What On Earth’s Compost Tea? And How Can It Help My Garden?

In honor of planet Earth, we’ve been covering lots of different organic methods we use on the farm, particularly techniques to improve soil fertility. Here’s the last post in the series — hopefully you’ve gotten lots of inspiration to bring some of these practices into your own garden.

All of the organic practices we do on our farm are about mimicking what nature does naturally, and compost tea is no exception. Compost tea is a powerful tool in any gardener’s arsenal, and it’s not for drinking! Basically, compost tea is a nutrient-dense spray for the leaves of your plants.

Sound crazy? Ineffective? Possibly unsafe? We promise it’s none of those things, and we’ll let you know exactly how we do it.

What’s Nature’s Version of “Compost Tea?”

Have you noticed how plants always turn vibrantly green after it rains? This is actually not due to the added water — it’s due to nature’s version of compost tea!

There’s much more nitrogen floating around in the air than there is in the ground. When rain falls from the sky, the water molecules pick up some of that nitrogen and deposit it on the leaves of plants. The leaves can then absorb some of those nutrients through their skin and their pores (called stomata)

Farmers and gardeners borrow this concept by spraying a diluted, biologically active compost mix directly on the leaves of plants. Basically, we steep compost and worm castings in water, and then collect the liquid to use as a foliar spray.

Does It Really Work?

We’ve used this spray on our noni trees for many years, and we believe it’s part of the reason why they grow such nutritious fruits 12 months of the year. But a while back, we had an opportunity to do a real test of how well compost tea works.

My son was spraying compost tea on our noni trees as usual, and he ended up with a little extra — enough to spray one of our two rows of banana trees. So he sprayed the one row, and then forgot about it. Four days later, I was out at the banana trees with a group, and I realized that the trees that had been sprayed were a full 2 feet taller than the un-sprayed trees! That’s enough evidence for me.

How Can I Get Started?

We promise, this is something you can do yourself!

Read How to Get Started With Great Compost in the Original Blog!

Steep Away

Once you have a good source of compost and/or worm castings, all you need is a steeping container. It’s most important to seek out a container that you can oxygenate, to get a more lively, active compost tea.

You can use a fish aquarium, and keep in the aerator pump. Or if you’d like to buy a system, a company called Growing Solutions has a variety of compost tea systems, which all aerate your compost tea as it steeps.

The oxygen allows the populations of the beneficial microbes found in your compost and worm castings to grow into the billions. We also recommend adding just a little molasses to feed your microbes while  their population is growing, for best results.

How to Apply

We always spray our compost tea in the late afternoon, because that timing works out best for a plant’s respiration cycle. Plants are busy photosynthesizing in morning and early afternoon, and the stomata (pores) in their leaves close up to prevent much-needed water from evaporating in the heat of the day. In the late afternoon, those pores open up and will stay open all night.

Just give your leaves a good spray and you’ll be on your way to greener, happier plants that produce more nutritious fruits and vegetables!

Have you tried making compost tea at home? What were your results?

Organic Agriculture: Mimicking Nature’s Ways

Humanity’s first farmers took their instruction from nature. They watched how the Earth provided water, nutrients, and pest protection to plants through intricate systems, and they learned to breed plants naturally to get the varieties they wanted.

Humans started out making small interventions to nature’s plants and ecosystems, which made a big difference to their lives.

Today, industrial agriculture makes massive interventions. Acres upon acres of land are cleared, tilled, fertilized, spray with pesticides, flooded, and planted season after season.

The environmental costs have continued to rise, while the returns have been diminishing for over a century. We’ve done a lot of damage to the natural systems on Earth that make life possible.

Organic agriculture is about returning to the philosophy of small intervention—of working with nature instead of against it. It’s about taking responsibility for the damage we’ve done to the Earth, and recognizing that nature’s way is often the best way.

Here are a few of the ways we at Hawaiian Organic Noni mimic what nature does naturally.

Accessing Water

In nature, where there is water, plants soon follow. The location for the plants is determined by the availability of water. But we humans like to have our plants where we want them, so it becomes a question of bringing the water to the plants.

On our organic farm, we use solar voltaic power to bring water up out of the ground to irrigate our noni trees. We then collect mulch and drip irrigate to conserve this water, making sure that there’s no waste, and allow the excess to seep back down into the water table.

Really, we’re just imitating the water cycle, which is nature’s way of moving water around on Earth. In nature, the sun evaporates water from lakes and oceans so it can be redistributed in the form of rain. We use the sun to pull water from the ground and distribute it—not so different!

Read the full version to learn about nature’s natural pest management system

Soil Fertility

Natural ecosystems are great at fertilizing themselves. Usually soil is fertilized through many complex processes of growth and decomposition, as nutrients are cycled from the soil to plants and animals and back again.

Organic farmers imitate this process of natural fertilization in several ways.

Vermicomposting

On our farm, we have tons of wild worms in the soil, but we also farm worms. We simply put the worms in a closed environment and let them do what they do in nature, just on a larger scale. They break down food scraps and other compostables by digesting them. We then collect the “castings” (aka worm poop) which is rich in nutrients. Then we spread this around the farm. It’s an amazingly effective fertilizer!

Traditional Composting

We also do traditional composting on the farm. We make a big pile of organic matter—food scraps, paper, cardboard, wood shavings, leaves, etc.—and let the bacteria go to work. We have learned to turn our piles every other day adding air and water to feed the beneficial bacterium. It’s an acceleration of a process that happens in nature over a long period of time. When the compost is broken down, it becomes a substance called humus, which is essential for healthy, living soil.

Compost Tea

We also make compost tea on the farm. This tea is not for drinking. It’s for spraying on the leaves of plants. Compost tea is a liquid fertilizer that helps us stretch our supplies of compost farther. Again, we aerate our compost tea injecting oxygen into the tea when making to feed the beneficial bacterium. The result is a more potent compost tea to feed the Noni leaves.

Mulching

Another way that we preserve soil fertility is by mulching. Mulching imitates the natural cycle of leaves, wood, and other plant matter building up on the ground to cover the soil. This helps maintain soil temperature, provides habitat for insects and other animals, and keeps moisture from evaporating. Our Noni orchards are worm “hotels” due to the thick mulching around every tree.

No Till System

One final way we keep our soil fertile is by using a no till system. Tilling means turning the soil over, so it’s easier for farmers to dig into, start new plants, and weed. The problem is, tilling disturbs the living things in the soil, releases carbon, oxygen, and water into the air, and gives weed seeds the chance to germinate. We don’t till the soil on our farm, to preserve the fertility of the land.

Diversity

Diversity is a major principle of organic farming, and it’s inspired by nature. In the natural world, you almost never see a monoculture—that is, an ecosystem made up of only one kind of plant or animal.

There’s a practical reason for this. An ecosystem made of only one organism is very unstable, prone to disease and pests, and destructive to the land.

We grow a lot of noni on our farm, but we’re careful to ensure there’s a wide variety of plants and animals on our land. That includes tons of tropical fruit trees, coconuts, flowers, honeybees, chickens, worms, insects, and many more.

Using Nature for Healing

Nature has given us tons of plants to heal ourselves, including noni fruit. Many people don’t take advantage of nature’s bounty, but we’re on a mission to educate the world about the amazing healing benefits nature offers us through noni. This natural medicine has been tested by centuries of use by ancient Polynesians and native Hawaiians as a natural preventative to maintain good health, and we’re proud to continue the tradition.

We’re returning to nature’s way by healing ourselves naturally, caring for the land, and taking advantage of the cycles that nature has perfected over thousands of years.

Our Friends the Worms : What Goes Into Good Soil…and Good Noni

We pride ourselves on our soil at Hawaiian Organic Noni.  Nutrient-dense soil means that the food grown in it will also be full of nutrients.  So we take the health of our soil very seriously.  We’ve spend years nurturing it, feeding it, and caring for it.  But we couldn’t have done it without our friends the worms.

What makes up good soil?

Science is just beginning to understand the full complexity of soil.  There are so many factors that go into determining the quality of soil:

• ·         Texture
• ·         Depth of topsoil
• ·         Water storage and drainage
• ·         Nutrient density (both macro and micronutrients)
• ·         Volume of air
• ·         Presence of living and decaying organic matter
• ·         (Aggregation) how well soil particles stick to each other. 

You can improve the quality of your soil in some surprisingly simple ways. 

Composting Returns Nutrients to the Soil

Composting improves soil’s texture, air flow, water storage, and nutrient density.

The basic process is simple: Mix yard and kitchen scraps in a big pile, soak it with water, and turn it frequently.  The only problem is, composting takes a long time, and turning the pile can be hard work.

Luckily, worms give us an easier way to make top-quality compost.

Vermicomposting for Soil Health

Worms are faster compost-makers than fungi and bacteria, and their castings – called black gold – are one of the best soil additives created by man or nature.

Vermicomposting is making compost using worms.  Most people do this in worm bins – Google it to get some idea of the many options – which keeps the worms from leaving, provides them with the shade they love, and helps keep them moist. 

You can either buy worms or collect them from your garden, but we recommend using local varieties so they can fill their natural ecological niches.

The only thing left to add is food for the worms!  

Here are some likes:

• ·         Most fruit and vegetable scraps
• ·         Bread and pasta
• ·         Tea leaves/bags and coffee grounds (worms love grit!)
• ·         Crushed/ground eggshells
• ·         Hair, tissues, paper, shredded egg cartons, etc.
• ·         Small amounts of lawn clippings, weeds, etc.
• ·         Sawdust

And some dislikes:

• ·         Highly acidic fruits
• ·         Spicy or pungent vegetables
• ·         Meat and dairy products
• ·         Shiny paper
• ·         Fats and oils

Feed them a little bit at a time (no more than the same volume of food as there are worms), only adding more food as it gets eaten.  Worms like to eat food that has just started to decompose, but which isn’t really yucky yet.

As the worms eat, they convert food into black gold.  Black gold looks like compost and should have very little smell.  Scatter the castings on your garden, mix them with potting soil, use them as mulch or fertilizer.  You can’t use too much – there’s no way for the castings to damage plants.

How We Use Worms

At Hawaiian Organic Noni, we keep indigenous earthworms in an area that we call the “Worm Hotel,” busily turning kitchen scraps into black gold.

We add the castings to our soil, where they deposit vital nutrients in a form that is easy for plants to absorb.  The noni trees love it, and produce more nutrient-dense fruit as a result of the more nutritious soil. 

How To Make Your Garden Worm-Friendly

You can also work on making your garden more worm-friendly, to naturally attract these hardworking creatures.  The key to attracting wild worms is to create a good habitat.

Here are some musts:

• ·         Create mulched areas, covered with leaves, grass clippings, or other materials
• ·         Keep the soil moist
• ·         Minimize the amount of digging and tilling you do
• ·        Keep your soil toxin-free

Wild worms will give your soil the same benefits as adding vermicompost you make in a worm bin, just slower and less concentrated. 

It’s definitely worth making the effort to attract worms to your garden, and it’s even more beneficial to vermicompost in worm bins.  We encourage you to give it a try!

Learn more about noni here.

You can use the coupon code: "BLOGGER15" and get 15 percent off your noni order on www.Real-Noni.com.

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Do you have any questions about composting, vermicomposting, or soil health? Ask us in the comments!