Chicken Poo Tea (JADAM fertilizer)

Hi, I'm Joey Berger, Permaculture Director here at Heartwood Mountain Sanctuary. Probably wondering why I look like this. Well, it's not because we're in the middle of the COVID epidemic, which we actually are, it's because I'm cleaning out our chicken coop today. This bedding's been in here for several months and we just moved our chickens to another coop on the farm. So we're going to gather up all this bedding that has their manure in it, we're going to clean out the manure off these shelves, and I'm going to teach you today how to make a very high nitrogen fermented chicken manure tea. This is going to be very high in nitrogen, your plants are going to love it, you can make it in about two weeks, it's going to be very concentrated, and you won't have to go buying any of this from the store. So all you're going to need is a big container to mix it up in, we've got a 25-gallon drum here, I'm using this little bucket and this little trowel just to reach these harder to reach areas to scoop up the chicken manure. I'm protecting my lungs today, I'm protecting my eyes, just trying to take a little safety precautions while I gather this up. You can see I'm glad I'm wearing this safety precaution gear, got my eyes protected, got my lungs protected. So you can see now we've been gathering up our chicken manure, there's even a little egg in there, that's no problem. Just collecting it all in here. Now we're going to clean up some of this bedding, this straw hay that has the manure in it, all the urine and poo, it's going to be very high nitrogen, we're going to fill this barrel all the way up to the top. I'm going to get some from this area because this is where we're actually feeding them, so I know they were peeing over here a lot, they were pooing over here a lot, this is going to be the very active stuff. Alright now we're back outside, out of the chicken coop, I've got my mask and my goggles off, oh this fresh air smells so good, we're finally getting a little rain here mid-May on the farm, it's finally breaking out of this drought we've been experiencing the last few months. So now we've got our barrel of chicken manure, chicken bedding here ready to go, I'm going to add the last two ingredients. The first one is leaf mold, if you've seen my other videos talking about JADAM liquid fertilizers, you know that leaf mold is nature's secret ingredient for breaking down material, making incredible food for your plants. This is just the crumbled up leaves that you find in the woods that are starting to break down. Once you go under some trees and you pull back those first couple inches layers of leaves, this is what you're going to find, it's just leaves that are starting to break down, often times you'll see little streaks of white all over it, that's the material you really want to use. So I've got about a gallon container here full, you only need about half this, but I'm going to add the whole thing because I've got it. You can see here this nice broken down leaf, there's actually a big fat worm right there, we'll just throw him in too. And now the final ingredient, we're going to fill this up with water, we're going to make sure this whole thing is saturated, we're going to cover it with the lid, we're going to leave it right here in the sun. And the only difference between this and the other JLF, JADAM liquid fertilizers that we taught you to make previously, this one you're going to want to stir every day. Just make sure you come out here, give it a stir, make sure all the materials are sinking, if they're floating you want to make sure that they're getting well saturated. And so after about two weeks, you're going to have a really high nitrogen fertilizer. You're going to be able to dilute this 30 to 1 at the hottest. I would start at 300 to 1, work your way up to 30 to 1. And that's going to be it. So you're going to check back in with us, this thing is going to be ready in about two weeks. If you do this in a smaller container, a five gallon container, this might be ready in about seven days. But we're doing this on a pretty large scale, and we're going to be cooking this for about two weeks. Last step in making these teas, you want to make sure you mark and label it. Here we got Chicken Poo, JLF, that's Jadam Liquid Fertilizer, we made it May 12, 2020. Put the year on there because when you empty this out, you can fill it back up with more chicken manure, more leaf mold, and more water. You never have to empty it or clean out the container. And these ferments are only going to get better and stronger with age. Thanks for joining us today. We showed you how you can make a very simple chicken manure tea. You don't even have to use chicken bedding from your own coop. You can just go buy a bag of chicken manure if you don't have access to any manure. Works just as simply. The magic ingredient is that leaf mold, which you can find in the woods, anywhere, under almost any tree. So we want to thank our Hawaii family, we want to thank our Humboldt family, thank you for joining us, and we'll see you out in the garden.