All gardeners need a little inspiration now and then. The rain has been very welcome here but we're feeling a bit of a winter lull with all the mud, busy-ness and and not as much time to get our hands dirty outside. Making compost tea is a fast and simple way to increase soil fertility and do something extra special for the winter garden. We got a bit carried away with ours as we were super excited and filled a 350 gallon IBC container (which is an extremely useful thing to have around by the way!).
We've never been fully convinced that compost tea really works but after watching the video below about the guy who grows Guinness Record gigantic vegetables we thought it was worth a try.
We started with homemade compost in a burlap sac, some microbial enzymes and about a quart of raw sugar. Molasses is recommended to feed the bacteria and get the mixture going but we used sugar because it is cheaper and we had some on hand.
Our container was already filled with rain water so we added the ingredients and submerged the burlap sac like a giant tea bag into the water and let the combination steep for a day or so. The key step is to aerate the compost tea. For this we used an air fish tank pump.
Supposedly after 24 hours the compost tea is ready and thankfully we have a huge stock of it with a hose attached to play with and use in our garden at will. Just one more experiment we are trying out over here.
Check out this video. We hope it inspires you the way it inspired us. Although we had to wonder if this guys amazingly humongous vegis are due to his super fertile Alaskan tundra soil. Only one way to find out...
Happy winter gardening everyone!
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