[compost_tea] Searching for basic instructions on compost tea brewing
Hello,
I am a newcomer to this direction of making compost tea. I have been
making hot compost for a period of about 4 years now.
My compost is primarily a manure compost using goat manure, and
browned alfalfa stems, coffee grounds, and kitchen fruit and
vegetable scraps. The manure/dried alfalfa blend is 80 - 90% of the
mix, the coffee grounds are 5 - 15% and the remaining scraps fill the
remainder. My typical compost cycles are that the pile hits a 140 -
150 degree F for a period of 4 days then cools to 120 - 130 then I
remix and let it heat up again for a period of 1 week, then mix every
week for about 4 weeks until the pile does not reheat above 80
degrees anymore (Usually 5 - 6 weeks). At that time I sift the
compost through hardware cloth or expanded metal.
This weekend for the first time I attempted to make the compost tea.
I had some rainwater that had settled in barrels and I placed a
burlap bag filled with compost into the water for a period of about
1 - 2 hours until the water was a deep brown.
Am I going about this in a reasonable strategy? How many times can I
reuse this bag of compost until I should empty the contents and
refill it with fresh compost? If I use municipal water - can I
assume that the chlorine is evaporating sufficiently while the
compost tea is brewing or should I let the chlorine evaporate (and
for how long) before adding the bag?
What are the advantages / disadvantages to using compost tea over
straight compost on the plants?
I average about 4 - 5 cubic yards of compost every 6 weeks so I am
just trying to calculate the best allocation for my recources.
Yahoo! Groups Sponsor |
ADVERTISEMENT
| |
|
Yahoo! Groups Links
Received on Mon Nov 15 2004 - 20:46:40 EST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0
: Tue Feb 07 2012 - 14:15:36 EST