Making Worm Casting Tea & Its Many Uses - Fewer Pests & Disease

Worm casting tea supercharges your fruits, your vegetables, and your flowers. It's super easy to make and I'll show you how. Worm tea is a probiotic. It's loaded with minerals, fungi, and beneficial bacteria. You can use it as a root drench, a root dunk, and a foliar spray. Let's go over the things that we're going to need to make our worm casting tea. The first thing is a five gallon bucket. That's usually enough to start out with, but you can go larger if you want. Just make sure you adjust your ingredients accordingly. The next thing that we're going to need is water and that'll be non-chlorinated water. And this is one of the most important things when we're making our worm casting tea. That chlorinated water will counteract what we're trying to do and build that good bacteria, but we'll talk more about that later. We're also going to need some molasses and I really like to use organic molasses for this because everything that I do in the garden I try to stick with organic. So the molasses is just going to feed that bacteria so that it multiplies very quickly. We're also going to need some cheesecloth or something that's kind of porous, but will hold that worm castings in. So what we're going to do with this is put our worm castings in the middle and bundle it up and make a sachet, essentially a tea bag. And then we're going to dunk that right in the water. So we're also going to need something to tie this up. So you can use some twine, even some wire or a zip tie. Those will all work perfect for this. You don't have to make a tea bag or a sachet to make your tea. You can just dump your worm castings right in there. But I really like to do this because I can just pull them right out and I don't have to strain it off before I put it in my water can. It just makes the process just a little bit faster. Most of our tap water is chlorinated and we're not going to want to use this unless we let it sit out for 24 hours. This allows the gases to escape and the chlorine to dissipate. Or you can just use some rainwater and that is totally safe to use. Or an irrigation water that hasn't been chlorinated. These are all really great for this. I like to use a little wire S-hook or a little clip that I can put on the side to hold my sachet bag. It's not necessary, but just makes life a little bit easier and makes it a lot funner to make my compost tea. We're also going to want an air pump. So this just makes it to where our tea will have the oxygen. And this is going to just be called aerobic, with air. It creates those bubbles. If we don't have that air, then it's anaerobic and it totally changes the chemistry of that tea. This one here has four valves, so I can actually do several different things at once. I can make compost tea, worm casting tea, and nettle teas all at the same time. So it's kind of awesome having one of these. But they make just simple little fish pumps with one little hose and those work perfect too. You're also going to want some poly, quarter inch poly feeder tubing. And you can find this at just about any hardware store. So the tubing is just going to push the air down into a bubbler. So you'll need some kind of a bubbler. You can use a fish bubbler or a stone bubbler. Stone bubblers are really nice because they sink to the bottom of your bucket and you don't have to weight them down. Or you can do something like I did, creating a circle with some quarter inch soaker hose with some fittings. But with this one, I actually have to weight it down because of course the air just pushes it up. So I'll just put a brick over the middle of it or even a rock just to hold this guy down to create that circulation. A couple things to remember when you're making your worm casting tea is to keep your tea out of the direct sunlight because the UV rays of the sun can actually damage the bacteria that you're trying to create and grow. So go ahead and put your bucket in a shady location or put a lid on it. Just keep them out of that direct sunshine. The other thing is, is we want to be doing it when the ambient air temperature is warmer. We don't want to be doing it during cold freezing temperatures. The warmer the temperature, the faster the bacteria grows. So if we're doing it in the middle of winter time, we're not going to get the success that we really want. During the spring, summer, and fall are the best times to be making our tea. Okay, we got our five gallons of non-chlorinated water. We let it sit out for 24 hours so the chlorine is gone in it. So to this, we want to add two tablespoons for five gallons of water of our molasses. So we'll just pour this right on in there and I'm just going to guess. That's close enough. And then I'll want to mix this in a little bit. That's not necessary because our aeration bubbles are going to do that for us. I'll double up my layer of cloth to be putting my worm castings in. And I like to use about two cups of castings. You can use more if you want. Don't worry too much about the measurements. So just put this in the middle of this guy and then gather him right up and tie him off. You can use just about anything you want to tie this guy off. I'm using a little garden wire because then I can make kind of a little loop to hook on my S hook. And then I'll just drop that right in my bucket. Okay, now that we have all of our ingredients in our bucket of water, we're going to add our bubbling system. So I'll just put this guy in here, put a rock on it to hold it down, and we'll start the percolating process. We'll want to let this go for 24 hours. And during this 24 hours, you may see some foam building. And that's actually a good thing. That just means that it's active and that bacteria is growing. If you're finding this helpful, like, subscribe, and hit the bell. In all of my impatient years of gardening, I've definitely proven the fact that using chlorinated water in any of my teas definitely kills off that good bacteria that I'm trying to create. When I'm in a hurry and use that tap water without allowing that 24 hours to sit, I find that my tea doesn't foam up. It doesn't create that bacteria that we're looking for. And it doesn't work near as good. If you don't have an air pump, by all means, still make your tea. Just come in here and just whisk this up every three or four hours so that you can incorporate those air bubbles and keep it aerobic. This tea here has been percolating for 24 hours, and we want to get this used up. It's best if we use the tea within six hours, but you definitely want to be using it within 24 hours because you've got to remember this is biologically alive. So we want to get this on our plants as soon as we possibly can. Now that you're done with your tea, what do you do with these castings? At the very least, toss them in your compost pile. But I actually like to use them as a mulch, and I'll just put them around some plants or over the top of the soil because there still is some microbes in there. Just not as much, but it makes a perfect mulch or something just to put around your plants to hold in moisture. If you're using this as a soil drench, then you can just take this and go ahead and dump it right over the top of the plants. But I like to dilute it to make it go a little bit further. Five to one is good, but you can go 50-50 as well, and it's not going to create any burn. I also like to strain it off a little bit when I'm using my water can so it doesn't clog up the orifices. Also, if you're using it in a sprayer like we're going to be doing, then you want to do it through a fine sieve or something to strain out all those little particles so that you can actually use it in a sprayer to spray on for foliar feeding. When we're using our tea as a drench, then all we're doing is going around the base of that plant. This is also really good for trees, maybe trees that are struggling. So you just want to pour it around the drip line of the plant or the tree and let it soak in slowly, and then you can add some more. And you can do this full strength. For my diluted tea, the five to one, I'm going to go ahead and sprinkle it over the top of these vegetable plants right here. So the great thing about this is they're going to absorb those nutrients immediately from their leaf system, but it's also going to get the runoff, that sprinkling over into their root system. So they're going to uptake it from their leaves and the root system. So it's going to stimulate really healthy growth. It's going to stimulate the microbes in the soil, and it's going to make for a really healthy plant. If you've ever wondered why we would use worm tea over worm castings, well, when we make worm tea, we're just multiplying those microbes by millions. Another great thing that our diluted worm tea is good for is houseplants. Houseplants really respond well to the nutrients that you're giving them. You can just pour it right into the base of the plants, and they'll uptake those nutrients. You'll have greener, more vibrant growth. Another way to use your diluted form of tea is through a spray gun like this. It works great because you can spray it on houseplants. You can spray it on your outdoor plants. It works really good because they'll take it in through the leaves, just like they would when you're sprinkling it over the top. But one thing to remember when you're putting it in one of these sprayers, make sure that you strain out all of those fine particles really well. Otherwise, it clogs off the orifices, and that's really frustrating. Diluted worm tea is also superb for young seedlings, especially if they're sluggish. Just pour it right over the top of the seedlings and let it just drizzle right into the soil. One of the big benefits when you're spraying your vegetable plants in the garden is the tea really helps combat pests and disease. Just make sure when you're coating your leaves, you're coating on top and also the undersides, because this is where the pests hide out at. And you'll find that those pests really don't like this stuff. Another great way to be using worm casting tea, one that we don't think about, is as a root dunk, especially when we're talking about bare root trees. You just take your bare root tree, put the roots in that tea, diluted form, and let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes. Then plant your tree. And then with the leftover tea, you can just pour it right over the surface, and that tree just absorbs those nutrients so much better and gets off to a better start with healthier root growth. Another thing that's really good to use as a root dunk is if you've had a plant that was a little stressed out or root bound, and you've tangled those roots apart. It's a good idea to take that root ball and just dunk it right in that tea. Let it absorb that moisture before you plant it. You'll see that it comes out of it a lot quicker than it would originally. You can use worm tea as often as you want because it's not going to burn. I really like to use it when I see a struggling plant or one that doesn't look as healthy, and I'll use it as a foliar spray or even a root drench. This really helps them come out of that stress cycle. If you wanted to diversify your worm tea just a little bit, you could actually add some kelp mill to it, like a quarter of a cup, just put in with your castings. And you can also put some humic acid in it, a quarter of a cup as well. And just percolate it the same as you would everything else and use it the same way. You'll just see that things just change up a little bit. The chemistry changes. Thanks for sharing tea time with me and I'll see you in our next episode. How's your tea? Kind of foamy and I got something stuck in my teeth. And it's wiggling!