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Tap your compost pile to make a potion that both fertilizes and prevents disease

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How to Make Compost Tea.
How to Make Aerated Compost Tea - Organic Gardening - MOTHER EARTH NEWS.
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As your interest and compost tea needs grow, you can always brew in a bigger container. Depending on the types and proportions of each ingredient added, brewing compost tea can take anywhere from one to three days. Remember, UV rays kill microbes, so brew your tea out of direct sunlight. Finished tea looks a bit like coffee and smells really sweet and earthy.

Use your tea within four hours to keep your microorganisms alive. Sign up for weekly project ideas and advice from experts. How To Outdoors Gardening. How to Make Compost Tea.

Learn to make your own organic fertilizer by brewing compost tea at home. Pinterest Facebook Twitter Email.

Bag or sock optional. How to Make Compost Tea Give your garden the benefits of compost and organic fertilizer with less work by brewing and using compost tea. Compost Tea Recipes Discover the nuances of compost teas, what your garden needs and how to make it. The Benefits of Compost Often called "black gold," compost is valued for giving plants a boost when added to the soil of garden beds.

Learn how to give your compost pile the jumpstart it needs. How to Add Manure to Compost Discover why manure makes a good addition to your compost and how to select the right manure for the job. Simple Soil Tests A few simple tests can determine what you need to do to help your soil and improve your gardening results. Kid-Friendly Composting and Plant Sales Learn about easy composting and a way young gardeners can give back to the community.

It is completely organic! Your indoor houseplants like compost tea, too. How to make Compost Tea: Use any large container, from a 5 gallon bucket to a 55 gallon drum. Fill the container loosely with a variety of plant waste. Or, fill a burlap bag with compost, and insert this "tea bag" into the container. Yes, you can toss in a little manure in, too. Fill the container with water. Stir the mixture every day. Aeration is important to the process of making compost tea.

After a week, your tea is ready to use.

Brewing Compost Tea

Drain off the liquid. Strain out solid particles. If you are going to use the liquid fertilizer in a garden sprayer, strain the tea through a cheesecloth or other fine mesh, to remove small particles that can clog the sprayer. You do not have to use it all at once.

Actively Aerated Compost Tea

If you only need a little, take what you need, leaving the rest to continue to steep, until you need it. The resulting pure compost tea is likely too strong for your plants.

How to Make Compost Tea.
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If you put a lot of "greens" into the tea, the nitrogen content can be so high, that it burns the plants. Many grassroots compost tea brewers I know use a nylon stocking to hold inoculant. However, some compost tea brewers claim that nylon is not the best material to use, and recommend using a non-sticky compost bag like a polyester mesh screen which will allow for more fungal extraction.

The mesh should be at least micrometers to allow fungi and nematodes to flow through. For optimal extraction, it is also important that you put your inoculant in the bag and not just directly in the water.

Use an air pump to keep your tea sufficiently oxygenated. Though there are many sources that say that some variation of an aquarium pump connected to some airstones could supply enough aeration for a five-gallon batch of compost tea, that is not necessarily the case. Lots of compost tea brewers have pumps or bubblers that provide good aeration, but they may not provide the necessary agitation you need to truly aerate the water and knock the organisms, like fungi, off the organic matter and into solution.

So instead of a lightly bubbling compost tea, you should aim for more of a rolling boil, or churning. To achieve this, you may have to play around with a few different air pumps or generative blowers. Some sources suggested using a high-pressure 3. Avoid using air compressors as they can damage microorganisms. Remember, these pumps need a power source, and the tea needs to be aerated constantly - so make sure no one turns off the pump at night.

In a post-disaster situation where power may be more difficult to come by - or if you live somewhere where electricity is a touchy thing - it may be harder to make compost tea properly. Pretreat your compost to increase its inoculant and fungal power. Take your compost inoculant and add some humic acid or fish hydrolase to it. Put it into a shallow tray and mix it up well. Then let it sit for two to three days.

How to Make Aerated Compost Tea

This encourages fresh microorganism growth in the tea. Fill a bucket with non-chlorinated water. Water temperature is ideally between oF. If using tap water, leave it sitting and uncovered for 24 hours to off-gas any chlorine, or add humic acid to it to deal with chloramine. Put the airstone in the bottom of the bucket, attach the air pump and let it start to bubble. Make sure there is enough oxygen and agitation moving through your liquid; if not, get a more powerful pump or move to the gang valve and three-bubbler approach.

Remember, you are looking for more of a churning or rolling boil, not simply fine bubbles. Let the whole brew bubble for 24 hours and for no longer than 36 hours. After 36 hours, if the tea received insufficient oxygen or too much food, anaerobic organisms will overcome the beneficial aerobic organisms. It will be obvious if the tea went anaerobic, because it will stink!

Finished compost

If that has happened, pour it out away from garden plants and start over. One thing to be aware of — just because your compost tea smells earthy and sweet which is the smell you are going for , it does not mean that it packs a microbial punch, as that smell can also come from molasses. If possible, do a soil biology test of your first few batches to see if you truly are rocking the microbe production.

Make sure to clean your bucket and pump for your next round of tea. Use a non-toxic, environmentally friendly, biodegradable cleaner. Use your compost tea within four hours of turning off the bubbler, since after that amount of time without oxygen your aerobic microorganisms will begin to die. It is best to apply your tea to moist soil or after a rain, on a cloudy morning or in the evening as some microorganisms do not like baking in the hot sun.

You can also take a digging fork or piece of rebar and make holes throughout your site to loosen soil and give the microorganisms a way to move more rapidly down to where the contamination may be.

Tap your compost pile to make a potion that both fertilizes and prevents disease

Shop the Store View All. Docked Out 8am 7c. Every time you stir, be sure to reposition the bubblers. There are many sites that offer recipes. Try to stir the tea at least a few times a day.