A Summer Garden Tea Party

A tea party?

Well, OK, not exactly, but your plants will enjoy a tea party of their own, with compost tea! Now that summer is in full swing, your garden is loving the heat and probably growing faster every day.

To make sure your veggies grow to their fullest and most nutritious make sure you’ve replenished your soil with the organic matter and nutrients plants need! While compost usually enjoys its five minutes of fame in the early spring, your plants can continue to enjoy the many benefits of compost throughout the growing season and one way is to brew your own compost tea.

What is compost tea?

Compost tea is an incredibly potent natural fertilizer (probably even more powerful than any commercial fertilizer available on the market) that you can easily make right at home and utilize all summer long! And believe me, your plants will thank you for it.

Some of the benefits of compost tea:

  • Increases soil nutrients and nutrient availability.
  • Creates a thriving Soil Food Web that provides soil and plant roots (and leaves) with millions of beneficial microbes.
  • Improves your plants stress tolerance to drought, cold, and disease.

Compost tea is one of the easiest and most effective ways to extract all the goodness from bulky compost and feed it to your soil.  There are many ways to go about brewing your own compost tea, so read on to discover just how happy your house plants and gardens can get!


Quick and Easy Compost Tea

The oldest and simplest method of brewing compost tea is the anaerobic method, which is basically like making a giant cup of tea for your plants. All you need to do is:

  1. Buy one small bag (3kg) of Lufa Farms Premium Compost, which is already in the burlap sack that will function as your tea bag (a nylon stocking would work as well).
  2. No need to open the bag, just place it in a 5 gallon bucket and fill it with water.
  3. Let your tea steep for 5 - 7 days.
  4. Remove the “tea bag” (you can use the remnants as a top dressing in your garden, the remaining nutrients in the mix will drain slowly into the soil. Or do a tree a favor and apply to the nearest tree square!).
  5. Dilute the tea mixture with 10 parts water to one part tea, and lovingly apply to your houseplants and garden beds.

That’s it! Easy, right? The best time to use the tea is right after it’s done steeping, so if you have extra...give some to a neighbour and let them in on the secret!

Compost Tea for the True Enthusiast

While the simple method above allows you to extract the nutrients from compost and apply them to your garden without adding a bunch of bulky compost, soil scientists and serious gardeners have been developing ways to not only extract existing microbes, but to help them reproduce, giving your compost tea even more punch! This method has one extra step from the above method, and that step is aeration, so you will need an air pump or compost tea brewer. There are many brewers available for purchase, however, you can also buy a simple aquarium air pump at a nearby pet supply store.

  1. Place tube(s) from the air pump into a 5 gallon bucket.
  2. Place a small bag (3kg) of Lufa Farms Premium Compost into the bucket, positioned on top of the air tubes to keep them in place.
  3. Fill the bucket with water.
  4. Add 1 Tablespoon of unsulphured molasses (optional), stir in vigorously .
  5. Check to make sure your air tubes are still in place and spaced relatively evenly.
  6. Turn on your air pump.
  7. Let steep for 2- 3 days, stirring occasionally.
  8. After steeping, dilute with 5 - 10 parts water to 1 part tea and use the mixture to fertilize your plants.

Compost tea is amazing stuff but it has to be used soon after brewing because it is literally made up of living organisms. There is tons of information available on brewing compost tea but if you’re looking for a more in depth description, download this free PDF available here. Happy brewing!