Ingredients:
1. About 1 gallon of compost
2. Unsulfured molasses
3. Oat flour
4. About 4 gallons of water
Equipment:
1. 2 five gallon (or larger) buckets
2. An air pump
3. Cheesecloth, or something to filter your compost tea. Pantyhose work fine, believe it or not.
Pre-composting step: The night before, I filled a bucket with 4 gallons of water from the hose. I let it sit overnight so the chlorine would evaporate. Otherwise the
Step 1: We began with some finished worm compost. You want to make absolutely sure you've got good compost, because if you have any harmful pathogens or other destructive organisms in your compost, turning it into compost tea will magnify the problem. I haven't done anything special to my worm compost but it smells like compost and looks like compost, so I'm trusting that the worms did a good job. I put about 1 gallon (a little less, actually) of finished worm compost in a 5 gallon bucket.
About 1 gallon of worm compost
If you want, you can put your compost into a pair of pantyhose, tie a knot at the top, and put that into the bucket. That saves you the step of filtering the solids out of your compost tea at the end.
2. Add food for your microbes: unsulfured molasses for your bacteria & oat flour for your fungi. The instructions I used said to use about 1 ounce of molasses. Well, we just poured. But 1 ounce is a little less than a shot, so you could use a shot glass to measure. We tossed in a handful or two of the oat flour.
3. Add water. Remember, use water with no chlorine. Fill the bucket to about 6 inches from the top.
Bucket filled with compost, molasses, oat flour, and water.
4. Aerate your compost. We got an air pump for a fish tank for $26. It has 4 hoses that come out from it, pumping air into the water. You do not put the pump itself into the compost tea! Just the hoses. I put the pump slightly above the top of the bucket, so that if the power goes out for some reason, the water will not back up and get into the pump.
Our Actively Aerated Compost Tea, brewing in our garage.
Close up
5. Leave it alone for 2-3 days.
6. After 2-3 days, strain your compost tea into another bucket through a cheesecloth. We left ours for two days and then strained it with a cheesecloth. Unfortunately, at this point it got so messy and crazy that I was no longer able to take pictures of each step.
7. Use it IMMEDIATELY - otherwise the microorganisms will begin to die. (One source I read said they'll start to eat each other.) To use it, put it in a watering can and apply it to your garden, both to the soil and to the foliage. At this point, if your compost tea smells bad, DO NOT USE IT. Pour it into your compost pile. Ours smelled fine, and we used ours on our peppers, tomatoes, and strawberries.
8. Put the solids you strained out of the tea in your garden like you would with normal compost. |
