Brewed Compost Tea

Hi Glenn, Is your spring far enough along that you will see any plant leaf responses? And has your daughter-in-law seen these photos yet !!! One thing I've used tulle for that's almost as utilitarian is for jar-top-strainers when I sprout seeds in a quart jar or bigger - fastened with a rubber band. It makes rinsing several times daily easy. Here in the central Idaho mountains the Cottonwood leaves are just coming out an inch & very fragrant. Monday I had the windows wide open to hear the bird life along the canal. The Wood River is beyond & then Carbonate Mountain. And a large, glossy moose walked out of the open brush & onto the lawn less than 20' from my windows. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was speaking on a pod cast on my table. I too enjoy juxtapositions ... I leaned aside to get a better look & the cane of my chair made a slight creak. The moose turned & looked at me! Quite a sensation ... I won't be envisioning a greens-garden in my window view any more. Now I'm going to take this as a good omen from my new totem animal for the work that's underway. It was a really large moose & I think we may soon see two moose!

I ask about using sugar to feed aerobic bacteria, on the old KGI. I never got a clear answer or one I could understand. And I just got a hand sprayer at my surpraise 50th Birthday party! What good timing, the garden fairy must be telling me something.

I have quite a bit of experience with brewing compost tea. I used to do it when I was paid to be a gardener and then I owned a business where I sold organic soil amendments and compost tea brewers. There's quite a bit of knowledge to do it right, so I can't cover it here, but I will say that the second article (the pdf) you linked to was written by Elaine Ingham, and she is the guru when it comes to compost tea. Her Compost Tea Brewing Manual is the bible. If you want to make a good tea, my advice would be to buy a good brewer that has been tested. For the average home gardener, it's too costly to set up your own and test and tweak it until you make a good tea. It's actually cheaper to buy a brewer for a couple hundred bucks. You're right about the reason behind it. The old soaking method would get a little bit of nutrition out of the compost, but not much in the way of beneficial microorganisms. The new "aerated" method, if done properly, is a great way to extract and multiply a huge number of microbes from a small amount of excellent compost, and then inoculate your entire garden, including the leaves. I've seen miraculous results from doing it just a few times. It's definitely worth the investment, but it does take some time to learn the ropes, so only do it if you think it would be fun. Hope that gives you a bit of good info.

Nice to see all the comments. I hope you don't mind if I respond to everything here. Jessica, some of the results I have seen are diseases disappearing overnight, better quality/higher quantity food, and even trees getting established where they could never be established before, due to an imbalanced soil food web. In terms of how many people could share a brewer, quite a few. 5 gallons of good compost tea will cover an acre of plants. 100 gallons of poor compost tea won't do much of anything. Glenn, yes I shouldn't have mentioned the $200 with the short explanation I gave. That kind of money is best spent by people who are growing a lot of food and who want to get better yields, higher brix, less pests, and so on. It makes sense if you are really growing a lot. For most home gardeners, I much prefer other inoculants (like effective microorganisms, but that's for another time). David and Joel, I totally agree, on the surface it seems absurd that we need to pay for a compost tea brewer. Honeycarts and honey buckets are wonderful, but they are different. They supply some nutrients, but not much in the way of microbes. Pouring water through compost or humanure doesn't extract many microbes because they are held extremely tightly onto the organic matter with the "glues" they excrete. Most of them aren't floating around in the water part of the compost, so they aren't extracted. That being said, the 2 reasons we use compost tea are 1. Because we usually don't have as much compost as we want and 2. Because the microbes who should be colonizing our plants are often not there. If we have plenty of compost, then by all means that is a magnificent way to get microbes into our soil. And if we have an established organic garden that isn't getting pesticide drift or other forms of urban pollution, we don't need to colonize the leaves with microbes. They're already there. So this is a especially useful when we're converting away from chemicals to organic practices or when we can't make enough compost to load up all of our beds. And even more than that, it's useful in wineries and on golf courses where we're growing monocultures and we need all the help we can get fighting pests and getting the nutrients to the plants. In terms of buying a bucket and a bubbler, although it is often-repeated advice, it doesn't make good compost tea. It's not that it can't make good tea, but most tests done on homemade systems come up way short in terms of the number and diversity of microbes you get. So the way to do that is do testing and tweaking a few times through a lab until you get the right amount of air pressure, amount and types of compost, additional microbe foods, and so on until you get a good tea. This testing costs hundreds of dollars, which is why I suggest going for a brewer that has been thoroughly tested for a couple hundred bucks. Jessica, yes you should get a microscope! They are a bit expensive, but I have been using mine to look at compost tea and compost and the whole microbial world for awhile now and it is beautiful and even life-changing. Hope this didn't all sound to preachy and I'll be the first to say I am an amateur at this stuff. Lots to learn, forever I imagine.