While on my quest to improve the soil and the results I was getting in my yard, things took an interesting turn. I have always had a compost pile. Every fall I collect several hundred bags of leaves which I grind into an almost dust like state. I spread the ground leafs on all my beds and add to rest to a compost pile.
When I was growing up my father made me go with him to collect rotten sawdust from old sawmills for our compost pile. Like most things your parents make you do as a child you end of doing the same thing as an adult even thou you thought it was the stupidest thing imaginable when you were a child.
Suffering from CDO (just like OCD only the letters are in the correct order) I not only have a compost pile but have installed a laundry sink with a garbage disposer in my basement. I grind all our left over fruit and vegetables into disgusting looking soup to pour onto the compost pile. After all if you grind the leaves to dust, the green part of the compost mixture needs to have the same consistency!
While reading about composting on the web I came across an article on compost tea. Apparently compost tea is the holy grail of organic farming. I read about the process of taking compost and putting it in a tub with aquamarine aeration pumps to provide oxygen for the growth of fungus & bacteria to make a tea. Since it was critical how long you “brewed “ your tea, keeping time of the process was critcal. Noting the relatively short shelf life of the mixture, I concluded it was too big of a pain in the a** even for a wacko with his own garbage disposal.
Growing up in a country capable of putting a man on the moon and developing the TV remote control, the two crowning achievements of the twentieth century, I assumed that someone had developed a better way to take cow poop and compost and make compost tea. Sure enough someone had designed a vortex brewer that through cyclonic action forced air and water into a dehydrated mixture to brew tea in large quantities quickly.
After ordering the equipment and letting it sit in the warehouse for six months (did I mention I have ADD too) we finally got it up and running. With the first patch we decided to give it a test to see if it lived up to half the hype. In an exhaustively planned and documented experiment we grabbed two plants that were sitting side by side in the garden center and poured the tea on one of them.
Below are pictures of the two bougainvillea plants that we used. As you can see the one on the right is covered in blooms while the one on the left has none. The plants are actually the same size. This took place in less than two weeks. I also took several gallons home to test in my yard. The second picture shows the pachysandra around my fountain. The light green foliage is the new growth that happened within a few days of application. These are only estimates, your mileage may vary.
The plant on the right received the compost tea application.
One week after application of compost tea. All the light green leaves are new growth.
After 2 applications of compost tea.
Right now we are just testing out the equipment. If you would like to try a sample on your plants come by the garden center and tell them you saw the offer on the blog. This is a limited time offer, act now!! But wait there’s more!!! We would appreciate it if you would bring your own jug since we have run out of jugs. The tea can be diluted 16-1, so a little goes a long ways.
