Compost Tea

The other day Janet told me some of her plants looked sickly and could use a shot of fertilizer. Down I went to the basement to set up our vermiculture station to produce some liquid gold.

Compost tea. This wonderful stuff! It smells like a barn. It's brown and dark. It's the consistency of thick coffee.

The worms have been pretty happy lately so the tea was easy to get. Our vermiculture stations sit on top of very large upside-down ceramic planters, so they're easy to reach and to manipulate. I took one of the stations (a large plastic recycle bin) and piled the worms and soil up so they just about filled 2/3 of the bin.

Then I tipped the bin ever so gently so that water could flow down through the soil to the lower side of the bin. I placed a large plastic tub underneath to catch the drippings. I poured in a few liters of water and left it until I came home from work.

The yield was a couple of liters of the best fertilizer you can use for your home or garden. I diluted it to about half a cup to a gallon of water and watered all the plants in the house. Then we put some in a jar and gave it to a friend of Janet's. Good fun and nice to see the product of all we've fed the worms, banana peels, coffee grinds and filters, cardboard egg cartons, vegetable peelings, etc., etc.