Manure tea to nourish your plants

This series is to help you sort out fertilizer “teas” for your growing operations.

If you are someone rich in livestock manure, you can make manure tea to fertilize your garden plants. (By livestock, I mean four-legged mammals, not poultry.) Note that this is not compost. It’s poop from cows, horses, rabbits, llamas, goats, and such; avoid cat and dog manure.

You’ve probably heard me harp about “Compost that manure before spreading!” But here is a different strategy — make a tea of that manure. You’ll save yourself the problems that come with applying manure directly on your soil, namely:

• raw manure takes a few weeks to compost in a heap.

• raw manure can be so fresh that it burns plants,

• raw manure contains lots of weed seeds,

• raw manure robs soil of nitrogen while it decomposes.

So try the tea of manure as a liquid fertilizer. No waiting for decomposition, no introducing weeds.

How? Fill a mesh bag with manure. Place this gigantic tea bag in a bucket or barrel of water. No need to boil water for this tea; just use air-temperature water that’s de-chlorinated. Use 2/3 water to 1/3 manure. Let it soak a day or three, stirring it occasionally if you have time. This steep lets soluble nutrients dissolve into the water. You are also culturing anaerobic bacteria. Oh, oh…will it stink? Yep, somewhat. That’s from those beneficial bacteria at work.

Next, pull out your tea bag and dispose of the residual solid contents on your compost pile. Now dilute your homemade liquid fertilizer so that it is the color of weak tea. Apply this onto the base of your plants (a drench.) Make batches every week and apply manure tea to feed your vegetables, flowers, shrubs, berry bushes, trees, and lawn. Since manure tea is high in nitrogen, you may want to avoid applying it to root crops, which do not require much of this nutrient.

A caution: if the manure comes from livestock recently given growth hormones (agri-biz operations), de-wormer, or antibiotics, your manure tea may be less effective or perhaps counter-productive. Why? De-wormers and antibiotics harm the soil food web. It is the soil food web that you want to feed. It is the soil food web that feeds your plants. The soil food web is a complex community of bacteria, fungi, protozoans, nematodes, earthworms, etc. These beneficial organisms are underground chemists. They magically transform minerals to forms that plants can use. If you harm the beneficial bacteria with antibiotics, for example, these workers cannot do their jobs of supplying food and water to your vegetation. I recommend that you ask when the de-wormer or antibiotics were administered. Collect manure that was produced a few days after the medicines were stopped.

How does this compare with actively aerated compost tea?

Manure tea is inexpensive and easy to make. It takes a couple days to steep. It’s stinky, and it is effective as a fertilizer and partially effective to suppress plant diseases when sprayed. It is high in bacteria and extremely low in fungi.

Compost tea (actively aerated), when brewed properly, is ready in 24 hours and does not stink. In fact, it smells earthy sweet. It has an exponentially larger soil food web representation, and the fungi in compost tea are highly effective in warding off most all plant diseases. Actively aerated compost tea is available fresh at Alaska Mill & Feed daily, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturdays at the Anchorage Farmers Market at 15th and Cordova, and sometimes in the Mat-Su through Good Earth Garden School.