Compost tea

[orlyn17]

I am just starting a compost pile so I don't have any to make compost tea. I was was thinking of buying some compost/manure bags at the Home Depot and making my tea from that. Will that work?

Thanks,
Orlyn17

[hendi_alex]

Hopefully you will get some answers to your question. Perhaps something like mushroom compost would make great compost tea. But you may want to consider starting an earthworm compost container. The liquids that accumulate from a worm bed are supposedly loaded with nutrients and earthworms work very quickly, not like the prolonged period required to compost yard debris in a conventional compost pile.

[cynthia_h]

The quality of the compost(s) sold at Home Depot has been questioned by forum members before.

If there's an independently owned garden-supply store near you, I'd ask the staff there about the ingredients of the compost(s) they sell. Since there are no federal labeling laws on what goes into "compost," HD's could be sand + wood chips with, oh, 2 percent cow manure, for all we know. Read the labels carefully at the Home Depot (well, anywhere, for that matter).

Maybe one of your gardening neighbors can give you a shovelful or so of compost for compost tea; many gardeners like to help beginners! (heh heh...the first one's free... )

And welcome to The Helpful Gardener!

Cynthia H.
Sunset Zone 17, USDA Zone 9

[applestar]

I guess the main would be just how biologically active a bagged compost may or may not be. If I was doing this, I would pay top $ for best compost I could find and get a small amount since you only need a garden shovelful or so to make a 5 gal bucket of concentrated compost tea (you can/should dilute to as thin as 10:1 as foliar spray though I think I used mine at about 3:1 as soil drench) . Another idea would be to find a leaf pile in your yard (I usually have some in the fence corner or along the back fence, and tap the black leaf mold under there for making some composted leaf tea. I posted a bunch of links last year -- June/July maybe? of websites that had some interesting compost tea recipes to kick up the potential. Some additions I've tried are molasses, agar agar, yeast, and alfalfa meal. One I *DIDN'T* try was adding a can of sardines. [/u]

[orlyn17]

Thank you for the suggestions on the compost tea. They were all great ideas.
Orlyn17