Compost Tea and Me

I'll admit it, I didn't know a lot about compost tea until recently.  I wasn't even sure how it was made.  I guessed it was a watery form of compost and I already used compost in my garden, so I wasn't all that curious about it.

Then I noticed a lot of talk about it on Twitter.  People raved.  I felt a little out of the loop, so I asked some questions of the person who seemed to know a lot about it.  Annie, whose Twitter name is @GreenSoil, is the owner of Authentic Haven Brand, the family-owned company that packages and distributes Natural Brewed Soil Conditioner Tea.  I would say they make the tea, too, but the cows and horses do that.

Compost tea is made by adding water to compost - in this case, aged manure - and letting it steep for a few days.  Then you use it to water your plants or as a foliar spray.  In the soil, the plant benefits from the extra nutrients.  As a spray, it helps prevent some fungal diseases. Either way, it's a good thing.

Annie sent me some samples of both their cattle and horse manure teas.  A few days ago, I mixed some up and I'm using it to water my houseplants.

When I opened the package, the faint aroma took me back to when I was a little girl and I used to play in my grandma and grandpa's barn.  They raised a few cattle for beef and the kitties were always hanging out in the barn, so just smelling that tea reminded me of those days.

You might think the smell would be offensive, but it isn't!  I've got the bucket of tea I mixed up sitting beside the back door and I really can't smell anything, although the kitties are cautiously checking it out. :-)

The benefits of compost tea are undisputed, so I don't have to wait to see if this tea does good things for my plants.  I know it will.  I'm planning to use it mainly on my house plants because our gardens are so big, it would take truckloads of compost tea bags to use it on all of them.  I'll use it once a month, year 'round.

If you are interested in trying it for yourself, I now have Annie's Compost Tea in my Open Sky store.  I only carry products there that I believe in, and Authentic Haven Brand is one of them!

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The product or merchandise being reviewed in this blog post was the sole compensation for testing and reviewing the product. All opinions expressed here are mine, with no suggestions whatsoever by the manufacturer or distributor. If I like it, I'll say so. If I don't, I'll say that, too.