You may be asking yourself why I am posting a bucket of muddy water on my blog. Ah, but that’s not mud, that’s compost tea.
I’ve written about the magic of compost before on here, and how amazing it is that you can take your kitchen waste and turn it into an fertilizer for your garden. This year, I’ve been taking the extra compost I have and making compost tea with it, and using it as an all-purpose liquid fertilizer for my plants.
Let me tell you: it works great. If you pour compost tea on a droopy plant, it will pick up within an hour of your applying it–that’s how powerful this stuff is. And it’s free and easy to make.
So how do you make it? Put a quart (4 cups) of compost in a 5 gallon bucket and fill that bucket with water. Let the bucket sit overnight so that the compost can “steep” into the water, thus the name compost “tea.” After that, transfer the compost tea to a watering can and water your plants as you would with any other liquid fertilizer.
Compost tea can be applied to any plant. It’s especially great if the plant is producing food and seems to need an extra boost of nutrition. It also helps sickly or struggling plants and is a great way to feed your container garden.
Also compost tea lets you make the most out of a small amount of compost. So if you don’t have room for a giant compost bin, don’t worry. Make what you can and then make compost tea with it. That way your plants can still benefit from the magic of compost.
Will the compost tea work with an ollas? Do you think the tea will be able to seep through the ollas’ pores?
Reader, I’m not sure. Compost tea works like any other liquid fertilizer. I say it wouldn’t hurt to try it.
No, don´t waste your magic compost tea in this way. Look at the olla as a ceramic water filter. The compost tea will be filtered through the olla and seap as clean water. BUT the tea, and anything but clear water, will eventually clog its pores and require you to remove and clean the olla. We use ceramic, basically terracotta pots, to filter our daily water in Súdamerica. We clean it twice monthly with a scrub as it clogs. And this is with clear faucet water.