subject: Making Compost Tea From Your Earthworm Farms [print this page] Making Compost Tea From Your Earthworm Farms
You've probably been told or at least heard that compost from your earthworm farms was the best thing you could use on your garden. It's the best natural fertilizer, is organic, and is eco-friendly. All of this is true, but you can take your compost one step further by making compost tea. Using tea compost is like putting your garden on steroids, and it all starts with your earthworm farms.
So why is making compost tea from your earthworm farms such a good thing? Let's first discuss how it is made. Essentially you want to change your compost into liquid form. The simplest way to do this is to get a bucket, fill it with water, and add the compost from your earthworm farms. Allow the compost to steep for a while.
What does this do? This allows the nutrients from your earthworm farms' compost to be absorbed into the water. Now when you pour your tea compost onto your plants, the plants are able to absorb the nutrients from the compost much more easily and more effectively, rather than if you just used solid compost. You can also spray the tea compost on the leaves of the plants. This has actually been found to prevent many types of plant disease.
There has to be a catch, right? Yes, making compost tea with the above method isn't the best method to use. Simply doing it like that allows the bucket of water to stagnate. The bacteria from your earthworm farms compost will deplete the oxygen within the bucket causes an awful stink. It can even turn your tea compost into a toxic mixture of bacteria. So how do we avoid this?
The answer to that is simple. When making compost tea, you want to make sure that you properly aerate it. By ensuring an ample supply of oxygen within the mixture, you are guaranteeing that the tea compost will come out great in the end. This is very easy to do.
You will need to get an air pump. This can be an air pump that would be used in a fish aquarium. Put the tube down into the bottom of the bucket of water, then add the compost from your earthworm farms. The air pump will make sure that there is a stream of fresh air through the process of making compost tea.
