Ever wondered how to make the best compost tea? A tea with the power to nourish plants to their maximum!
Well… today, we will look at the compost tea recipe that would help your plants thrive at their peak potential.
Everybody knows about compost, how good it is for the plants, how easy it is to use, and how it provides a pile of benefits for your garden. As gold is an adornment for the body, “black gold” proves to adorn our landscapes with beautiful lush green plants.
Benefits of compost aside, today we’ll be learning all about liquid compost—the compost tea!
Compost Tea Recipe | An Overview!
Before we get into the amazing recipe for making this magical elixir, let’s first see: what compost tea is, is making compost tea is even worth your time or garden, and what are the different types of compost teas out there.
This would help you to decide whether you want to invest your time or money in making the compost tea, and you’ll be able to choose which type of compost tea you want to brew for your gorgeous green buddies!
What Is Compost Tea?
I would have started with the definition, but there is none.
Compost tea is not something you make in a pot on a stove!
Historically speaking, compost tea is just water mixed with compost. In the modern era, many other methods have been developed for making high-quality actively aerated compost tea (AACT).
Nevertheless, compost tea is a potent tonic that contains beneficial organic microbes such as bacteria, fungi, and protozoa that speed up plants’ growth.
As I mentioned before, compost tea is essentially liquid compost. So, it would also contain a bunch of healthy organic nutrients.
It is a brew of water and compost and is said to have as many benefits as compost provides to the garden.
There are two different compost tea recipes that I’ve mentioned further in the article, but the results will be pretty similar to whatever method you use to make the tea.
What are the Benefits of Compost Tea?
Talking about the results, let’s look at some of the benefits that following a good compost tea recipe would provide to your garden.
- Compost tea is filled with a colony of healthy microorganisms, so it massively enhances the soil structure, leading to better soil quality.
- Due to the presence of mycorrhizal fungi and predatory nematodes in compost tea, soil treated with it is claimed to reduce weeds and pest attacks and kill harmful pathogens (.pdf) that can harm plants.
- As it is a potent drink for your plants, it can significantly improve their immunity and growth rate.
- Using compost and compost tea in your garden reduces or even diminishes the use of chemical fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers are one of the major causes of soil and water pollution. Still, compost tea—being 100 percent organic—proves to be the safest amendment that can efficiently enrich the soil with readily available nutrients.
- Moreover, following a good compost tea recipe and making your own household compost tea can save you from wasting a ton of money on fertilizers.
- Compost tea, having compost as a key ingredient, is also said to improve the soil’s water retention capability.
- Unlike compost, which only covers a specific portion of the soil, compost tea can be dispersed on a vast surface area.
- The beneficial set of microbes and healthy nutrients of the compost tea also help the plants grease the wheels.
With that said, let’s now enter the world of making compost tea. Before we get into the compost tea recipe, let’s look at the basics.
How Long Does It Take to Brew Compost Tea?
It takes around 24–36 hours to brew perfect compost tea, but it depends… depends upon the method you are using to brew the tea.
If you are making aerated compost tea, it can take up to 24–36 hours. Letting the mixture infuse for about two days ensures the proper number of beneficial microbes to dwell.
However, letting aerated compost tea sit for more than 2 days can turn the aerobic conditions into anaerobic, leading to not-so-friendly bacteria like E.coli and Salmonella emerging in the mixture.
That’s why brewing anaerobic compost tea is more time-consuming!
What Are the Different Types of Compost Teas?
Now that you know how much time you would need to invest in making the compost tea let’s kill the delay by moving on to the different types of compost teas and the compost tea recipe for making both of them.
Actively Aerated Compost Tea
As you may already know, and as the name suggests, actively aerated compost tea, also known as aerobic compost tea, is the tea that’s made by actively infusing oxygen into the water and compost mixture.
The process is usually carried out with the help of an aerating pump or a motor (quite similar to the ones we use in our fish tanks for making water bubbles) that forcefully drives oxygen through the mixture.
Since beneficial aerobes require oxygen to thrive, using this method for making compost tea is considered far more efficient than the other method.
Non-Aerated Compost Tea
This can be considered a historical method. The art of making compost tea is pretty old, and I don’t think there was any sort of aerating system present at that time.
Non-aerated compost tea is made through a passive method that involves four things: water, compost, bucket, and time!
It involves hanging a bag of compost or dumping a proper ratio of compost in water and letting the mix brew for a week or so. The only labor involved is occasional stirring and mixing up the liquid. After that, the drink is ready to be enjoyed by the plants.
Compost Tea Recipe | How to Make Aerated Compost Tea?
Now that you know all the basics, let’s jump into the process of making the tea! Here is the best compost tea recipe for making aerated compost tea.
Ingredients
Let’s start with the ingredients.
You’ll need:
- Water: Make sure you use clean, chlorine-free water that can fill up a 5-gallon bucket. Using rainwater is better, but if you use tap water, let it sit for about 24 hours before use. If the water contains chloramines, you can use Vitamin C (Ascorbic acid) to treat it before use.
- Inoculations: Inoculations include compost material. Ideally, you should use 1–2 cups of high-quality vermicompost and/or aerobic compost.
Worm castings are really useful for making good compost tea because they are filled with nutrients and contain many beneficial bacteria. These castings are also a good source of humic acid (a food source for microbes) and can protect plants from different contaminants and pathogens.
Moreover, as we are enhancing the potency of the compost by brewing it into the compost tea, we must ensure the use of fully finished, well-made, and well-maintained compost.
The compost must contain an adequate number of both bacteria and fungi. However, compost with higher fungal content is advantageous for your compost tea.
Compost that has been decomposing for about 3 months is more abundant with aerobic bacteria, while the one breaking down for about 6 months is more enriched with fungi. We can increase or decrease the number of these microbes by providing them with their respective food sources.
- Food Source for the Microbes: An ideal compost tea would contain a sufficient proportion of bacterial and fungal colonies, and food is needed for these microscopic families to survive.
Food sources for bacteria include carbohydrates, simple sugars, and simple proteins. To feed the bacterial colony with this food, we can add unsulphured molasses, fruit juice, and liquid fish fertilizer (fish emulsion with an NPK ratio of 4-1-1).
Food sources for fungi include complex sugars and proteins. For these, we can add kelp, fish hydrolysate, and humic acid. You can add ¼ cup of the mixture, including fish hydrolysate, kelp, molasses, and a tablespoon of humic acid.
You can use a mix of bacterial and fungal food to create a compost tea that’s well balanced with nutrients.
Supplies
After you’ve gathered all the tea ingredients, let’s look at the supplies you’ll need.
- A 5 Gallon Bucket: You can use any kind of plastic bucket, but it should better be clean!
- A Porous Bag: It could be any bag like a nylon stocking or any breathable piece of cloth from which the compost can seep into the water.
- An Airstone: Airstone is usually used as an aquarium water bubbler. You can even use more than one airstone if you need more power.
- An Air Pump: The air pump should be powerful enough to energetically churn the water and mix the air in it. You can’t just rely on water bubbles; proper oxygenation of the compost tea mixture requires extensive agitation.
Steps
Once you have everything in place, follow these simple steps to carry out the process:
- First of all, fill up the bucket with water. Ensure the bucket is thoroughly cleaned, and the water is free from chlorine.
- Afterward, take the airstone(s), place it in the bucket, and attach it to the air pump sitting outside the bucket with the help of plastic (polyethylene) tubing.
- After you have fired the air into the bucket, it’s time to hang in the inoculants. Take your fresh, fully finished, sweet-smelling, and nutritious compost mix and fill it in the mesh bag. You can tie the bag with a rope or something like that to easily suspend it in the water and effortlessly take it back after you are done brewing.
- Once the compost mix starts seeping into the tea, it’s time to add the food material. To be honest, you can be picky and flexible here and choose what you want to add according to your own needs. Don’t add too much of the food material, as that can boost pathogens in compost tea. ¼ cup for 5 gallons of brew is enough.
- Now that everything is socializing on its own, you just have to wait. Aerobic compost tea takes about 24–36 hours to cook. Just wait for that time, and if you smell a sweet earthly smell, congratulations! You just did a great job!
Making actively aerated compost is fun, convenient, and not very time-consuming. The only downside to this process is that you’ll have to invest a bit amount of money in making the aeration system.
Compost Tea Recipe | How to Make Non-Aerated Compost Tea?
After all, not everybody wants to take things like making tea to a professional level. Do you want simplicity? Here’s simplicity for you.
Here’s the easiest compost tea recipe for making non-aerated compost tea at home!
Ingredients
As I must have mentioned earlier, for passively brewing compost tea, you’ll just need:
- Water: Same as mentioned above—clean and chlorine-free.
- Inoculations: Also, same as said above—high-quality, fully finished, fresh compost having a sweet earthly scent.
That’s all!
However, you can add a few tablespoons of molasses into the mix if you want to. Also, the ratio of both ingredients will be different in this method. Here we are adding 1 part of compost for 5 parts of water. So, for 5 gallons of water, it goes in a full shovel scoop of healthy organic compost.
Supplies
For the supplies, however, you’ll need:
- A 5 Gallon Bucket: Yes, you guessed it right, it should be clean and clear!
- A Porous Piece of Cloth: It’s unnecessary, but if you want, you can use it to fill in the compost.
- A Stirrer: It can be anything that you can use to stir the compost tea mixture once or twice a day.
Gather everything stated above, and follow the following steps.
Steps
Here’s what you need to do:
- First, we fill up the bucket with water.
- Then, we take the bag, fill it with our fresh compost, tie it up, and swing it in the water. Or, you can skip all this and dump the compost directly into the water.
- After that, you can add some tbs of simple sugars like molasses if you like, or you can just wait.
- Wait at least a week for the compost’s magical nutrients to leach into the tea.
- Don’t forget to stir the mixture once or twice a day.
Once everything is done, you are ready to give a tasty treat to your plants.
Brewing non-aerated compost tea is relatively easy and more leisurely than making aerated compost tea, and it’s definitely much more affordable. The only downside is the risk of the presence of harmful bacteria because of the anaerobic conditions that might prevail.
Different Ways to Use Compost Tea
Now that you know both the compost tea recipes for making two different brews let’s see the different ways to use compost tea for our greeneries.
- Compost tea can be used to water plants directly. You can dilute the compost tea with water (10:1) or use it directly to drench the soil. The best time to do this is in the morning when the stomata are opened, preventing excess moisture build-up and fungal diseases. Also, the morning sun doesn’t direct harmful UV rays to the microbes.
- Compost tea can also be used as a foliar spray to treat the leaves with a healthy dose. When using compost tea as a foliar spray, it is diluted to half its strength.
In whatever way you use the compost tea, this magic elixir will immensely help you in your gardening journey.
On that note, let’s head toward the conclusion.
Conclusion
Concluding the talk, I must say that although there are only a few pieces of scientific research backing up the claim that compost tea provides such excellent benefits to plants, they are still backed up by the experienced gardeners out there.
So, if you have a passion for gardening and have never tried making or using compost tea for your garden, I suggest you… this is the time!
I hope you are happy to read our compost tea recipe for making the best compost tea for your plants, and I hope it helped!
If so, consider sharing this article with your friends and family.