How to make home made liquid fertiliser (compost tea)

If you're wanting to keep your garden happy and you're on a budget like we are, the best thing you can do is make some liquid fertiliser yourself, or otherwise known as weed or compost tea. We used to purchase seaweed solution and various other liquid fertilisers such as charlie carp but we were finding that we were churning through one of these every couple of weeks. While these products are great and add loads of extra microbes and nutrients to your soil, to keep it more sustainable financially we decided our hand at compost tea.

What you need

Using a 9 litre bucket (that has a lid) We add into our mixture a handful of aged manure or compost (whatever we have around), a shot of molasses, worm wee, comfrey leaves and then it's topped up with water. We use most of it on the weekend and start a new batch ready for distribution the following weekend, if you're in cooler climates you may need to wait a few weeks for everything to start breaking down. You can also use disease free weeds such as stinging nettles or dandelion - anything that has long root systems and has gathered nutrients from deep in the soil is a bonus.

Do you need to use an aerator?

Some people will say you need to use an aerator in your compost tea, and you only need to brew it for around 18 hours - otherwise it will kill your plants. We're lazy gardeners and we like to make things fit around our lifestyle and also what we have on hand, we don't do any of these things, yes it gets a little stinky but our plants are very happy and healthy. Have you made your own home made liquid fertiliser?