Compost Tea: How to Make Your Garden's Favorite Drink

Compost tea is a cool refreshing summer drink for your garden, not for you. It is the nutrient rich liquid run-off from your compost. Compost is simply decomposed vegetable matter that is full of minerals and nutrients for your garden. Mixed into your garden beds it enriches the soil and helps keep it at top productivity year after year. Compost tea is used during the growing season as a liquid fertilizer. There are several ways to make compost tea. It all depends on what you're planting and where you need the tea. In this article, we'll address making compost tea that can be poured into a container and used to feed any garden location. This means that we want to keep it from soaking into the ground when it's created.

Materials for Making Compost Tea

We start with a barrel or other large container. A store-bought or mail-order compost tumbler works great too. For making compost tea, you want a container with no holes bored into it. Some compost tumblers have air holes to keep the compost from getting too wet. If you can find one with a spigot or drain valve near one end, that's perfect.

To create compost, you just set aside common vegetable kitchen scraps. Cucumber peels, potato peels, carrot greens, and anything other plant material from the kitchen that you'd ordinarily throw away. You can also use grass clipping and autumn leaves, but these should be mixed in with even portions of other plant matter to keep the compost chemistry just right. The key to making good compost is to keep the decaying material aerated. This means tumbling the compost container every couple of days to keep it well mixed.

How to Use Compost Tea

In a sealed compost container, you'll find that liquid starts to build up over time. This liquid is your compost tea. Just drain it out into a bucket and use it generously in your garden. It'll be a brownish color and should have very little odor. If liquid doesn't build up in your composter, then you can add some water. Don't add too much or let is set too long. Too much liquid can kill off the bacteria that is decomposing all the stuff you keep putting in there. An alternative is to always leave the drain open and keep a large bucket under the drain to catch the compost tea as it is generated. This prevents it from building up and stopping the composting process.

Replenishing your Garden Soil with Compost

At the end of the season, you can stop adding new material to the composter for about 3-4 weeks. Then empty all the finished compost from the container and mix it into your garden soil. It should be black in color and have no recognizable food scraps left in it. Using compost tea all summer, and replenishing the soil once a year with finished compost provides a perfect growing medium for vegetable or flower gardens. Composting keeps the soil healthy and vigorous indefinitely.