My Formula for Worm Castings Compost Tea! With John Musser www.aquaponicsandearth.org
Welcome to our Webinar on making worm casting compost tea!
Overview of Today's Training We will take you on a picture tour of the results of our using compost tea along with our homemade substrates! Session 1: What we have grown with compost tea. Our History Tea put us on the map What has given us abundant crops every year without fail! Session 2: Why compost tea? Session 3: How to make worm castings compost tea Session 4. Tips on making and keeping your own worm bin.
Make sure you STAY with us to get the useful BONUS at the end our webinar today I m going to try to fit in as much training as I can for our limited time together. At the end we ll show you a system where you can take everything we ve covered to today and use it in your garden to get results even faster! After we share some of the items we have worked hard to find, just for you. We will have a final Q&A. You are under no obligation to buy anything, but we have some very exciting things to offer that will help you with today s training.
To boil everything down, we have two great secrets (now exposed) at the AESL micro farm to our successful growing methods that have drawn people from around the world to see us. 1. Our homemade substrate and growing system shared in our last webinar and DVD on cinderblock and shallow grow bed gardening. 2. And our compost teas! How we make them! When and how often we apply them and How we apply the tea to our crops for double and triple yields! Today I am giving our most used recipe made with worm castings!
I don t want you to have the problems we first had in making teas! Gardening with AESL I ve made compost tea hundreds of times! In the beginning I had no guide to help me. The views were conflicting on the process. Even the master gardeners in our area knew very little, if anything, about the right process. I searched for hours, days and weeks on the internet and got a tip here and there, but no one made it plain and simple. Once I completely scorched my plants by just applying my tea at the wrong time of the day! It was trial and error until we learned to make a perfect tea, every time! Then you can make a perfect tea but NOT apply it at the right time or the right way. I will give you five keys to success in making a perfect tea, every time! We are going to cover all this later in our presentation!
I want to share what we have done on our urban farm with compost tea Compost tea put us on the map! I learned how to make several formulas: To make fish waste teas Rabbit manure teas And worm casting teas But in all of these ------ I always use worm castings!
Session 1: What we have grown with compost tea. Our history (my story) and my journey in making compost teas! I heard from someone that if you poured fish waste water on the ground that crops would grow like crazy! I saw it demonstrated once with sugar cane in Florida, but I soon learned some real good lessons. So my first year in raised bed gardening I took straight fish waste and put it on our crops! I used some other organic fertilizers and we saw real fast leaf and stem growth, but not a lot of fruit! Back then you could not find much information on the subject of the ingredients I needed. So I kept practicing and learned what I was lacking!
Our History Gardening with AESL I searched long and hard online and found out about a woman called, The Worm Woman! I found information online about the worm woman. She had passed on, but a man on her staff told me about a couple of books on how to get your garden teaming with microbes by using red worms & compost teas! We will offer her book at the end of our presentation. The amazing benefits of worm castings hit me hard and I had to get started right away! I got my first worm bin and first garden worms from them and never needed to re-order again, we have always had thousands of worms!
My first time using real compost tea! In the second year of my gardening experience I applied my first real batch of compost tea with worm castings. I also mixed some fish waste in a 55 gallon drum. Then I added a small bubbler to it. Then some other ingredients that I will share with you later, when I give you the tried and tested recipe! I can t remember how long I let it brew the fist time. I couldn t find anyone to help me. Some said to brew the tea for a whole week. Others said days? The only thing I could find was commercial tea brewers. They only talked about heat and pressure. It was very confusing. So I just did some guess work and a got my sprayer out and applied it to the crop. I was shocked as I saw growth in a few days time. The leaf looked much healthier and buds began to appear! I did it! After a few sprayings, people began to notice the difference and I really got excited. However, others saw more than I! Gardening with AESL
The next year I had perfected the brew and drew many unexpected visitors! Texas A&M The Dallas arboretum SMU, other colleges, and local schools. Back yard gardeners and master gardeners. The next year representatives from 37 countries came to see the farm from local colleges and visitors in the metropolis! The next year world leaders came to see our crops and called us nonstop to the point we had to get a different phone system! I have very little training in gardening and was now considered by many an expert! Ag organizations asked us to help them in parks and even on colleges campuses! One of the largest humanitarian organizations in the world have contacted us and we are currently working with them.
What you will be able to accomplish after you hear and apply what we teach you today! More disease resistant. More dense and healthier root mass. A healthier looking leaf, stem, and crop. A better color to the veggies. Better flavor and taste to your veggies. More crops! Expect double or more especially if you have never used compost tea!
Some of our successes, to name a few! Gardening with AESL We grew 50,000 peppers on 1/10 of an acre! Fig trees grew from 15 inches high up to nine feet tall in one year. Pequin peppers grew over four feet high, spanning five feet wide. Tabasco peppers grew like small trees. Anaheim peppers grew up to nine feet tall! Cherry tomatoes that produced 1500 tomatoes per plant. One 7 x 20 area produced over 7,000 peppers of various kinds.
Peppers grow like trees These peppers are growing in six to seven inches of substrate
Nine foot tall Anaheim peppers in 6 to 7 inches of substrate!
50,000 peppers in one growing season
We had several pickings like this, but could not completely harvest everything!
Pablano Peppers that fill a plate Gardening with AESL
500 Roma Tomatoes from one 4 x 4 cinderblock grow bed using compost tea! Gardening with AESL
Dying shrubs, weeks later, after applying compost tea!
Peppers from spring and early summer cut down to five feet high and re-grown with compost tea. Texas A&M comes to see it!
The Pequin Peppers One 4 x4 section!
Fig tree grow from 17 inches to 8 foot tall from April to October in one year!
AESL worker wins yard of the month using our compost tea! Notice Nancy s grass verses the neighbor s? All the other shrubs and flowers in the neighborhood were terrible looking in the dead of summer!
Compost Tea put us on the map! I have told hundreds of eco tourists who come to our urban farm that, compost tea put us on the map, and it has! I practiced until I learned to make a perfect batch of tea. I learned what to look for: What a perfect tea smells like and When and how you must put it on your crop. Then how it must be applied And how often It took five years in all, but now we don t need to use any other fertilizers, but our own homemade, along with our unique growing system. This makes us truly sustainable on our farm!
Session 2: Why Compost Tea? I have found that using compost tea in the right way, at the right time, in the right proportions will take you from a decent gardener to a pro! It is obvious why we do it, but it is not just for big crops and more crops!
Another amazing fact is that: Gardening with AESL We use the same crops all year! Here in Dallas, Texas we plant in the spring and again just after the harsh heat. Most people replant, but we use most of the same plants by saturating them with compost tea! We keep on making new discoveries about compost tea!
Worm casting tea is different and better than any known tea due to its multiple benefits! Mary Appelhof the worm woman says: Compost tea is a liquid produced by stripping and extracting bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes from high quality compost. This is a brewing process of agitation and aeration of a small amount of compost in water. After this extraction process, bacterial and fungal foods are added to the liquid. The high oxygen content of the water and this extra food causes the populations of organisms to increase dramatically, producing a magnified liquid version of the original compost. Compost tea can then be applied through hoses or sprayers to the soil or plant foliage making the benefits of good compost go much farther and with a great reduction in intensive labor.
What compost tea will do for your crops In brief, compost tea that is brewed as we are teaching and used as a FOLIER OR EXTERNAL SPRAY: 1) Will coat the leaves of plants with an invisible protective shield! The compost tea micro organisms stick to the leaf surfaces. This action does not allow diseasecausing organisms to attach to the plant. Using unsulfured molasses helps in the process! Some crops will even resist bugs! 2) Will enable and equip the entire crop to absorb nutrients! When used to soak the plant base, the soil organisms attach to the roots of the plants and help in processing important nutrients to the crop. Like when humans take a bath and soak in beneficial Epson salts that nourish the body and even strengthen the bones. Like sending a honey bee hive to the root system! 3) Regular compost tea sprayings is the key to: Ensure ample food supplies, immune booster, disease resistance, additional microbial populations & healthy food to all beneficials in your grow bed, including red worms! With compost tea in July! Without compost tea in July!
Leachate vs. Worm Compost Tea Gardening with AESL What kind of compost tea are you talking about? Some people just soak compost or worm juice in a pail and let the sun do it s work! We don t like this method for a few reasons: Compost tea is not the dark-colored solution that leaks out of the bottom of the compost pile. That s called leachate, and although it may contain soluble nutrients it may also contain organisms that can cause illness so it isn t suitable for spraying on food crops. Some people make compost tea to be the extract of compost made by suspending compost in a barrel of water for a short period of time, usually in a burlap sack. The resulting liquid can then be applied as a soil or foliar fertilizer. To others and AESL, it s not compost tea until the extract is fermented or brewed with some type of microbial nutrient source such as molasses, kelp, fish byproducts, and/or humic acids. Leachate: Leachate can contain phytotoxins (toxins that can harm plants and humans). Some of these toxins are created by bacteria. Every worm bin has good and bad microbes. This is ok of course, as long as the good ones outnumber the bad ones. Some leachate can contain harmful pathogens because it has not been processed through the worms intestinal tract. It should not be used on edible garden plants. During decomposition, waste releases liquid from the cell structure. This liquid or leachate seeps down through the worm composter into the collection area.
What kind of compost tea are you talking about? AGAIN: When we talk of compost tea FOR THE REMAINDER OF THIS PRESENTATION we mean a compost or worm castings that: Is mixed with un-chlorinated water! Is put in a bucket or container that has a powerful air/oxygen pump that will fill the entire container, non-stop, creating both oxygen and top turbulence! Has organic ingredients stirred into the water that will feed the microbes that are already within the worm castings. That is processed this way for at least two days or 48 hours! That is fully used right away for both soaking and foliar application!
Before we go any further today I want to say that: Using Worm Tea: WHY? 1. Will out-perform any chemical fertilizer. Increasing both plant size and yield. This is due to interaction of Worm Tea microbes with the soil microbes and protozoa, soil particles and the roots of the plant itself! 2. Worm Tea made, the proper way, becomes an inoculant for potting soil suppressing airborne pathogenic fungi that can readily infect a sterile potting medium. 3. The living organisms in Worm Tea also produces hormones, vitamins, nutrients, enzymes, amino acids and minerals needed by seedling cuttings, young plants and proper root establishment. Inoculation should be done two weeks prior to planting. 4. Plants grown in soil treated with Worm Tea are much healthier due to the symbiotic relationship between the plant and the microbes in the root zone. Plants feed the microbes and the microbes produce or make available all of the food and medicine the plant needs to thrive. Now we have perfected our formula through many years of R & D!
Worm tea enables your veggies to utilize more food plus make it more available to the crop! A KEY FACTOR TO ALWAYS REMEMBER! In addition to increased nutrient levels, worm castings contain millions of BENEFICIAL microbes which help break down nutrients already present in the soil into plant available forms. You see, for worms to eat your garbage they need a team to help them break it down for slurping. Worms have beneficial friends that I liken to a bee hive. WORM MUCOUS: As the worms deposit their castings, their mucous is a beneficial component, absent from just regular composting from a pile, whether it s hot or cold composting. The valuable mucous component slows the release of nutrients preventing them from washing away with the first watering. Stick-to - it tive-ness! Nothing else can do this!
Let s look a little deeper Gardening with AESL to see why worm castings are much more productive than compost alone! From Yelm Worm Farms 1. Higher concentrations of microorganisms. 2. More diversity of microorganisms. 3. Enzymes and plant growth regulators only found in worm casting soils. 4. Higher percentage of available nutrients. 5. Greater plant heights, leaf area and root depth. 6. Greater germination rates. 7. Faster growth rates. 8. Higher aggregate formation. 9. Better disease control. 10. Higher capacity to hold water. 11. More nutrient availability over time. 12. Larger fruits and vegetables with higher yields. 13. Sweeter tasting fruits and abundantly richer tasting veggies.
What I like so much about worm compost tea is: You are recycling your kitchen food waste. Also worm castings are a renewable, plentiful fertilizer resource with very little upkeep! It s a fertilizer that could be used in the hardest of times! Every one interested in gardening needs a worm bin, yesterday!
The favorite for gardeners
Today's formula is our over the top all purpose tea, that will do wonders in your garden, year after year, harvest after harvest! Gardening with AESL Making your tea You will only have to add a couple of ingredients and it will feed every crop in your garden!
The size tea maker you will need depends on the size of your garden area! We use two sizes since we have 1/10 of an acre, plus! A half cut 55 gallon barrel A five gallon pail. Our own tea maker invented at AESL For deep feeds I use my large brewer with a large sprayer rig Most times I use my five gallon unit (at right) and make two batches over the period of a week. Every 48 hours will produce a new batch. This gives me about 22 gallons of tea.
Session 3: How to make worm castings compost tea
How to make your tea! THE INGREDENTS: 1. Worm castings Compost with egg shells, especially for tomatoes. Or you could finely crush dried egg shells right in your brew. 2. Un-chlorinated water 3. Unsulfured molasses THE TOOLS: 4. A strong air bubbler with high quality air stones. 5. A food grade container 6. A stick for mixing and stirring 7. A heater - if it s cold 8. A strainer 9. A sprayer
Mixing your ingredients Today I will give you the ingredients for a five gallon pail. Adjust the amounts according to this recipe, IF you want a larger container. Please follow these 5 easy steps and you will be successful! 1. Fill pail three fourths full with un-chlorinated water (at about 70 degrees). Use a RV or water safe hose and RV filter if you have city water. The process of making the tea allows the microbes to "wake up" and multiply. 2. Add five heaping teaspoons of non GMO alfalfa. Let it soak for a few minutes and stir in with wooden stick. 3. Pour in one quarter of a large coffee can of worm castings and stir into the water. 4. Put in eight tablespoons of liquid or dry un-sulfured molasses and stir well with a stick or wooden spoon. 5. Add your air bubbler. Top off with water to 2 inches from the top of the pail. Then set the timer for 48 hours. You can use a lid if it has holes in it! BREWING SECRET: Make sure your air bubbler creates enough oxygen and turbulence to fill the whole five gallon pail and cause top turbulence! This is a secret to making a perfect tea!
How to increase the power of this tea 100 times over! Add one teaspoon full of Endomycorrhiza spores the second day after brewing! Let it brew for about four hours. It s like sending a troop of soldiers into your soil and upon your veggies and much, much more! Also, the spores/fungus colonizes the host plant's roots. Mega insight - Use root fungus! This mutualistic association provides the fungus with relatively constant and direct access to carbohydrates, such as glucose and sucrose. The carbohydrates are translocated from their source (usually leaves) to root tissue and on to the plant's fungal partners. In return, the plant gains the benefits of the mycelium s higher absorptive capacity for water and mineral nutrients due to the comparatively large surface area of mycelium. If you are growing tomatoes or other calcium loving crops, make sure you add 2 or three egg shells that have been properly dried and finely crushed. Also a rounded tsp. of Epson salts will help.
If you are leaving it outside: Make sure animals cannot tip it over. Make sure temperatures do not get cold or else put an aquarium heater in the bucket. How will I know when my tea is done? In time you will become an expert. 48 hours under the right conditions is all you need. Most of the time you will see a nice foam at the top and it will have a nice clean, earthy smell. Brewing your tea
Straining your tea I recommend using a pump up sprayer or battery powered to apply your tea to the crop! The best thing we have found is a knee high nylon stocking. Nothing gets through it and it won t clog up your spray nozzle! Pour your tea into the spray rig and apply right away! Use all of the tea! Keep the rest of the tea brewing until you come back for more! Notice how we fit the nylon right over the spray rig!
Using a larger spray rig
When should you spray? Never apply tea in the afternoon time! I prefer after five, when the sun is not scorching. I have areas in my garden that are partial shade and I can hit them first! This gives me plenty of time to add the tea, and clean up my rig. Use all the tea after each brewing. Again don t shut the pump off until you are done or you will lose the full potency of your brew. If you have some tea left over just pour it and any sediment at the bottom on or around your favorite crops. They will explode!
Stand back and spray the entire plant, from top to bottom, saturating, till run off. Applying your tea! If the plants are tall go around the plant and spray every part of it! Leaves, steam, and root area all need to be covered.
You will see results right away If you spray in the morning you will notice difference by nightfall. Most of the time, right after application you see a reinvigorated crop, especially the leaves! Use also for startup beds that have no crops! Spray on bare beds in the fall before winter! Spray on seedlings In a couple days you will see accelerated growth. When crops are growing you can use tea every two three weeks. You will learn in time what is best for you. Sometimes we back off as some crops grow too fast!
In case of emergency If you can t use your tea after two days (48 hours) and something comes up, here s what to do. Do not turn your brewer off! Add a little more molasses 3-5 teaspoons! Try not to go over 72 hours total! How to know if your tea went bad? This is Very Important! First of all get used to making tea that produces a nice foamy top and earthy smell. If you order our Homgro Tea Maker and use the exact ingredients we give, you will brew perfect tea as the process has been tested 100 times. Get used to the this look and smell! It should smell nice. If it smells like an outhouse, or otherwise unpleasant, start over! Pour it in your compost pile and rinse your brewer. Sometimes teas will have a slightly unpleasant smell. This is okay to use, but not ideal. Ideally teas will smell fresh and earthy.
In case of emergency Learn these words: Aerobic & Anaerobic. 1. Aerobic: Aerobic means "requiring air", where "air" usually means oxygen. Worm tea should be used immediately after removal from your aerobic tea brewer. The colonies of aerobic microbes will quickly consume the oxygen in the tea brew, and micro-organisms will begin to die or go to sleep. 2. Anaerobic: Anaerobic is a word coming from the Greek word "αναερόβιος" (comprising from the words αν=without, αέρας=air and βίος=life) which literally means living without air, as opposed to aerobic. The longer the tea remains unaerated, the greater loss of microorganisms and of diversity. The loss in numbers and diversity could be as much as 30% - 50%, but it is still useful until it goes anaerobic. You ll know it has gone anaerobic if the tea has a strong odor. So don t throw the extra tea out unless it smells! I take slightly smelly tea and pour it around my crops I only like to use good smelling tea for foliar sprays, just to make sure!
When you spray or pour the tea on the soil, not only are you feeding the plant, but you increase the number of beneficial microbes in the soil, thus crowding out the bad. It has been proven that the tea, along with the castings, can significantly increase plant growth, as well as crop yields, in the short term (a season) and especially the long term over a period of seasons. Along with these great benefits come a boost in the plant s own immune system to be able to resist parasites like the infamous aphid, tomato cyst eelworm, and root knot nematodes. Plants produce certain hormones (like the jasmonic hormone) that insects find distasteful so they are repelled. Worm tea also helps a plant to resist diseases such as Pythium and Rhizoctonia. When worm tea is sprayed on leaves and foliage, the bad disease-causing microbes are again outnumbered and cannot populate to the levels of taking over a single plant. The tea also aids the plant in creating the "cuticle", a waxy layer on top of the epidermis, or plant skin. This waxy surface protects the leaves from severe elements and reduces attacks by certain harmful microorganisms and insects.
Compost Tea Brewer Our five gallon compost tea brewer is QUICK AND EASY to serve your needs! Five gallon bucket with air stones High powered pump to create both oxygen and surface turbulence Made with long lasting commercial parts and stones that allows for higher oxygen saturation Comes pre-assembled and ready to use!
Session 4: Tips on making & keeping your own worm bin.
Setting up your worm bin for worm propagation and castings There are many recipes on how to set up you worm bin. We have our own that works very well in the context of this training as: The quality of your worm castings will depend upon the health of your worms and the medium they live in.
Simple key components to keeping your worms safe and happy! They don t like light They need moisture! They need air! They need food! 1. They don t like light. A dark colored bin is ideal 2. They need moisture! Substrate such as shredded paper, cardboard, shredded leaves, or coco fiber will help retain moisture 3. They need air! Holes need to be in the container and better yet, PVC with holes drilled in it with access to the outside, especially when in a plastic bin! 4. They need food! Kitchen scrapes (no meat)
Setting up a worm bin for using castings WE HAVE A VERY SIMPLE, BUT SAFE WAY TO MAKE WORM BEDDING THAT DELIVERS A SUPERIOR CASTING! 1. Rehydrate a ten pound coco fiber block. Save what you don t use in a bag that is kept out of heat or moisture. This will come in handy when you remove castings! 2. Mix one ounce of unsulfured molasses into the mix. Both worms and beneficial microbes will love it. 3. When the coco mix is rehydrated and not soupy, mix what you would need to fill ¾ of the bin with ¼ shredded paper or cardboard. Fill your bin within 3-4 inches from top. It should be damp like a sponge. 4. Add your worms and start feeding! Bonus - what to feed your worms
Rehydrating Coco Fiber
Check your worms often I recommend a simple bin to begin with. It s all I have ever needed for our entire farm! I have enough babies to put in all our gardens. I just put in a small handful in each area. We have made worm bins available at the end of this webinar! It s the same one I bought several years ago and it s still in mint condition!
What are worm castings? Worm castings, also called worm manure, or worm humus, are the end product of the breakdown of organic matter by certain earthworm species called composting worms. They are used as powerful organic fertilizer to improve soil and plant growth. The process of harvesting this material is called vermicomposting.
How to collect your worm castings I recommend two simple ways. For seven days move all food to one side of your bin and only put fresh food on this one side. All the worms except for babies will move over to where the food is so you can scoop up the castings on the opposite side. Open your bin and hold a bright lamp directly on the entire bin. All the worms will escape from the light going down into the bin, then you can scoop up the castings from the top. I prefer the first method. The worm bin below is the worm a-way!
Vermicomposting! What are its unique benefits? The worms do the work for you: 1. TURN: Like tiny plows, they work their way throughout the material. 2. AERATE: They add oxygen for all the beneficial microorganisms. 3. MIX: All kinds of organisms and nutrients throughout the pile adding lots of small aggregates. 4. SCREEN: They eat the bedding materials and the feed, ultimately turning it into a rich soil product. 5. PATHOGEN CONTROL: They ingest and render useless the bad guys. 6. FAST: They can eat one-half of their weight per day. 5 x 8 Large Scale Flow Through System can process 100lbs. of food scraps per day and 75-80 lbs. of castings per day. From Yelm Worm Farms
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