Chicken Coop Chatter©
One of the best natural fertilizers you can have is manure, worm casts or compost tea. Each method is easy to make, and is simply recycling the waste from your critters or compost. Any well aged manure can be used for making the tea, and requires very little effort and supplies you most likely have within reach of your garden shed.
If you have a worm bin, you know the value of the worms for aerating and enriching the soil. The worm castings are another great natural fertilizer. Worms thrive on a mixture of manure and peat moss or potting soil. When you are refreshing your worm bed with manure, reserve some for the manure tea.
Our cattle farmers recycle the bovine waste via this same means on a much larger scale of course, and you will see throughout the countryside where they have irrigation systems set up fertilizing their fields with manure tea. This is particularly true at the dairy farms.
Supplies Needed:
Bucket (or watering can)
Manure
Screen or cheese cloth
Water
Place well aged manure (steer, rabbit or chicken or other fowl), about 2 inches deep in a bucket or watering can, fill with water from the hose. Allow to sit a week or two. When ready to use, strain through screen material and water the garden, house plants or fodder. Well aged manure tea will not burn foliage, however you may prefer to pour it around the base of the plants rather than over the foliage in the event it leaves water spots on the foliage.
If you compost, you can take that rich composted *soil* and prepare a compost tea in the same manner as the manure tea.
If you raise worms, you can take the worm castings and prepare those castings in the same manner as the manure tea.
Each method will feed your plants and it will not be long before you will visually see the results of these natural organic fertilizers.
The residue that is strained off from the natural fertilizer can be tossed into the compost pile, or used to top dress plants in the garden, so nothing is ever a waste.
Follow the link to learn how to raise Red Worms for the worm castings: http://justfowlingaround.weebly.com/earth-friendly-projects/red-worms-and-how-to-raise-them
Credentials: Certified Oregon State Master Gardener since 1999. Horticulture degree 2001. Study of Herbs and Horticulture Therapy, heavy research and study of all plants and herbs. Gardening a lifetime.
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