cornmeal?

BG – posted 16 March 2004 20:12

How come every thread on this website somehow leads into cornmeal?

svcrawf72 – posted 16 March 2004 20:16

I don’t know, I picked up here thinking it was the best thing for fungi. I was told other wise, seems someone has stock in it and pushes it on this forum?

BG – posted 16 March 2004 20:18

For entertainment sake lets say Im a enviro-nazi and I refuse to use any type of chemical on my lawn. Im ate up with fungus as a result of poor fertilization practices and over watering. Sell me on this cornmeal idea. Come on!

BG – posted 16 March 2004 20:31

I have a professor named Ian Rodriguez who co authored an agricultural chemestry for turfgrasses textbook with Dr.Beard. Im going to look into this futrher and post up my findings.

jr – posted 17 March 2004 05:31

Forget it. It’s just one nut who thinks cornmeal is the answer to everything, and as we all know in this business, nothing is the answer to everything. The supposition is that cornmeal attracts a fungus that will eat all the other fungus attacking turf. The problem is it takes three weeks to start working. By then your turf is a forgotten memory. Under proper management practices, you will have all the necessary microbes in your turf already and have minimal problems.

jr – posted 17 March 2004 13:25

Forget it. It’s just one nut who thinks cornmeal is the answer to everything, and as we all know in this business, nothing is the answer to everything. The supposition is that cornmeal attracts a fungus that will eat all the other fungus attacking turf. The problem is it takes three weeks to start working. By then your turf is a forgotten memory. Under proper management practices, you will have all the necessary microbes in your turf already and have minimal problems.

Dchall_San_Antonio – posted 17 March 2004 15:14

I’m the corn meal nut. Near as I can tell, I’m the only one on this board posting about organic solutions to anything. So here’s the skinny on corn meal.

As a fertilizer:Any source of protein has amino acids in it. Amino acids contain nitrogen. Ground up seeds, nuts, and beans all contain protein as do animals (including dead animals). For agricultural purposes, I like to deal in ground up seeds, nuts, and beans rather than dead animals. It’s just more fragrant! When you grind up seeds, beans, and nuts, you get a meal that will not sprout on you. When you sprinkle the meal on the ground, the microbes in the soil digest the proteins and carbohydrates in the meal and poop that stuff back out. Then secondary microbes come along to digest the poop and poop it out. This process continues through a web of 25,000 different species of microbes living in the soil. Eventually the pooped out product is the perfect plant food. This is the way Mother Nature has designed it. She’s been perfecting it for hundreds of millions of years. More recently we’ve been trying to improve on her system with chemicals. While the chemicals do feed the plants, they do not feed the microbes. Besides the perfect plant food, the microbes also produce antibiotics, plant growth hormones, enzymes, glues, herbicidal chemicals, insecticidal chemicals, and fungicidal chemicals. So when you stop using a protein based fertilizer, you stop feeding the microbes what they expect to find and the soil becomes ready for invaders, disease, and bacterial blooms.

As an anti fungal agent:Corn meal attracts the Trichoderma species of fungus as well as a few others. You can read about Trichoderma all over the Internet and see that it is a very popular fungus. For mushroom growers, they do everything they can to kill Trichoderma because they know good and well it will kill out their crop of mushrooms. At the same time, you will find only one resource that discusses the use of corn meal as a way to grow your own Trichoderma fungi. That reference is at

http://stephenville.tamu.edu/~clee/pdncr/index.html

The researchers found that using corn meal cured every one of the (peanut) fungal diseases they tested it on. It turns out that the same fungi attack your garden. As the word has spread about using corn meal against fungal disease, it has shown to be a preventative as well as a complete cure for turf diseases, rose, tomato, and nearly every fungal disease it is tested against.

Corn meal does have one (so far) shortcoming in an organic program. If you use it during a grass seeding program, you will likely find a significant suppression of germination and subsequent grass growth.

So inasmuch as the discussions on this board rarely involve reseeding and quite often involve fungal disease, I usually get my 2 cents in for you to read without having to bring up the lone shortcoming of the material. As the lone organic contributor, I don’t think my comments are about to jeopardize the massive amounts of advice you’re going to get regarding chemical solutions to turf problems. Some folks think my comments should be balanced with comments about the non-organic solutions. Balance? It’s about 100 to 1 out of balance right now. As far as I can tell, nobody with any clout has tried using corn meal for anything. As far as it taking 3 weeks to work – all organic solutions take at least 3 weeks to work. Some take a year to work.

Many people who write into these forums never do one minute’s worth of research looking for another message about their same problem. Those of us who reply to help will often answer the identical question 3 times a day on one board.

Dchall_San_Antonio – posted 17 March 2004 15:17

Oh, yeah! Regarding my having stock in corn meal: I don’t even wish I had stock in it. Corn meal sells retail for $0.10 per pound. Farmers get about $0.08 per pound for it. I’m convinced the lack of profit inbetween the two prices is what keeps the research from being done on it.

svcrawf72 – posted 17 March 2004 21:19

Yeah, your on it man!

You give good advise IMO about other things and I thank you for helping me out even when it was helping someone else. I will try the cornmeal but have a few questions that I am not clear on if you don’t mind.

Will fungi just go away if it drys up “only water when it needs it” and will it hurt if I just fertilized and if so how long should I wait? My main thing here is to get rid of mushrooms that pop up and yellow spots on St Aug grass. It rains in Fla every day for a month sometimes, wouldn’t fungi be a problem? If so wont the fungi go away in the dry months? So do I really need to worry about it so much?

Dchall_San_Antonio – posted 19 March 2004 09:42

Wet or dry, you want a ton of healthy beneficial microbes in your soil. When you feed them with an organic protein source, you will get the beneficials working for you. This is Mother Nature’s way of recycling dead things (animals and plants).

There are other beneficial microbes besides the one’s I’ve mentioned that control the balance of beneficials to pathogens. All you have to do is feed them. Chemical fertilizers feed the plants directly but do not feed the microbes. There are microbes that can “dismantle” the chemicals but they still do not feed the beneficial microbes. Only protein and sugar can do that. Sugar comes to the soil naturally via the photosynthesis process in plants and the delivery of sugar to the soil through the roots.

Mushrooms are not necessarily a symptom of a problem. Many of the beneficial fungi will grow mushrooms in the right conditions. I just kick them over when I see them; however if they are growing in a perfect circle, they could be a symptom of disease. I watch very closely when I see a perfect circle and at the first discoloration of any leaf inside that circle, I hit it with corn meal.

If your yellow spots are caused by a N deficiency, the corn meal will work as well (but slower) as chemical fertilizer. If it is caused by an iron deficiency, then the issues get back to what your soil is like. Sometimes you have plenty of iron but the calcium in the soil is binding up the iron so the plants can’t get any. Sulfur is often used with success to release the iron from the calcium, but I don’t like the antifungal effect of using sulfur. I have used greensand (glauconite) with great success when all other treatments have failed, but my situation might be different. My soil is pure white limestone dust with my sod/sand on top. You absolutely cannot comprehend this pure white dust until you see it. So my turf is fairly fragile in that life exists only on the very top of the soil. My subsoil starts at about 1.5 inches deep and really does nothing but hold moisture. I’m trying to get roots down there and kill them off so as to “inject” organic matter where it wasn’t before.

JankJankinson – posted 23 March 2004 12:00

Hey man, I appreciate the information you have posted and am working on applying it to our situation at a golf course in Illinois. We have had many fungus problems and I am convinced it is related to an inbalance of the soil ecosystem due to heavy reliance on chemical ferts and pesticides. Do you have any input on using these techniques in a golf course setting?

BTW, I am an “environazi” in that I think people should work within the system provided by millions of years of evolution rather than assume that our primitive knowledge of chemistry and plant nutrient requirements allow us to supercede said system. Unfortunately the USDA and chemical manufacturers have more or less brainwashed the horticultural masses into thinking that they are authorities on a system of which science is only now beginning to grasp the complexity and importance. Anyway, thanks for spreading good info–a lot of people don’t want to expose their families/pets to poisons but don’t know that their are good alternatives. Common belief is organic=ugly, sickly, low production

Dchall_San_Antonio – posted 29 March 2004 07:53

I have a “follower” (my one and only) in Canada who is using corn meal on his two pitch-and-putt golf courses. I can put you in touch with him if you like. He’ll send you a portfolio of before and after pictures using corn meal. He’s totally 100% organic now.

As I recall his first problem was that the corn he put down was cracked corn instead of ground corn. Of course golf has always been a game of obstacles but having to putt through 500 pieces of corn laying on the green was a little different for the first few weeks. He put it out earlier this year I think. His second problem was the return of the earthworms and their piles on the greens first thing in the morning. He solved that by simply mowing. The rollers on his reel mowers flatten the mounds nicely. Beyond that, his fungus problems have disappeared and his turf look better than ever. Just ask him…

Write to me at

dchall8 (at) texas.net

cohiba – posted 17 April 2004 12:30

DChall,Well, I did it. I bought my first bag of corn meal. I want to try it out on my back yard. 100# for $8.00. What have I got to lose. I’m going to try some test plots. Thanks for the other side of the story(Organics) and wish me luck.

I need it……

josepht – posted 09 May 2004 22:40

Good luck Cohibia

Your going to need it

Chemicals rock

Buddee – posted 19 June 2004 00:33

quote:Originally posted by Dchall_San_Antonio:I’m the corn meal nut. Near as I can tell, I’m the only one on this board posting about organic solutions to anything. So here’s the skinny on corn meal.

As a fertilizer:Any source of protein has amino acids in it. Amino acids contain nitrogen. Ground up seeds, nuts, and beans all contain protein as do animals (including dead animals). For agricultural purposes, I like to deal in ground up seeds, nuts, and beans rather than dead animals. It’s just more fragrant! When you grind up seeds, beans, and nuts, you get a meal that will not sprout on you. When you sprinkle the meal on the ground, the microbes in the soil digest the proteins and carbohydrates in the meal and poop that stuff back out. Then secondary microbes come along to digest the poop and poop it out. This process continues through a web of 25,000 different species of microbes living in the soil. Eventually the pooped out product is the perfect plant food. This is the way Mother Nature has designed it. She’s been perfecting it for hundreds of millions of years. More recently we’ve been trying to improve on her system with chemicals. While the chemicals do feed the plants, they do not feed the microbes. Besides the perfect plant food, the microbes also produce antibiotics, plant growth hormones, enzymes, glues, herbicidal chemicals, insecticidal chemicals, and fungicidal chemicals. So when you stop using a protein based fertilizer, you stop feeding the microbes what they expect to find and the soil becomes ready for invaders, disease, and bacterial blooms.

As an anti fungal agent:Corn meal attracts the Trichoderma species of fungus as well as a few others. You can read about Trichoderma all over the Internet and see that it is a very popular fungus. For mushroom growers, they do everything they can to kill Trichoderma because they know good and well it will kill out their crop of mushrooms. At the same time, you will find only one resource that discusses the use of corn meal as a way to grow your own Trichoderma fungi. That reference is at

http://stephenville.tamu.edu/~clee/pdncr/index.html

The researchers found that using corn meal cured every one of the (peanut) fungal diseases they tested it on. It turns out that the same fungi attack your garden. As the word has spread about using corn meal against fungal disease, it has shown to be a preventative as well as a complete cure for turf diseases, rose, tomato, and nearly every fungal disease it is tested against.

Corn meal does have one (so far) shortcoming in an organic program. If you use it during a grass seeding program, you will likely find a significant suppression of germination and subsequent grass growth.

So inasmuch as the discussions on this board rarely involve reseeding and quite often involve fungal disease, I usually get my 2 cents in for you to read without having to bring up the lone shortcoming of the material. As the lone organic contributor, I don’t think my comments are about to jeopardize the massive amounts of advice you’re going to get regarding chemical solutions to turf problems. Some folks think my comments should be balanced with comments about the non-organic solutions. Balance? It’s about 100 to 1 out of balance right now. As far as I can tell, nobody with any clout has tried using corn meal for anything. As far as it taking 3 weeks to work – all organic solutions take at least 3 weeks to work. Some take a year to work.

Many people who write into these forums never do one minute’s worth of research looking for another message about their same problem. Those of us who reply to help will often answer the identical question 3 times a day on one board.

We live in Johnson County, Texas. I’ve finally been able to give time and finances to my lawn which is part St. Augustine and part Bermuda grass about 1 1/2 acres. I’d heard of the corn gluten-meal organic benefits and researched somewhat on the internet. So I used it this spring understanding that it would probably be the next year before I would see the benefits. Put it out at the end of February and again at the end of May. Have noticed a few yellow spots in the crabgrass but now the dallisgrass is lush and spreading quickly to the Bermuda. I mow the Bermuda taller, got angry at the Dallisgrass and mowed it twice as short. Now I understand if I mow it taller the Bermuda will choke it out. That’s what I’m going to do; hope it works. Meantime, I put 28% nitrogen on the lawn; it really greened up and thickened up. Yesterday, I sprayed Weed B Gon Crabgrass on the back half; will see. I would like to believe the corn gluten-meal will work – am I just being impatient? What do I do about the dalligrass?

On another note, we have bought lawn tractors for 28 years. My husband bought a Cub Cadet zero radius recently and if I had known how much difference it made in time and the way it cuts, I would have invested in one and not wasted my money for all those years. My mowing time has been cut in half. They are well worth it!!!!!!!!!!

lewispaul – posted 20 June 2004 12:02

quote:Originally posted by cohiba:DChall,Well, I did it. I bought my first bag of corn meal. I want to try it out on my back yard. 100# for $8.00. What have I got to lose. I’m going to try some test plots. Thanks for the other side of the story(Organics) and wish me luck.

I need it……

I’d really like to try this in Florida, but the only corn meal I can locate is in supermarkets and is prohibitively expensive. Any suggestions as to where to buy 100#?

cohiba – posted 20 June 2004 14:10

Lewis Paul,I purchased cornmeal from a Hardware store in farm country. Any farm type store may have it. Agway? Also check with bulk fertilizer companies. They specialize in farm or AG grade fertilizer, they may have a source.

On a side note: I used the cornmeal and man do I have a crop of crabgrass. I just put out Ortho Weed B Gone Crabgrass Killer and am awaiting the results. So…..I say use PreM and use the cornmeal as an organic fert but nothing more. It may be a preM for someone else but not at my house.

Ronstar next year………….Good Luck!

sweetpooty – posted 11 July 2004 18:43

I would be willing to try cornmeal. We live on 5 acres and I feel like everything I put on my lawn probably ends up in my well water since the well is 700 feet deep.How much cornmeal do you apply and can you apply too much?

ganeese – posted 12 July 2004 17:08

quote:Originally posted by Buddee:[B] We live in Johnson County, Texas. I’ve finally been able to give time and finances to my lawn which is part St. Augustine and part Bermuda grass about 1 1/2 acres. I’d heard of the corn gluten-meal organic benefits and researched somewhat on the internet. So I used it this spring understanding that it would probably be the next year before I would see the benefits. Put it out at the end of February and again at the end of May. Have noticed a few yellow spots in the crabgrass but now the dallisgrass is lush and spreading quickly to the Bermuda. I mow the Bermuda taller, got angry at the Dallisgrass and mowed it twice as short. Now I understand if I mow it taller the Bermuda will choke it out. That’s what I’m going to do; hope it works. Meantime, I put 28% nitrogen on the lawn; it really greened up and thickened up. Yesterday, I sprayed Weed B Gon Crabgrass on the back half; will see. I would like to believe the corn gluten-meal will work – am I just being impatient? What do I do about the dalligrass?B]

Hey, we live in the same area. Our lawns sound the same too. I have Bermuda in the back with a little St Augustine and St Augustine in the front with a little Bermuda.<LOL> I have such a dallisgrass problem it make me sick. All the lawns on my street have it so I don’t think I could ever totally get rid of the problem.

I want to try the corn meal myself. Did you put anything down before you used the corn? I heard you need to put down some type of manure/compost before, but I don’t know much about it.

I’m really desperate to have a nice looking lawn. I tried for two season to get a lawn started at my old residence but was unable to. It was more weeds than grass. We moved into a new house that had a nice looking lawn already but making it as nice as I want is hard. I just don’t have the money to blow on my lawn that some do. Right now it is so hot I don’t even want to mowe. We have a big lot and a push mower/mulcher. I wish I could hire someone to take care of it.