so this week we're doing compost tea and we're going through the motion of how we make it I'm
not a pro at this and honestly I don't think you need to be a pro at this uh in my opinion
Market gardening successful Market gardening is 90 everything else than doing something like this
it's like being good in the greenhouses learning how to graft your Tomatoes learning how to you
know Harvest efficiently washing pack efficiently there's so many other variables that are really
really important Market gardening soil fertility is a major one and composty in the soil fertility
is in my opinion something really minor or not depending on his how this experiment will go on
this week so for all these years that I've been growing veggies my fertility program has always
been feeding the soil with compost feeding this the plant with either chicken manure or another
organic amendment that works and we've grown a using vegetables throughout the years with such
a fertility program compost tea for me where it becomes interesting is that let's say if we could
bypass some of that and still get the fertility we need for the crops to really Thrive or which
is what I'm leaning towards doing thinking if we can inoculate the soil with bacterial life
to really kind of kick it off and get it going with its fertility this Farm is a new farm at the
Old Mill the soil hasn't been cultivated you know we're broad forking the beds we're shaping them
but it's going to take time for the fertility to really kick in it's going to take time for the
biological life to really establish itself it's going to come with root systems it's going to
come with green manure and it's going to come with adding amendments this is an old bioreactor that
I got used it's not meant to be designed and what I'm doing but for me compost tea is we're taking
really good compost and we're Brewing it 24 hours with lots of air and we're putting chelates and
we're putting also fish meal in it to really feed the the microorganisms while it's Brewing if you
look inside it's nothing more than just uh two air diffuser we usually see those in ponds and
then I have another pump that this one is blowing air inside inside the compost that we're putting
in in the water so this will be filled with water then it's bubbling and we're also adding a lot of
air inside the comp compost so that it doesn't it doesn't stagnate it it breeds any literature that
you'll read on compost tea talks about making sure that everything is sterilized first and I
don't believe in that at all and I actually believe it's the contrary that we should be
doing because anytime you sterilize something you open up the space the ports the for any bad
bacterias to inoculate the material so it's the same thing for seeding trays I've never sterilized
my seating trays over almost 20 years and so this is going to be cleaned up but I'm not going to the
process of really sterilizing bleaching it out filling it with good water this is well water
and then we'll go and get the compost so one thing that I know or that I think is that you
should have good compost in here I had a Ln Elaine inning I'm at the farm a few years ago and she was
really high on that the The Source the origin will have an impact on the quality of the tea
and so this is good compost that I'm making here it's a mix of horse manure and different material
that was aged and turned a few times it was heated so now it's really nice still has a little bit of
straw in it but that's okay so I'm simply filling this up pretty sure we'll find earthworms here
this one so this is a pretty classical setup for here at the Old Mill with the hay bales
we're setting it up so that the hay bales can create kind of the structure that holds the
compost together it's the it's the size of the bucket on the tractor so we have here at the
Old Mill the small compact tractor with a bucket this is why I started to do compost and we have
all the chicken and we have all the residues from the kitchen so a mix of residues from the kitchen
straw and horse manure that we're getting from the neighbor really nice and then the the Bales
after at the end of the summer they'll be kind of used to do the straw next year so it's a pretty
simple process a lot of Growers use this kind of setup and making compost you know a lot of
people say it's an art I don't I don't really agree I think it's a set of principles that you
need to follow making sure that it's heating so that the straw doesn't have any weed seeds
but again what we're trying to do is create a material that has all the all the life force in
it which is in my opinion what's really important the next step and there's a lot of literature on
this so I I think that's good advice to follow is that we want to make sure that we're also adding
so this is a mix of fish meal with chelates in it
and that's going to be really feeding the bacterias while they make the tea
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ready to barbecue
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so what we're doing here is we have a block that's in a green manure of hairy vetch and I'm going to
spray only the first part of it so I'm going to leave like half of it soaked with compost C
and the other one without it and we're gonna see we're gonna see if it makes a difference I might
try another round elsewhere just to double the test and validate but you know if this
is supposed to be a really Duty heavy fertilizer Amendment it should make a difference we'll see
foreign so one thing that I haven't said that I think might be important is that I've left out a
lot of the filtering part filtering really the big macro pores because I don't want
the filter to really interfere with some of the microbial life that's developed in the compost tea
so you actually don't want to over filter it too tiny and I left the nozzle pretty open so that
if there's any you know if there's any microbial life there it's going to shoot away it's not going
to be destroyed by the sprayer so I was with our buddy David here at the market Gardener
Institute and we're really trying to bench out the markers to see if we see the difference
and so far we see a slight difference but I did also reach out to my good buddy in California
Benjamin Farrer that has more than 20 years of experience with compost tea and he's a grower
that I trust he's a grower that I know is not just kind of you know bsing things and what he told me
is like JM you won't perhaps see it naked eye but it's like many things in life you're just building
resiliency you're building the micro microbiota in your soil and it's down the road like medium
range that you're going to see a big difference so you know he's encouraging me to keep up with
this practice and to more than have faith because I'll see the impact but maybe not just the first
time ago and you want to learn more about compost tea and really go in depth you can listen to this
conversation right now on the screen that's it for this week I'll keep you updated with
the research that we do at the market Gardener Institute I'll see you next time JM out [Music]