Make Your Own Compost Tea!

If you’re into organic gardening like me, you’ve probably heard or are already using compost tea. I’ve never used it, but I’m about to get started — you’ll learn more about it in this post.

Compost tea is essentially water infused with compost. It has all the beneficial microorganisms and nutrients of compost, but in liquid form, which may be more convenient to apply.

Traditionally, compost tea was just water steeped in compost for a few days. This seemed to work well for gardeners and farmers of old.

Nowadays, though, that way is not recommended. Apparently you can get a lot of non-aerobic microorganisms that way — microorganisms that may not be good for your plants after all. The new, and presumably better, way to make compost tea is to aerate it. While the compost is steeping in the water, the water is being aerated. The aeration and agitation of the water makes the beneficial microorganisms detach from the soil part of the compost to mix in with the water. Afterwards, you apply the compost tea either as a foliar spray or a soil drench.

As you can imagine, you need special equipment to create aerated compost tea. If you Google it, you’ll find dozens of detailed instructions for making your own compost tea brewer.

But some people prefer to get the whole kit and kaboodle and forego with the guesswork. Those people include me. So I approached Titan Controls to let me review their compost tea brewer, the Flo-n-Brew compost tea brewer. They agreed to give me a complimentary compost tea brewing system to review on my blog. I received my Flo-n-Brew recently. Here’s what I got:

Since I’m headed out of town, I haven’t been able to actually make compost tea yet. But I will tell you this: I was able to assemble everything all by myself! And it only took me 5 minutes! The included guide did miss a couple of instructions, though: 1. Before doing anything else, attach the spigot to the bucket. Remove the screw from the spigot, push the spigot into the grommet. Then return the screw from inside the bucket. 2. Assemble the water fountain before attaching it to the submersible water pump. The fountain comes in three parts, each one fits into the other. Simply attach the two bottom parts to the top part (with the round top), then screw into the submersible pump. Now you can proceed to follow the rest of the assembly steps in the enclosed brochure. By the way, here’s what came in my Flo-n-Brew compost tea brewer system:

• 4 gallon bucket with lid and grommet
• 1 lid with holes for the various tubes
• 1 black dispenser spout
• 1 EcoPlus air pump (4.5 liters/minute)
• 1 EcoPlus water pump
• 2 x 3-foot tubes, 3/16″
• bell fountain kit – 4 pieces
• 2 air stones
• 1 Xtreme Tea Brew sachet

Here’s what the Flo-n-Brew compost tea brewer looks like, fully assembled (Note: I put it together all by myself! It was that easy):

 

 

In my next video, I’m going to show you how the Flo-n-Brew actually makes compost tea. Watch out for it!

PS: Flo-n-Brew is available at Amazon.com:

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