compost tea - the 24hr recipe

there's been a rare old hoo-har about compost tea, here in the uk, since Gardener's World broadcast their April 1st look at the RHS's experiments with this organic method of keeping our plants tip top and healthy.

Of course, the recent e-coli outbreak in mainland Europe shocked many folks into thinking about what goes on to our commercially grow veggies - whether manure-based feeds were robust enough to prevent the transmission of pathogens, or whether they were in part to blame for such a devastating pathogenic outbreak.

The issue of creating safe organic feeds is therefore a crucial one - the oldest form of compost tea comes from the Victorian country garden.

Simply put: a collection of dried "cow-pats" would be placed in a burlap sack, weighted down and placed into a water butt to steep for a few days, before the liquor would be watered into the veggies and flowers for the full fertilizer effect.

It worked well in that time, of course, as they had precious few petrochemicals which might upset the delicate food-chain in the soil food web ( fascinating subject we'll cover in more detail in later blog posts) and no long-lasting man-made compounds which might survive the journey through a cow's intestine and go on to mutate crops, as we had a few years ago with herbicides.

So, what with the concern over e-coli, pathogens from manure, i was reading through a couple of homesteading blogs and came across this recipe from the small measures blog.  It's a guest post by Indio of saving the big money blog in the states and gives a 24 hour recipe for compost tea:

I started out with a control group of plants that didn’t get the compost tea as a point of comparison. Eventually, I took pity on this group and one by one they got hooked on the delicious beverage. There is only one remaining anemic plant from my group of test plants.

This is my first year using compost tea and I quickly became a convert. It’s not a difficult process so I usually have a 5 gallon bucket of tea percolating daily. I alternate between my two vegetable beds and every other day they get a drink when it isn’t raining. With the recent ecoli outbreak in Europe, compost tea is one of the safest ways to add nutrients to soil instead of using animal manure. Rather than worrying about whether or not the manure has aged enough to be safe on root crops, or if it will splash on fruiting crops I’ve found that compost tea is a way to take the worry out of soil enhancement and organic nutritional supplements.

At its most basic, compost tea is made by soaking the compost in non-chlorinated water for twenty four hours to encourage the growth of bacteria, fungi, protozoa and beneficial microbes that will feed the plant either through the leaves or the root system. The tea can be either sprayed on the plants as a foliar spray or used to water the plants. If you soak the compost longer than 24 hours, you risk the microbes dying before they get to the plant so it’s important to use it as soon as it is ready.

The Four Step Process

1. Fill a large bucket with water (water temperature doesn’t matter). If you don’t have well water, then let the water sit for 24 hours prior to adding the compost to let the chlorine evaporate out of the treated water. Depending upon the size of your garden you may want to use something larger than a five gallon bucket, which is what I use for my two modest veg beds.

2. To encourage the microbe development, I add two tbsps of tea catalyst to the water and stir to dissolve it. This is not a mandatory step, but it does accelerate the development of the microbes.

3. An air pump, the kind that is typically used in an aquarium, with two air stones attached to the end of the pump tubing, are used to circulate the bucket water. The air stones are placed on the bottom of the bucket. The whole set up must be located near an electrical outlet because the pump will need to be higher than the bucket so that water doesn’t get sucked back into the pump and break it. The pump speeds up the process by circulating the water and organisms.

4. To make the tea, I use either worm castings or arctic humus. I usually run out of humus quickly, but worm castings I can dig out of the vermicompost bin in my basement. If you don’t have a worm bin, check with your local garden shop for bags of worm castings. Next put the compost in a mesh bag and hang that over the edges of the bucket. Stirring the compost every now and then helps distribute the organisms, rather than letting them get stuck in the compost.

In 24 hours, you can pour the tea into a watering can or use it as a foliar spray. Your plants will show their appreciation by being bountiful.

Now i'm not exactly sure what the tea catalyst might be, but i suspect it may be a commercially available additive from the varying compost tea suppliers in the States.

As we'll find out through the pages of this blog, there are a myriad of ways in which to make compost teas, wines, microbe brews and so on - with varying effects claimed and shown.  The main point that people are finding out, however, is that we don't need chemical or synthetic feeds to care for our plants - in fact these synthetic feeds may have done more harm than good since their introduction (in terms of damaging soil structure and allowing pathogenic species to flourish).

BUGS are part of the coming new understanding about how we can feed ourselves whilst taking care of nature, but remember -
the revolution will not be pasteurized*

* see the about this blog page for more