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Molasses Subsitute in Compost Tea

willow

willow

Has anyone used a molasses sustitute in compost tea. I have access to unprocessed freshly squeezed sugar cane juice or the raw sugar they produce from this locally. I plan to use one of these as molasses is not available. From what I can tell and have read raw sugar should be fine. Any thoughts would be appreciated on whether to use the juice or sugar or if someone knows a reason to use niether....
 
Thanks in advance.
 
The short answer is that any source of sugar can be substituted for the molasses so you should be fine with either the juice or raw sugar.  There is a point where too much sugar can interfere w/ nitrogen intake when the tea is applied so be careful of overkill.  
 
The long answer depends on why you are incorporating sugar into the compost tea.  If it is to help increase the microbial reproduction, there is a school of thought that sugar doesn't add that much value.  Lot's of discussion/arguments on the 'interweb' about this topic.  
 
The idea was a direct replacement for the molasses which I believe is thought to be food source for the microbes. Yes I see its a lifetime of research if you want it to be. I read one article by a scientist, was pretty intense, he was saying unless you adhere to very strict rules chances are your tea will contain the bad boys and probably will not do that much good. I think you can overthink this and personally just see it as soaking some nutrients in some water and feeding the plant or soil. Basically as nature does, just in a concentrated way. All this business about getting the tea to froth with microbial reproduction etc might be a little over the top for me, I dont see much of that in nature and everything grows pretty well. Will experiment and see what happens.
 
Molasses has trace elements and goodies in it.  If you got with simple sugars, you're basically feeding it white bread.  Does it work?  Sure, it works.  But you don't want to just feed your microbes sugar.
 
So some research has told me this. Molasses comes from the sugar cane juice. The problem is its approx 10 to 1, so to get the nutrient and vitamin rich molasses you need to boil the excess water away and preferably remove most of the sugars, sucrose usually (might not be so necessary in a compost tea, its more so for sugar free health benefits for humans I think). So with that in mind I think the raw sugar will do pretty good as its basically molasses with the sugar not removed. Commercially its done in centrifugal machinery, I have seen some videos of traditional mountain molasses producers, doing there thing but its not something any tom, dick and harry can do on a Sunday afternoon, I do not think. Seems crazy that no one would be making Molasses here, I need to search harder perhaps. If not I will go with the raw sugar (it is not simple sugar, its 100% unrefined, just has the water boiled away, so has all the benefits of molasses I believe). That is what I get from what I have read at least...
 
Yeah, OK, I missed the cane juice.

I'd almost have to argue that fresh pressed cane juice would be better than molasses, as you'd still have living enzymes that haven't been cooked off by heating. 
 
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