HOW TO MAKE COMPOST TEA
supplement for your plants now let's look at what you need to prepare compost tea
you will need a bucket five-gallon bucket you will need an air pump you'll need a
small piece of quarter inch tubing a small piece of soaker hose and some
weights
you will need some compost you can either use bagged compost or you can use your own
homemade compost you will need fish fertilizer, seaweed, as well as molasses which
you can find at any grocery store
our first step in the brewing processes is to make sure that our water is free of
chlorine now a lot of household tap water contains chlorine which is bad for
beneficial bacteria so this is how you get rid of the chlorine and this is done
by using the air pump that we saw we've connected the air pump outlets to this barbed tee
which in turn connects to the quarter inch tubing and then into a soaker hose and
the weight is used to keep the soaker hose down another reason of using a soaker
hoses is that it produces a lot of these air bubbles that add a lot of oxygen into the water
Our next step is to add compost I'm using a bagged composed here
but you can use your own compost as well and you just need a handful of compost
as you can see here you do not need to over do it this is the fish
fertilizer, seaweed which will add nutrients to the soil and there's also molasses
which'll be food for the bacteria as the compost tea brews now we're gonna add our
ingredients to our compost tea which has been brewing for about an hour or so to
get rid of the chlorine in the water and what we do is we add the compost now
remember that the whole idea of making compost tea is to add a lot of
beneficial bacteria in the Tea
we're gonna add some fish fertilizer and seaweed which will not only add nutrients but
also feed the bacteria in the soil part in the compost tea and this is the
seaweed you just need to add a capful tablespoon of each don't need
to overdo it and then we add molasses which can be found in any grocery store
and what the bacteria do is they feed on the molasses and then they keep
multiplying and they keep multiplying to an extent where there are just so many
beneficial bacteria that your compost it becomes very nutritious and that's the
whole idea of brewing your compost tea
and what the air pump does is that it adds a lot of oxygen in the water we now
stir everything together very well with a stick and by adding all that oxygen
in the compost tea what happens is that we feed the aerobic bacteria which is
the beneficial bacteria in this compost tea and which multiplies and becomes
large in number and it also feeds on the molasses that we added in the compost
tea and once again here's how the air pump is connected to the soaker hose
via these barbed tees basically the two tubes connected via the barbed to the
quarter inch tubing and then back into the soaker hose which creates all these air
bubbles and now all we need to is let this tea brew or anywhere between 24 to 72
hours and I'll show you how the tea looks like a stage so after 24 hours you
can see that the bacteria in the compost tea has begun to multiply you can see
that with all the froth around the surface and after 48 hours it just
increases you can see how the tea looks like in 48 hours now at 48 hours the
tea is actually usable but if you want more beneficial bacteria just let it
keep brewing and you can see that 72 hours later
can see a lot more of that froth which is when you take out your tubing you
turn the air pump off and you're ready to use your compost tea so to use it all
you do is just put it on the base of any plant it will be absorbed by the
roots you can also foliar-apply the compost tea as I'm doing here I'm not
using a pump here but you get the idea now compost tea is also very good
for seedlings because seedlings don't need a strong fertilizer so compost tea
works very well
and because compost tea is so natural organic and doesn't contain any salts
that would harm you plants you can use it in containers you can use it for fruit
trees and remember that by adding compost tea
you are adding a gazillion bacteria into your soil and what the bacteria does is it
let your plants
absorb all the nutrients from the soil very efficiently so what you're gonna see
is very healthy plants that not only look good, they taste very good as well
and show a very nice good overall vigor in their growing and if you have not
tried making compost tea before I highly recommend that you try out this technique
