Is Compost Tea Worth The Hype- DIY Organic Liquid Fertilizer Recipe And Results

So this week we're doing compost tea and we're going through the motion of how we make it. I'm not a pro at this and honestly I don't think you need to be a pro at this. In my opinion, market gardening, successful market gardening, is 90% everything else than doing something like this. It's like being good in the greenhouses, learning how to graft your tomatoes, learning how to, you know, harvest efficiently, washing pack efficiently. There's so many other variables that are really, really important in market gardening. Soil fertility is a major one and compost tea in the soil fertility is, in my opinion, something really minor. Or not, depending on how this experiment will go on this week. So for all these years that I've been growing veggies, my fertility program has always been feeding the soil with compost, feeding the plant with either chicken manure or another organic amendment. That works and we've grown amazing vegetables throughout the years with such a fertility program. Compost tea, for me, where it becomes interesting is that, let's say, if we could bypass some of that and still get the fertility we need for the crops to really thrive. Or, which is what I'm leaning towards too and thinking, if we can inoculate the soil with bacterial life to really kind of kick it off and get it going with its fertility. This farm is a new farm at the old mill. The soil hasn't been cultivated. You know, we're broad forking the beds, we're shaping them, but it's going to take time for the fertility to really kick in. It's going to take time for the biological life to really establish itself. It's going to come with root systems, it's going to come with green manure, and it's going to come with adding amendments. This is an old bioreactor that I got used. It's not meant to be designed in what I'm doing, but for me, compost tea is we're taking really good compost and we're brewing it 24 hours with lots of air and we're putting chelates and we're putting also fishmeal in it to really feed the microorganisms while it's brewing. If you look inside, it's nothing more than two air diffusers. We usually see those in ponds. And then I have another pump that this one is blowing air inside the compost that we're putting in the water. So this will be filled with water, then it's bubbling, and we're also adding a lot of air inside the compost so that it doesn't stagnate. It breeds. Any literature that you'll read on compost tea talks about making sure that everything is sterilized first. And I don't believe in that at all. And I actually believe it's the contrary that we should be doing. Because anytime you sterilize something, you open up the space, the pores, for any bad bacterias to inoculate the material. So it's the same thing for seeding trays. I've never sterilized my seeding trays over almost 20 years. And so this is going to be cleaned up, but I'm not going to the process of really sterilizing, bleaching it out, filling it with good water. This is well water. And then we'll go and get the compost. So one thing that I know, or that I think, is that you should have good compost in here. I had Elaine Inningham at the farm a few years ago, and she was really high on that. The source, the origin, will have an impact on the quality of the tea. And so this is good compost that I'm making here. It's a mix of horse manure and different material that was aged and turned a few times. It was heated, so now it's really nice. Still has a little bit of straw in it, but that's okay. So I'm simply filling this up. Pretty sure we'll find earthworms here. This one. So this is a pretty classical setup for here at the Old Mill with the hay bales. We're setting it up so that the hay bales can create kind of the structure that holds the compost together. It's the size of the bucket on the tractor. So we have here at the Old Mill a small compact tractor with a bucket. This is why I started to do compost, and we have all the chicken and we have all the residues from the kitchen. So a mix of residues from the kitchen, straw, and horse manure that we're getting from the neighbor. Really nice. And then the bales, after at the end of the summer, they'll be kind of used to do the straw next year. So it's a pretty simple process. A lot of growers use this kind of setup. And making compost, you know, a lot of people say it's an art. I don't really agree. I think it's a set of making sure that it's heating so that the straw doesn't have any weed seeds. But again, what we're trying to do is create a material that has all the all the life force in it, which is, in my opinion, what's really important. The next step, and there's a lot of literature on this, so I think that's good advice to follow, is that we want to make sure that we're also adding... So this is a mix of fish meal with chelates in it, and that's going to be really feeding the bacterias while they make the tea. Ready to barbecue! So what we're doing here is we have a block that's in green manure of hairy vetch, and I'm going to spray only the first part of it. So I'm going to leave like half of it soaked with compost tea and the other one without it, and we're going to see. We're going to see if it makes a difference. I might try another round elsewhere just to double the test and validate, but you know, if this is supposed to be a really duty-heavy fertilizer amendment, it should make a difference. We'll see. So one thing that I haven't said that I think might be important is that I've left out a lot of the filtering part, filtering really the big macro pores, because I don't want the filter to really interfere with some of the microbial life that's developed in the compost tea. So you actually don't want to over-filter it too tiny. And I left the nozzle pretty open so that if there's any, you know, if there's any microbial life there, it's going to shoot away. It's not going to be destroyed by the sprayer. So I was with our buddy David here at the Market Gardener Institute, and we're really trying to bench out the markers to see if we see the difference, and so far we see a slight difference. But I did also reach out to my good buddy in California, Benjamin Farrer, that has more than 20 years of experience with compost tea, and he's a grower that I trust. He's a grower that I know is not just kind of, you know, BS-ing things. And what he told me is like, J.M., you won't perhaps see it naked eye, but it's like many things in life. You're just building resiliency. You're building the microbiota in your soil, and it's down the road, like medium range, that you're going to see a big difference. So, you know, he's encouraging me to keep up with this practice, and to more than half-fate, because I'll see the impact, but maybe not just the first time I go. And if you want to learn more about compost tea and really go in-depth, you can listen to this conversation right now on the screen. That's it for this week. I'll keep you updated with the research that we do at the Market Gardener Institute. I'll see you next time. J.M. out.