I am implementing an organic program in my landscape (lawn/flower beds/trees/garden) at my new home in Mesquite, TX, but am concerned about chemicals in the water supply. Mesquite's water is treated with chloramine at the North Texas Municipal Water District (NTMWD) in Wylie. The primary source for Mesquite's water is Lake Lavon and is supplemented by water delivered from Lake Texoma and Cooper Lake. Chloramine is a combined form of chlorine (chlorine and ammonia) and its purpose is to kill microbes. It is added to our water supply because its disinfecting qualities are longer lasting and less corrosive than free-chlorine.

So that I can better understand soil microbes, I have read all of the information on Dr. Elaine Ingham's site at www.soilfoodweb.com and have ordered two of her books, "Soil Biology Primer" and "Compost Tea Manual, 4th ed." She mentions that chlorine is harmful to microbes, but doesn't mention anything about how to remove chloramine on her web site.

From my research on the web I have learned that free-chlorine can be removed from water by allowing the water to be exposed to the air for a few hours before using or by aerating the water with a submerged air bubble stone attached to an aquarium pump, but chloramine can not be removed this way. It must be filtered out.

Further research on organic materials that will filter out chloramine from water have indicated granulated activated charcoal, zeolite and ascorbic acid (vitamin C, Tang etc.) can be effective. As a result, I am designing a rechargeable in-line garden hose filter with these three ingredients and will test the effectiveness of chloramine extraction with reagent test strips.

If it works, this will allow me to use my garden hose applicator sprayer to apply compost tea without killing the microbes in the tea. I would use rainwater, but we haven't received much rain lately. The problem is, my landscape is all watered with my in-ground sprinkler system, which is connected to the municipal water supply. I do not see an economical way of placing a filter on my sprinkler system to remove the chloramine. I have not calculated the size of a rainwater collection reservoir I would need to irrigate an 8,500 square foot landscape, but I would think it would need to be quite large and expensive to retrofit.

The question is: will the chloramine in my sprinkler system water end up killing the microbes I have inoculated into the soil with compost tea and therefore be counter-productive to an organic program? Could you apply the tea and wait a few days before watering with the sprinkler system? If so, what about subsequent waterings? What's the ppm chloramine concentration limit that microbes can survive? Over time, would the chloramine completely wipe out the microbes, or can they reproduce fast enough and overcome the chloramine. Once established in the soil, does the soil offer any protection against chloramine?

This is a new house, with new sod, built in March of this year. Previously the soil was farmland that had not been farmed in at least 7 years. My soil is made up of about 1-inch of sandy-loam topsoil that was delivered with the Bermudagrass sod. The sod was laid over the local heavy clay soil which is called Houston Black Clay from the Upper Cretaceous Taylor Marl Formation. I also applied about 1/3-inch compost as a top-dressing on the grass in late May to start my organic program. It has had Texas Tee organic fertilizer, Garret juice and horticultural cornmeal applications as well.

Thanks for your help.

This is incredible! You're making an excellent start into organic turf management. How would you like to moderate a forum??

Okay, to start with, you are absolutely right that the chloramines and chlorines will kill microbes. If they didn't, the city would use something stronger, right? So you hit that nail directly on the head. I came to that conclusion this year myself. I don't care how much water I apply, a 1/4 inch rainfall helps 10x more than an inch of tap water. I've had folks tell me the rain water collects nitrogen on the way down. Do I believe that? And is the nitrogen available to the plants? I think that's weak science, but I'm reserving my final conclusions.

PLEASE feel absolutely free to improve upon my inline charcoal/zeolite dechlorinator I built two weeks ago. Here's a link to my post in Dirt Doctor.

http://www.dirtdoctor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1402

There was considerable concern about the speed of the flow through the filter not allowing the chlorine to be absorbed (or 'adsorbed'). Then someone who sounded like he had just looked it up in one of his textbooks wrote in and said that activated charcoal has an "immediate" effect and that anything that it can absorb (adsorb) at all will be adsorbed immediately upon contact. So that made me feel better. Then he added that the charcoal filtering pores will fill up eventually, and when that occurs, the filter stops filtering just as suddenly as it filters. So it's either filtering like a sonofab-gun or not doing jack. The only way to know what it's doing is to test. If I was to refill it today, I would put half zeolite and half charcoal without mixing the two products. I took apart my PUR gallon jug water filter the other day and it had about 50 particles of carbon and 50,000 pieces of zeolite. My home made filter is exactly the opposite. The zeolite is dirt cheap at HEB (generic kitty litter - contents Zeolite 100%).

I've spent the past few days on the Internet and in pet shops looking for test strips. They're plentiful ($$$) on the Internet but pet shops don't carry them. They figure that once you got the chlorine out of the water, there's no way to get more in there so why test? And swimming pool test kits don't necessarily go all the way to zero PPM of chlorine/chloramine. The city restaurant inspectors get the test strips that show how much chlorine is in the water, not how little, so they don't all go to zero ppm.

Zero parts per million is what you're after. 1 PPM kills microbes (according to the city inspectors), so you want absoutely undetectable levels.

So I have more bad news for you. You maybe have already fixed this but the water you use for compost tea must be aerated for at least 3 hours and/or filtered for chloramines before you put any compost in it. Then, the water that you use to dilute it, if you dilute it, must be aerated (3 hours) or aired (24 hours), too. In your case, with chloramine, you need to filter it all. If you have not been doing that, according to at least one professional in the lawn care business who makes and sells compost tea, it will have near zero counts of microbes.

Someone has suggested that I devote a 30-gal trash can to decontaminating water and keep an aerater running in it 24/7 (we don't have chloramine, yet). I don't know about that. I'm going to try my dechlorinator (if I ever have to water again) and see how it works.

So please have a go at my design. Mine is rechargable with the threads in the middle but it sure makes it heavy. I think I need to devote a short piece of hose to connect it to the faucet all the time rather than attaching it at the sprinkler end.

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David Hall
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