Need some help about tea's please

Hi just wondered if I could get a little help.
I am making a tea containing the following- stingy nettles,moss,spinach leaves and compost (homemade).
The compost is a mix of kitchen waste,grass,leaves, old crop roots nettles and horse manure.
My question is how long can I keep this brewing and once I add it to my feed schedule diluted of course how long before it's no good.
I am new to organics and am loving it best of all it costs little when you have everything you need outside and not in a store.
Here is a few pics of how first organic is going.





The one on back right I fimmed at third node, One at back in middle I have defoliated and the rest I have done lst they are all Louis macrons.
The small pot in the front center is some sort of Thai strain

Aerated compost teas are boof tek. Soaking things like nettle, comfrey, alfalfa, kelp etc in water overnight can be pretty beneficial but just topdress the compost.

IIReignManII said:

Aerated compost teas are boof tek. Soaking things like nettle, comfrey, alfalfa, kelp etc in water overnight can be pretty beneficial but just topdress the compost.

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Thank you for your help will do a topdress with the compost instead of adding it to the brew

Madmike79 said:

Thank you for your help will do a topdress with the compost instead of adding it to the brew

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I think it depends on your style of grow too. If you want to feed the plant with available nutrients then perhaps a compost tea would do fine. I've never tried it though, except when I was using hydro nutrients in coco. With teas, do you measure EC and pH like I did with coco and synthetic bottled nutes?

On the other hand, if you want to recycle your soil or even reuse like in a no-till, then fungal and bacterial activity should be #1. That means your soil needs some carbon in it for them to chew on, because that's like their potatoes, pasta, or rice. It's their staple. NPK only will not cut it. Compost still contains carbon, but a tea essentially leaves the carbon containing stuff behind to be thrown in the garbage. I could never bring myself to throw out the 80% of food that my microbial life depends on to live. Other opinions obviously differ

Northwood said:

I think it depends on your style of grow too. If you want to feed the plant with available nutrients then perhaps a compost tea would do fine. I've never tried it though, except when I was using hydro nutrients in coco. With teas, do you measure EC and pH like I did with coco and synthetic bottled nutes?

On the other hand, if you want to recycle your soil or even reuse like in a no-till, then fungal and bacterial activity should be #1. That means your soil needs some carbon in it for them to chew on, because that's like their potatoes, pasta, or rice. It's their staple. NPK only will not cut it. Compost still contains carbon, but a tea essentially leaves the carbon containing stuff behind to be thrown in the garbage. I could never bring myself to throw out the 80% of food that my microbial life depends on to live. Other opinions obviously differ

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I am doing an organic grow trying to go as natural as poss I believe it's a hippy style grow.
I haven't as yet made the tea, am just topdressing with compost it's on day 9 of flower was going to wait till finished it's stretch before I brew up. It is only being fed a seaweed extract 15ml to 7 litres with a mix of neem foliar spray every other feed about 3 days apart haven't measured EC or pH.
Had water tested once and is spot on
I have recycled last grow in to compost so hope it's teaming with life and plants seem happy enough in the mix but am just trying to find right balance of adding feed as am doing the hippie tea way, trying to work out what is best for veg and what works best with flowering.
Thank you for info it all helps.

Northwood said:

I think it depends on your style of grow too. If you want to feed the plant with available nutrients then perhaps a compost tea would do fine. I've never tried it though, except when I was using hydro nutrients in coco. With teas, do you measure EC and pH like I did with coco and synthetic bottled nutes?

On the other hand, if you want to recycle your soil or even reuse like in a no-till, then fungal and bacterial activity should be #1. That means your soil needs some carbon in it for them to chew on, because that's like their potatoes, pasta, or rice. It's their staple. NPK only will not cut it. Compost still contains carbon, but a tea essentially leaves the carbon containing stuff behind to be thrown in the garbage. I could never bring myself to throw out the 80% of food that my microbial life depends on to live. Other opinions obviously differ

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So lets say i brew my tea and top dress the compost i brewed it with on my soil? Does this now reap the benifits of both tea and top dress? Surely the organic composted material (after brewing) still has plenty of microbial food? Also when brewing if you add sugars to your tea will this provide enough microbial food to support colonization? I usually add a 1/4 of molassess, honey, maple sugar, and brown sugar (i stay away from white bleached sugar as im unsure if the white sugar will actually be benificial or detrimental to my brew) to my tea for the microbes... Dr. Elaine Ingham says that feeding the microbial life a diversity of sugars and carbs and protiens is the way to truly promote lots of diversity in bacterial and fungal life and gives them an array of foods to choose from...

Gardenator said:

Surely the organic composted material (after brewing) still has plenty of microbial food?

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Probably. Well for sure it contains everything that didn't have time to break down, including cellulose and lignin so lots of yummy carbon there. The fungi especially might like it. The issue is that you're cycling and extracting all the easy stuff with a tea, meaning most of the N sources like proteins. So what you're left with may not be ideal from a C:N ratio perspective. I'm really only taking educated guesses here because I really don't know very much about compost teas. If you find they suite your growing style and your plants are happy, keep on trucking!

Northwood said:

Probably. Well for sure it contains everything that didn't have time to break down, including cellulose and lignin so lots of yummy carbon there. The fungi especially might like it. The issue is that you're cycling and extracting all the easy stuff with a tea, meaning most of the N sources like proteins. So what you're left with may not be ideal from a C:N ratio perspective. I'm really only taking educated guesses here because I really don't know very much about compost teas. If you find they suite your growing style and your plants are happy, keep on trucking!

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Cool thanks i really appreciate it... i believe the compost material being top dressed may have some carbon left in it for them to chew on as well, also pressumably the soil itself and the added sugars to the tea's provide sufficient enough food for the hungry microbes also imo. Truly i was curious as every time i make my tea (once a week) i top dress my veg ladies with the compost materials left over (under the assumption it was an added bonus ontop of the tea)... really depends on the tea you brew too, you can specifically brew a bacterial or fungal dominated tea, or a nutrient tea can be brewed as well, all have their own added bonuses for the plants but each has a specific job to do... in op's case, brewing to feed with a nutrient tea usually is only to suppliment some nutrition the plant is lacking, brewing a bacterial/fungal tea to increase the microscopic biological life or introduce it in your soil acts more as an innoculant then a feeding, assuming there is already plenty of carbon material in your medium for them to eat, its purpose and intent is to help the plant uptake food more easily and promotes healthy hardy growth and plant health in general. This is because of the symbiotic relationship between the microbes, the fungi, and the roots. Imo compost tea is good to introduce life and diversity to your medium and nutrient tea is just a nutritional suppliment. Ill post a link but dr. Elaine Ingham has somewhere up near 2 hours worth of podcast with joe gardner all about the soil food web, compost, and compost tea... she also has a slew of material on the subject as well, its a pile of reading but go ahead and climb down the rabbit hole if you like and search soil food web lol or listen to her tell it on the podcast eitherway...



Its 2 hours worth of podcasts, listen a few times there is a ton of info from her on these subjects... too much to retain in 1 listen lol. Enjoy, happy growing everyone... and listen to Elaine, she has studied soil, soil biology, soil science, and horticulture for over 40 years and knows what she is talking about.

@Gardenator Elaine Ingham's research contributions to soil microbiology have been notable, especially during the peak of her publishing days during the 1980s. I've read a few of them that particularly caught my interest.

Since that time, she's become one of the most vocal proponents of ACTs out there. My issue is that she hasn't published a single piece of research that concerns the subject that she most strongly supports. Serious errors in judgement that led to situations like the Klepbsiella incident also greatly disappointed me. I would expect any practicing research scientist would avoid promoting anything that isn't backed up by science itself and to keep cringe-worthy opinions to themselves, or at least identify them as such in the name of public transparency.

This organic subject-area has mushroomed into a crazy array of fringe ideas, practices, and even counter-cultures that are more often than not ideologically rather than science-based. Often the buzzwords that describe the practices are borrowed from real but unrelated terms used in science. Take bioenergetics for example. It's a real branch of science dealing with the capture, storage, transfer, and utilization of energy at the cellular level. If you ask a non-scientist, they might tell you it's an amazing "new-age" system that's transforming "conventional" organic agriculture.

I'm a bigger fan of scientists like Linda Chalker-Scott. She doesn't offer opinions or anything else that's not accepted in the scientific community and sticks to what we know. I found her book "How plants work" a very entertaining and enlightening read that helped me think of what's going on between plants and other organisms in soil very differently than I used to. Like herself, I would hesitate to recommend a practice to the public that has yet to be validated through the scientific process.

Northwood said:

@Gardenator Elaine Ingham's research contributions to soil microbiology have been notable, especially during the peak of her publishing days during the 1980s. I've read a few of them that particularly caught my interest.

Since that time, she's become one of the most vocal proponents of ACTs out there. My issue is that she hasn't published a single piece of research that concerns the subject that she most strongly supports. Serious errors in judgement that led to situations like the Klepbsiella incident also greatly disappointed me. I would expect any practicing research scientist would avoid promoting anything that isn't backed up by science itself and to keep cringe-worthy opinions to themselves, or at least identify them as such in the name of public transparency.

This organic subject-area has mushroomed into a crazy array of fringe ideas, practices, and even counter-cultures that are more often than not ideologically rather than science-based. Often the buzzwords that describe the practices are borrowed from real but unrelated terms used in science. Take bioenergetics for example. It's a real branch of science dealing with the capture, storage, transfer, and utilization of energy at the cellular level. If you ask a non-scientist, they might tell you it's an amazing "new-age" system that's transforming "conventional" organic agriculture.

I'm a bigger fan of scientists like Linda Chalker-Scott. She doesn't offer opinions or anything else that's not accepted in the scientific community and sticks to what we know. I found her book "How plants work" a very entertaining and enlightening read that helped me think of what's going on between plants and other organisms in soil very differently than I used to. Like herself, I would hesitate to recommend a practice to the public that has yet to be validated through the scientific process.

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So you dont believe there are benifits to compost tea? Or you are just not a fan of Elaine? As for the Klepbsiella incedent i believe that its really a matter of opinion but hey thats my opinion, i know she made some mistakes, i also remember her owning those mistakes and i believe that all she was trying to say is that a biologically engineered bacterium could have a drastic effect to life on the planet, which it could (i.e. swine flu) not saying it was engineered but look at how a natural bacterium effected the planet and humans. They were making a bacterium that killed plants by making alcohol as a byproduct of plant material being consumed by the engineered bacterium. They even stated that it was harmful to the plants it was tested on.

Either way thats how i feel about the inccident... as for compost tea, i brew microbial tea, fungal tea, and nutrient tea... i cant measure bacterium colonization in my soil but i can see the fungal colonies, you can measure ppm in a nutrient tea, i can see the response in the plants when watered in or foliar sprayed on the plants. Id say it works... however i wouldnt reccomend anything that hasnt personally worked for me and i can attest to my own experience with tea's and the way they effect the plants.

Gardenator said:

Id say it works... however i wouldnt reccomend anything that hasnt personally worked for me and i can attest to my own experience with tea's and the way they effect the plants.

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If never really said it may not work. But there are a few people that make certain claims about compost teas that just defy reality. And it's difficult to test by science, because if you get 100 people to make compost teas, they'll make 100 very different teas. Perhaps one out of 100 brews a tea with some foreign beneficial bacteria in it. That tea will help, but it doesn't mean compost teas in general are effective. See the issue with the science end of it? It's unfortunately complicated

Heck even forget the "tea" part of it. Even adding too much compost can ruin your soil within a couple of years if you're no-till or recycle it. I hate that damn phosphorus devil! Yes, you can add too much compost. (Sorry Jeff Lowenfels) Lol

As far as Elaine Ingham, it's like anyone else who breaks away from science while profiting from the action. But that has nothing to do with whether compost teas work or not. Obviously they work in some cases, because I've seen peer reviewed research that showed two beds of lettuce grown in equally deficient soil. In one they used compost tea, and the other control they used distilled water. The compost tea won. /s

Northwood said:

If never really said it may not work. But there are a few people that make certain claims about compost teas that just defy reality. And it's difficult to test by science, because if you get 100 people to make compost teas, they'll make 100 very different teas. Perhaps one out of 100 brews a tea with some foreign beneficial bacteria in it. That tea will help, but it doesn't mean compost teas in general are effective. See the issue with the science end of it? It's unfortunately complicated

Heck even forget the "tea" part of it. Even adding too much compost can ruin your soil within a couple of years if you're no-till or recycle it. I hate that damn phosphorus devil! Yes, you can add too much compost. (Sorry Jeff Lowenfels) Lol

As far as Elaine Ingham, it's like anyone else who breaks away from science while profiting from the action. But that has nothing to do with whether compost teas work or not. Obviously they work in some cases, because I've seen peer reviewed research that showed two beds of lettuce grown in equally deficient soil. In one they used compost tea, and the other control they used distilled water. The compost tea won. /s

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We may not entirely agree but i cannot help support your last reply because i def agree that science really needs to step in and discover the truth to make this a definitive answer for people... sometimes it does work, and sometimes it doesnt, there are too many different variables involved that are inconsitent and ever changing atm to have any real viable data to compare against. I believe in them personally but to each their own.

Running your kelp and various amendments through your worm bins first and then using the enriched castings on your plants I believe I going to do more benefit for us than anything else we could think of

IIReignManII said:

Running your kelp and various amendments through your worm bins first and then using the enriched castings on your plants I believe I going to do more benefit for us than anything else we could think of

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I'd take that even further to say that worms in your grow medium that can do this job are an even better option when growing annual plants like cannabis. Heck, shred up those leached fresh kelp leaves and stems, and add them to the top of your soil under a straw mulch to keep them moist. The worms will go nuts, and your next grow cycle will likely thank you.

Keep in mind that even organic material additives can be too much of a good thing. If you add 10% more phosphorous than you take away from harvesting your plants, then in 10 cycles you'll be twice as high in phosphorous than you began with. For some stuff, it's a lot easier to add if deficient than remove from your soil if you have too much.