Tea Brewer Steep
Posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 12:43 am
Brewing Compost Teas To Revitalize Your Garden
All organic gardeners love compost. It quite simply is a soil modifier and power food without equal. But what about compost tea? If you have not tried compost tea yet, you’re in for a genuine treat. Compost tea is the secret formula you’ve been waiting for! Give your plants a couple of applications and you’ll be a convert for life as soon as you witness the results.
Why Compost Tea Works So Well
Taking on board the real goal of compost tea brewing will help you see why compost tea works so well and my guess is it will make you a better gardener. So lets go…
A microscopic web of life exists all around us. In our soil, on the leaves of plants, on our skin and even on benchtops we thought were clean! Consider any organic surface, and on it, you can bet your bottom dollar there’s a colony of invisible lifeforms, living and dying, eating and being eaten, processing nutrients, converting sugars and playing their role in the ecosystem. Amazingly, just one handful of healthy soil is home to a mind-boggling 15,000 species of bacteria, 8,000 species of fungi as well as a variety of nematodes and protozoa, numbering in the billions. Some fungis are good. Some are bad. Some bacteria help while some cause trouble.
The goal of the compost tea brewer is to “cultivate” and multiply the beneficial fungi and bacteria in order to inoculate the leaves of plants or soil with the desirable species. Producing compost and turning it into our garden is the traditional method of treating (inoculating) soils in order to cause an increase of desirable organisms in the root zone. Brewing compost tea is simply an extension of the process, a means of supercharging the population growth and producing a liquid which can be used as a foliar spray to inoculate the leaves as well. By brewing a tea we can also make our well-finished, highly-prized compost go much further.
Brewing Compost Tea
Compost tea is created by steeping (soaking) mature, well finished compost in water that is kept aerated. Aeration is essential because the beneficial bacteria we need are aerobic and require oxygen to thrive. Molasses is used to feed the microorganisms in order to speed-up their population growth.
You’ll find a number of variations of compost tea brewing recipes and techniques online but here’s the basics…
Hardware Required:
A 5 gallon bucket
An aquarium air pump able to run 3 bubblers, also called “air stones”
Several feet of plastic air tube, 3 bubblers and a gang valve to distrubute air to the air stones.
A fabric bag to strain the solids out of the tea – an old pillowcase is suggested
The Method:
Arrange the three air stones, equally spaced, on the bottom of the bucket
Add your mature compost to the bucket to around one third of it’s capacity
Top up with potable, chlorine free water to within 2 inches of the rim
Start the pump and aeration process
Add 1 oz of unsulfered molasses and stir through the mixture
Gently stir the mixture a few times a day taking care not to move the air stones
Allow to aerate for 2 or 3 days (maximum), then strain off the liquid and apply immediately to plants; you can use it as either a soil drench around plant roots or a foliar spray.
Some Finer Points For Compost Tea Brewers
It’s important to only use mature compost that you can be quite sure has no pathogens remaining. Molasses will also feed pathogens like E. Coli and cause rapid growth in their population, making the tea a risk to your health. The best compost to use will have reached and held a temperature of 150 degrees F for three days during the process of composting in order to have eliminated pathogens. The high quality compost that you get from automatic kitchen composters like the NatureMill or worm compost bins is best for compost tea brewing.
Making and ultilizing compost tea is an easy way to improve your gardening results. Join the ranks of ecstatic compost tea brewers around the world, get brewing today!
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