoodweb.com
 
The saying is, "If all you have is a hammer then everything starts to look like a nail".

I like the idea of matching the chips with species. Only problem is chips are mixed thru the day. It would seem like a bit of a scheduling headache to ensure single species chips.
 
I agree it isn't as simple to do but we have managed to keep one pile seperate. I'm not denying that companies that do 4/5 jobs in a day with different trees (of course) can't be expected to travel back to their yard with a small chip load to dump then travel back out to the next job...no thats just not sensible, not realistic. However when you do have 1 big job or a series of similar species that get chipped then it is possible (given that you have the space for all these piles!)
 
Granted its utopian but with a council on side and community commintment to green recycling we can certainly do better than whats happening right now. Seperate bins for branches from oak, ash, pine. Again maybe too utopian? But if only one tree business in each city made an effort to put one or two species chips aside that would be a fantastic resource building up.
 
In relation to Mangoe's excellent ideas/

It's becoming quite hilarious down here in epidemic country that the conventional recommendations are systematically failing and the "witch doctor" approach is succeeding.

My clients can tell the difference between wordy bullshit and simplistic solutions that work on their trees - for one reason alone: years of applications from both schools and the evidence of what worked and what didn't.

Any meetings here that promote the official and approved methods are met with jeers and testimony that sends the "big boys" packing to the exits. I just stand there and write down the addresses of people who wish to try what's not approved and find it easy that they've talked with their neighbors and know enough to not be entranced by the glossy adverts anymore.

I'm loving it personally. Stay the course Mangoe.
 
Sean, sounds like a business op for truck body builders. A compartmentalized chip truck!

It would be nice to start to see wood chips taken in for mulching by the city. One of the problems we encounter due to the limited space we have is the disposal of our chips It's a long haul often and bites into the day significantly.
 
Look I do understand the problem and my comments are really just expressing my own exasperation at what I would like to see happening but generally doesn't. We're lucky I work in a small business focussed on quality work (as much as financially practical!) so we do have opportunity to seperate our chips to a very limited degree...we sperate all our albizia cips and keep them seperate because we have a number of large stable clients with very large A. saman that we are (at the moment) tied into the long term management of.

It is exasperating because our local councils don't seem willing to commit any tome or manpower to such a project, even though I feel they do accept the biology of the arguement. Its a slow change that we're envolved in here and both patience and resiliance is the key...things wil change but slowly and we have to stay around working in the mean time making a living to benefit from those changes down the track.
 
Why worry about stock piling wood chips when you can worry about keeping important people with degrees such as planners and engineers busy with paperwork and paving over the world. Councils love paperwork, degreed experts, and big building projects that they can point to. Most would be happy to point to a tree planted but really are not interested in the maintenance of it for health troughout its life.

This comes to a cultural problem of what is caonsidered important, and that is INDUSTRIALIZATION. Think about how excited people are at cranes and chippers, do they react the same to a wheelbarrow ful of chips?
 
There's a lot of truth in what you wrote (and I just reread my post better spell check this one!) but its also part of our role to guide clients into better understanding and appreciation of the importance of that long term "boring" management of trees. Its easier with some than others, and as triple bottom line calculations become more the norm the some should get bigger than the others. (Fingers crossed)
 
Treehumper, you know engineers are easier to win over than you think, you just have to surprise them by talking their language but relate it to trees, and politicians..well green issues are always popular at a broad scale, and local community groups lobby pretty hard.
 
[ QUOTE ]
ANY standard is better than no standard at all.

[/ QUOTE ]
The counter argument to this is that a certification implies some sort of
competence (usually), and having one that in fact doesn't really depend on
this would be worse than no certification at all, at least in that w/o any sort
of certification one would not be misled. I.e., if certification makes no
difference, if it only actually proves that someone jumped throught the
hoops of some process (but not that they have the skills implied), then
you're better off w/o it, leaving assessment of abilities to some other
method.

I surmise that in arriving at some level of testing to give certification
there was a line-drawing issue of trying to please eveybody, not wanting
to require college study, etc.. One way a certification scheme might go
to meet some differing needs is to complement some minimal demands
with additional components or grading. --levels of certification. E.g.,
the Ada programming language was born with requirements that
any certified language processor must support the entire language,
not merely a subset. Upon its revision for the 1995 standard, there was
demand to make the language more capable in a variety of areas (for
information systems, real-time, safety, numerics); but with concern to
not overburden every processor with all of these specialized capabilities,
they were included as Specialized Needs Annexes, which processors
could implement none, some, or part of. And whereas the designers
wanted to have certification for these annexes like that for the core
language (all or none), it was decided rather to allow partial support
to be tested & reported with the degree of support indicated in the
test report & certificate.

One might imagine that with such packaging & grading, a certification
for arborists might be able to be fuller & demanding, but still be able
to be passed with an acceptable minimum capability (and I note that
it is argued above that the current level is too low).

*knudeNoggin*
 
True enough, I've dealt with engineers on many levels. It's just irksome that a profession like urban planning wouldn't have a better attitude toward urban forests.

Yes, green is hot right now but watch how fast it slips from the radar screen when the economy dives. Politicians are chasing the green vote right now since polls indicate it's a top of mind subject.
 
Agreed on the polies front, what I was really alluding to was community groups that have a concern for their environment, be that creeks, lakes, mountains, deserts what ever...those groups are part of what drives local govt into adopting for exmaple tree ordinances, or even just a basic audit to begin with. Those groups can have a surprising spectrum of people envolved with them....bit like the internet, you just never know what tangent you'll head off on next as a result of brief exchange with someone else.
 
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