Make a Compost Tea, Don't Just Compost

If you have a garden of any variety, be it vegetables, flowers, cacti, or shrubbery, you most likely have a compost pile to help feed your plants. If you don't have a compost pile, I recommend you start one right away. When feeding the soil with compost, you will notice the results. Even if you have been composting for years, a lot of people don't know that there is an even more beneficial and useful way to use that compost and that is by making compost tea. Just as the name suggests, compost tea is a liquid made from steeping compost in water. Additional aeration is provided as well as a form of sugar to feed the microorganisms. This tea provides great benefits to your garden in the form of increased growth, increased (organic) nutrients, greater beneficial microorganism activity, suppression of plant disease, and a way to keep your garden green by being able to replace your chemical fertilizers. Compost tea is made quite easily with only a few simple materials.

You will need 2 5-gallon buckets, an aquarium pump, a 3-way gang valve for the aquarium pump, 5 feet of tubing, 3 air stones, a stirring stick, and a length of porous cloth such as from some old nylons or an old bedsheet. You will want to attach a couple feet of the hose to the pump and then the gang valve. Onto the gang valve attach three 1-foot lengths of hose and cap them off with the air stones.

Of course, you also need the organic materials, being the compost, water, and a small bottle of unsulfured molasses. Care must be taken about the water being used. I always recommend rain water. Collect your rain water and save it up in a trough or buckets to use on your garden. If you don't have any rain water, the next best thing is well water.

If you have neither rain water nor well water, your only choice will be to use regular tap water. The problem with this is that then chlorine content will kill the microorganisms in the compost, so first we must remove as much of the chlorine as possible. This best way to do this is through aeration. Fill one of the buckets about ¾ full of tap water and attach the gang valve to the side, allowing the 3 tubes and stones to rest in the bucket. Let the water aerate overnight, or at the minimum for 3 hours. It will then be ready to use.

To prepare the compost tea, simply fill a bucket about 1/3 of the way with compost. Do not pack it down. Let it stay loose. Add water, leaving about 3 inches to spare at the top of the bucket. Now add the aerators, attaching the gang valve to the side of the bucket. Add 1 oz. of the molasses and then stir vigorously. Set it all side for 2-3 days.

After 2-3 days-and no longer, remove the aeration hoses and let it sit for about 20 minutes so the solids settle on the bottom. Now you can pour the liquid into the other bucket, straining it through the cloth. Once it is all strained, add the solids back to the compost pile and mix together.

Now you have your compost tea. The best thing to do with it is to fill a sprayer. Spray the leaves and the ground to cover every surface. Repeat the process every 2 weeks to keep your garden healthy and to reap the benefits of an organically grown garden.