* Spring Tonic Compost Tea

SPRING TONIC COMPOST TEA

The slide show shows us making a special spring tonic compost tea to help the ailing baby plants transplanted into our freshly transformed lawn-turned-garden bed. We harvested dandelion leaves and violets growing wild in the yard (which are nutritious and delicious spring boosts for people and plants), to add to some powerful worm castings, compost, and sea vegetables. All mixed together in an old pantyhose stocking that was our “tea bag”, we left it to steep for a day in a 5 gallon bucket partly full of water. Then over a period of several days, we watered the garden with the tea, while adding more water to the bucket, and watered with more tea still.

Details and recipe below…

Slide Show Music – “I Love My Dog” by Cat Stevens

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In our first bed, we transplanted purple rodynda cabbage, spigariello broccoli, osaka purple mustard greens, red cored chantenay carrots, rossa di milano red onions, and mammoth giant sunflowers. We direct-seeded slow-bolt cilantro, red rumpled wave lettuce, and french breakfast radishes, and companion-planted german chamomile and dukat dill next to the broccoli and cabbage. At first, everything seemed to be going okay, but then we noticed that white spots were forming on some of the cabbage, broccoli, and especially mustard green leaves, and a few leaves were even turning a sickly pale shade and dying. We learned that this happens when plants are nitrogen-deficient (and probably lacking in other nutrients too), so we knew we had to give them a health boost as fast as Popeye can pop a can of spinach.

Nitrogen is a basic element essential for growth and reproduction in plants and animals, and is a key component of amino acids, the building blocks of protein. Luckily, we had purchased a bag of nutrient-rich worm castings (a.k.a. poop) at the Green Festival, from God’s Gang (http://godsgang1.net), a food pantry and urban gardening program for kids in Chicago. We got a great deal: 5 pounds of worm poop for 5 bucks. Adapting a recipe from the wonderful gardening book You Grow Girl by Gayla Trail (www.yougrowgirl.com), another one of our favorite references, we brewed up our own special concoction of compost tea. In an old pantyhose stocking, we combined the following ingredients, soaked them in a bucket of water overnight and all of the next afternoon in a sunny location, then applied the tea nearly everyday for almost two weeks thereafter, refilling the water after every use:

• 3 cups sifted compost
• 2 cups worm castings (an all-around excellent fertilizer)
• 4 cups dried sea vegetables e.g. kelp and dulse (rich in nitrogen, potassium, and important minerals)
• 2 cups freshly cut dandelion greens (also for nitrogen and minerals; comfrey, stinging nettles, and horsetail are other options)
• A sprinkling of purple and while violets growing wild in the spring (optional; violets are edible for people too)
• An equal or greater amount of water as the total of the other ingredients (in this case, 11 cups of water or more).

For more potent tea, you can brew straight worm poop and/or compost for up to two weeks to make a power-packed fermented aid for ailing or pest-infested plants. Within a few days of applying our special formula, the plants began to make a significant recovery. Two probable reasons why they weren’t getting enough nitrogen are that we didn’t incorporate nearly enough compost or aerate the soil as much as we should have, and the soil, after years of being under lawn out of the organic matter life cycle, was deficient to begin with. Thanks to our compost tea, our plants are now healthy and thriving, and the bed looks beautiful!

(This post is an excerpt from Hot Potato #18.)