Compost Tea
Compost tea is like a vitamin shower for your plants. You can spray it directly on leaves and/or use it as your watering and fertilizer regimen. There are as many ‘recipes’ for compost tea as there are gardeners. Some have multiple steps, some require more equipment than others, some take days to complete.
We make a fresh, ready to use compost tea using a couple of broken buckets, a sheer piece of cloth, bits of wood, water, and compost.
We head over to a compost pile that is nearly done decomposing. We fill a bucket that has a big crack in the bottom with lots of yummy compost.
The chickens help to maintain the piles by flattening them every time i mound them up. They eat the sprouts and seeds that survive along with any slow bugs. They leave behind nitrogen rich droppings that just enrich the pile.
We place the bucket that is full of compost on top of another bucket (that has no holes) with a few pieces of wood to keep it from falling in. Rain water gets poured into the compost bucket and it trickles down into the lower bucket, aerated, with all sorts of compost bits in it.
We will pour that back into the compost bucket and let it drip through again, to make it stronger. Eventually the silt and other bits will block up the drainage channels and the drip will slow to the point where it gets boring and we move onto the next step.
It takes a whole 15 minutes to make compost tea and eliminates the need for commercial fertilizers or other poisonous crap.
The tea can be used at this point in a watering can. Harkening back to the other recipes you may have run across, we are not using an aquarium air pump to oxygenate the tea. We are not heating it. We don’t have a bag of compost sitting in the bucket for days. We are not adding things like molasses or hydrogen peroxide. And we are not covering it.
We do like to use it in a sprayer, and there are bits and chunks in the tea that’ll clog it. So, we made a filter stacking two 5-gallon buckets with the lower portions cut off; one taller than the other, and a piece of sheer cloth between them.
We put our filter unit into an empty bucket with no holes and pour our tea over the sheet. We will do this a couple of times to remove the bits that will clog our sprayer.
Again, the more you pour from one bucket to the next, the more air is introduced into the tea, allowing for the microbes to survive better. This is also why some gardeners add molasses and/or hydrogen peroxide to their tea to feed the microbes.
Compost tea won’t burn your plants, harm insects, or poison your soil. In fact, it boosts the microbial population in your garden along with providing your plant with some fast-acting fertilizer.
You may want to let the tea sit for a few minutes to let any large bits that may have gotten into the bucket to sink to the bottom before you put it into your sprayer and definitely use a screen or something to filter out any bits that may linger. Spray your plants after the sun has passed. It will leave a residue that could clog the leaves’ pores when it dries out. The cool night air and morning dew will allow the plant to absorb the microparticles. Be especially sure to spray the underside of the leaves.
Spraying compost tea a few times a week will bulk up your plants and give you lots of lush, healthy plant growth. This is helpful if you are experiencing leaf yellowing or pretty much any other problem at any stage of the plant’s life.
In the spring, make your compost tea with some extra green materials in it like fresh lawn clippings or leaf trim. This will impart some extra nitrogen that you want during the vegetative stage. During early summer and into the fall, put dried banana peels and hardwood ash into your compost tea for extra potassium and potash to boost flower production and grow extra plump peppers.
