THE MICROBIOLOGICAL BALANCE OF STRAWBERRY ROOT ROT SOIL AS RELATED TO THE RHIZOSPHERE AND DECOMPOSITION EFFECTS OF CERTAIN COVER CROPS

Abstract

Soybean and red clover, grown as cover crops and incorporated into strawberry root rot soil, showed a marked difference in ability to control the disease on variety Premier. Soybean caused a striking reduction in the incidence of root rot and a drastic shift in the bacterial equilibrium of the soil. Red clover had little effect on the severity of the disease or the general microflora of the soil.A study of "rhizosphere effects" reveals that the characteristic differences between the resultant bacterial equilibrium of the soils in which the two leguminous plants were grown, could not be attributed to influences exerted by the latter in the living state. However, the bacterial types favoured during decomposition in experimental cultures of tissues of red clover and of soybean, each inoculated with root rot soil, were identical with those isolated from root rot soil with which red clover and soybean, respectively, had been incorporated. In contrast to the putrefactive decomposition of red clover, soybeans apparently underwent a carbohydrate breakdown that could be reproduced essentially in culture by the substitution of glucose for soybean tissues. Beneficial changes in the bacteriology of actual root rot soils could be induced by the decomposition of pure carbohydrate in place of soybean. The favourable alteration in the bacterial equilibrium was accompanied by a corresponding modification of the fungous flora such that potentially pathogenic forms were replaced by presumably innocuous ones. These carbohydrate treated soils were capable of producing strawberry plants with well developed healthy root systems. The ability of soybean to control strawberry root rot therefore seems to depend primarily on a carbohydrate type of breakdown in diseased soil, causing a highly favourable shift in the microbiological equilibrium. The decomposition of red clover, on the other hand, did not under the same conditions induce these salutary effects.