COMPOST TEA & Other Teas
Compost tea is an effective way to extend your supply of compost. Compost tea contains soil food web workers & minerals. They unlock & deliver nutrients to your plants to:
—nourish & fertilize them
—help prevent (and recover from) disease
—restore & rejuvenate ailing plants
—boost fast recovery from transplanting
— doggie spots and lawn problems.
Tea is an easy way to apply with your watering can or sprayer.
Compost tea can be created in a three ways. See recipes below for 1 & 3.
A quick and beneficial compost tea—a leachate tea—is simply soaking a bit of compost in water and applying.
An anaerobic—fermented tea—comes from soaking compost for 4-7 days in water. It stinks and is highly bacterial. It is beneficial too, esp. for annual plants.
Compost tea—the actively aerated kind—comes from a special 24 hour aeration process. This “brewing” extracts and breeds a diversity of beneficial fungi, bacteria, fungi, & protozoa in the tea that is 1000’s of times more concentrated than compost solids.
These soil food web workers will:
– unlock & deliver nutrients to your plants
– restore health to trees, perennials, transplants, berries, lawn, & doggie spots
– prevent disease, esp. on tomatoes, cukes, & peppers
Read on to learn more about when, how to apply it, and what it does. To order your actively aerated compost tea, email compostTeaOrders@theexperimentalfarmstead.org
For bulk & special orders, please contact Ellen at information@goodearthgardenschool.com
Helpful Information About Compost Tea
Actively Aerated Compost Tea
All the soil minerals in the world won’t make your plants grow unless you have the soil biology to deliver these nutrients. It is the soil microorganisms—namely bacteria, fungi, protozoans, and nematodes— who transform soil minerals into forms plants can use. This is how nature works, and the more diversity and higher numbers of microbes, the healthier the soil and plants will be.
Manure Tea to Nourish Your Plants
If you are someone rich in a livestock manure source, you can make manure tea to fertilize your garden plants.
Worm Tea to nourish your plants
In a typical worm bin, red wiggler worms digest and decompose kitchen waste, damp newspaper strips, and other organic matter. The red wigglers poop, and these accumulated “castings” are the vermi- compost. This product is a wet, crumbly, organic material. It is sweet-smelling and loaded with minerals and microbes. It’s very much like your finished compost from your outdoor compost heap, but vermi- compost is reported to contain somewhat higher populations of beneficial soil microbes per cupful.
Actively Aerated Compost Tea is a microbe inoculant with nutrients. It delivers the high microbe diversity and populations that decrease transplant shock, vastly enhance nutrient uptake, decrease the need for irrigation and fertilizers, and combat every kind of plant disease.
We hope the new owners of Ellie’s 100 gallon brewer in Chugiak will be offering actively aerated compost tea in spring of 2024