Snow melted today. Perfect opportunity to feed and spread some fungi (reduce thatch, prevent future disease) thought I’d share the recipe (compost tea basically)

What does this do?

Supplies food (sugar/carbon) and nutrients (nitrogen) to beneficial fungi. It also spreads those beneficial fungi in case they weren't already present in the lawn (or weren't evenly present).

Why do this?

1. Accelates thatch decomposition. Its not the most effective way to reduce thatch by any means, but it is by far the easiest and least destructive way. As someone in the midst of slowly converting 30k sqft of poa triv… That is very appealing to me.
2. By establishing and feeding good fungi, you can reduce the presence of bad pathogenic fungi (disease causing fungi, like dollar spot, rust, etc). Many of the bad fungi dwell in organic matter (like thatch) when they aren't attacking grass. So basically, more good fungi = less bad fungi.

When would you do this?

That's the trickiest part about this… You essentially don't want to do this at times where bad fungi are likely to be active… Because you'll just be feeding the bad fungi. So, you need to know what diseases you've had in the past and what weather conditions they are active in… And avoid this treatment if you know disease pressure is going to be high in the near future (particularly at times when the grass may already be stressed)

For example, I know that snow mold is the next disease to likely effect my lawn (and right now, is probably actively growing). I know the areas where it is most prevalent (under snow piles, and in shady areas) so I avoided this application in those areas.

Seperately, its best to do this application when the soil (and thatch) is wet, AND it can be watered in right away. I just had 4 inches of snow melt and it's raining, so that's perfect….

Fungi are not very active right now, but they are a little bit. Any time air temps are above 40, fungi are doing stuff. (I picked those mushrooms in the pics today)

The recipe

I'll be honest, I just eyeball the amounts… But I'll give some rough numbers that should be a good starting point. These numbers are per 1,000sqft.

• .75 gallon of compost tea (recipe below)
• .1 lb of ammonium sulfate or urea (seperately dissolved in .25 gallon of water)
• 2 oz of blackstrap molasses
• 3-5 tablespoon of humic acid powder (i use the humic powder from powergrown.com for other formulations, just follow the directions for a light lawn application)
• (optional) 2-3 tablespoons seaweed extract powder (same equivalents with humic)
• 2 tablespoon of surfactant (yes, that's heavy)

Compost tea recipe

This part is fun. The idea is to collect to collect things that already have fungi growing on them. Then you add them to a container of water and molasses, let that stew for a bit so they can multiply and release spores into the water, then that's your compost tea.

Things to look for (get a variety):
– mushrooms are king. Shred them up and chuck them in the soup. I was lucky enough to find some fairy ring mushrooms (which may be controversial)
– soil underneath old layers of leaves. And those leaves.
– decaying wood. Be careful with this one. You want wood that is touching the ground, but you don't want wood that is slimy (algae) or mossy (actually, that also applies to everything else). One way to make any wood usable is by charring the outside of it and then breaking it up to expose the unburnt insides… Toss it in a fire for 5 minutes or hit it with a weed torch. Alternatively, cut off the exterior of the wood and harvest the wood on the inside.
– compost of course.

AVOID: compost piles with grass clippings or anything else that has otherwise been IN a lawn… You wouldn't want to be multiplying and spreading those bad fungi.

Making the compost tea

• Set the various bits of detritus in a bucket.
• fill with water
• per gallon, add: 2 oz of blackstrap molasses, 1 fl oz of salt, tablespoon of humic if you want
• if you can, having an aquarium aerator stone in there helps a lot. I got one for $15 on amazon.
• keep it somewhere dark, and between 40-60F for 24 hours.

And that's it. Apply.