Free Fertilizer For Garden! How To Make It!

Hello homesteaders, welcome to our homestead. Weeds can be beneficial to your garden. I know that sounds crazy, but let me show you what we do to turn our weeds into fertilizer. Let's talk about it. Now there's two ways that I do this, but I certainly prefer one way over the other. Now weeds technically are just plants growing in a place that you do not want them to grow. And these plants right here are full of nutrients. And all of those nutrients can be beneficial to the soil. So some people will just pull them out, chop them up a little bit, however you do that, and lay them down next to your plants that you do want growing like this squash. But one thing you want to be particularly careful of when chopping and dropping weeds is the seeds that are attached to them. Because essentially you're just putting it back in the same place and those seeds are going to regrow and probably cause more weeds in the area that you don't want them. So things like this wild lettuce has mined up nutrients from around my bean plants here and they really need to get back into the soil so that the beans can utilize them. Now I usually let wild lettuce grow wherever it is because it is a medicinal plant. But in this case it's choking out these beans, so it's got to go. Right here I have comfrey. And comfrey is used a lot for healing salves and medicinal purposes for a lot of different things. But for us it's a great fertilizer. And that's because it's high in both phosphorus and potassium as well as nitrogen. So with comfrey I just clip it off about five inches above the ground and I'm going to show you what we're going to do with it. Some people will chop and drop this and that's fine, but there is a better method. So the method that I prefer and I recommend to you to do which will jump start your garden is taking your weeds or in this case grass clippings from our other lawnmower and soaking them in water. This method is so simple and easy. It's an amazing method to make fertilizer for your garden with just the scraps around you that you're going to probably throw away anyway. Most people chop and drop them or put them in their compost pile. I have done that a lot in the past as well, but this method is so much better. It's more potent when you steep these or brew these weeds in the water. What that does over a period of a few weeks, minimum of two, and I usually go maybe three weeks give or take. In my climate some people go six weeks, is the weeds release all of their nutrients into the water and it creates this amazing brewed compost tea that is just a jolt for your plants. So friends, I'm just taking, here's that wild lettuce and actually here's some regular lettuce that has started to go to seed from here in the greenhouse and take them, throw them in a bucket. I'm actually going to chop these up a little bit so I've got a little bit more surface area to work for or work with and the water is going to be able to react and work on them a little bit quicker. Just chop them enough to get them down into the bucket, get a little bit more surface area and then of course here's our comfrey and I will do the same to that. All right, now let's make this thing. Here are our grass clippings that's filling up the bucket nicely. I'm going to add actually our other material to that. I usually fill the bucket up about three quarters of the way and then what I'm going to add here, this is actually worm castings and leaf mold from underneath our leaf piles that we collected this fall and for a nice shot of microbiology into this, I'm going to add a handful or two right into the mixture. Now of course we're just going to fill it up with water. You don't need to fill the bucket up completely, just enough so it covers the material that you have in there. So I'm going to take our compost tea and set it off to the side in our greenhouse and our greenhouse is much warmer obviously than outside. What I'm going to do is cover it up and that's important to get the process going quicker and having something black on the top like this, a black lid is really good. Now you can actually leave it without a lid and down here in the south it does ferment pretty quickly but putting a lid on it is going to make the process go that much faster. Now let me bring you in here and show you one that we've been letting brew for three weeks here in the greenhouse in Texas so it is definitely ready to roll. It is super stinky but it's going to be highly beneficial to our garden. And here it is. If you could only smell this on camera you would probably faint and it's very powerful. Now the nice thing about adding the weeds in the water is that you don't have to worry about the seeds anymore from your weeds because they will rot and decompose in this solution. Now let me show you how we are going to use this. One thing I highly recommend you having a lot of on your homestead are buckets. These are not expensive and I use them for so many different jobs here. I have probably about 20-25 of them and I certainly could use more of them. This mixture is so potent that you probably do not want to pour it directly onto your plants. I usually take a cup like this and I'll just pour a little bit into another bucket. I'll do a 5 to 1 mixture if the soil is really poor. But if things just need like a quick fertilizer, a quick little extra boost, I'll just do a 10 to 1 ratio. You can pour this through a strainer and that's probably a good idea. I don't have one here with me. Just using the cup is fine. But you don't want to get a lot of the plant material that's still in there into your solution because I'm going to put it into our watering can. And if you get too much in that can, it's going to clog up those holes on the end. So this is good. I'm going to fill up this bucket about halfway and then use it here in the greenhouse. Putting it into the watering can is nice because then you can use it as a foliar drench as well. Pouring it on the leaves of the plants from the bucket is a little bit more difficult. Now when using this for the first time, you want to see how your plants respond to it because you don't want to overdo it with them. If you see that they're doing really well with the mixture that you have, go ahead and maybe add a little bit more or increase the frequency with which you do it. You can see I can do a nice foliar drench with this watering can on these tomatoes. It works really well. So you should never ever have to buy any type of fertilizer from the store. Everything you need is on your property and it's free. And friends, if you want to help our channel, head below the video to see the links to the products that we recommend here on the homestead as well as these t-shirts that we've designed. We'd appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments, leave them for me in the comments section below. Now go check out this series of videos which shows you exactly how we built this greenhouse by ourselves. Have a beautiful blessed day. We'll see you next time. Bye.