manure tea question

[cheapdave]

Found this article on manure tea and decided to give it a try........ so two weeks ago went picked up 2 5 gallon pails of fresh manure & straw. I placed in 30 gallon barrel and filled with rain water. Now I am finding the stuff stinks to high heaven.......smells like very rank sewage...... Is this stuff safe to use on vegetables?

Here is article.......

Manure Tea ? Best Natural Fertilizer?

Published by Mrs.Dirty Boots under Compost,Frugal Living Tips,Vegetable Plot

If you?re growing your own food you need your plot to be as fertile as possible. Manure is the small-holders best tool for improving fertility quickly. If you have a supply of manure then making up some manure tea or manure water is a quick way of ensuring plants have a soluble supply of all the nutrients they require. Make Manure Tea / Manure Water

Fill a bucket 1/3 full of manure. Fill up with water and put on a not too tight lid. Leave the manure water for two weeks to ferment and allow nutrients to dissolve. Dissolve the manure tea with ten times as much water and use. The brew applied to plants should look the colour of week tea. Keep topping up the manure water bucket with more water as you use it to ensure a continual supply.

This is a great ?pick me up? or reviver for plants which have gone through ?troubled times? such as club root or bad weather. It is also useful to apply as crops first start cropping as a booster feed. We use it on tomatoes, aubergines and peppers until fruit starts to set.

In the long term a self sufficient gardener would be looking to improve the soil en-mass with regular compost and manure applications so this ad-hoc feed would be rarely needed. But as you start to improve your soil?s fertility this quick-fix solution can be invaluable.

To make compost water or seaweed tea use exactly the same method described above. You will need to rinse some of the salt from your seaweed haul before making the seaweed tea. Seaweed tea is probably the best as seaweed seems to contain every nutrient a plant could want. But as ever, use whatever you can get your hands on.

manure-tea

[David Hare-Scott]

Yes. It is usual to put it on the soil though ;-)

The smell is from a wide variety of microorganisms but not from fecal bacteria which are the main group that is a danger to humans. There is a school of thought (that has some evidence in support) that it is not so much the dissolved nutrients that improve the soil but innoculation with the microbes. In that sense it isn't actually a fertiliser. This explains one of the common observations that it works best the first few times you apply it (or on degraded soil) but not so much after that as the soil then has its microflora restored and adding more makes no difference.

Personally I couldn't be bothered, it is easier to apply the manure directly and get the same effect, plus the nutrients from bulk manure, plus the improvement of soil texture from the fibre in the manure that is not in the tea.

David

[David Hare-Scott]

Yes. It is usual to put it on the soil though ;-)

The smell is from a wide variety of microorganisms but not from fecal bacteria which are the main group that is a danger to humans. There is a school of thought (that has some evidence in support) that it is not so much the dissolved nutrients that improve the soil but innoculation with the microbes. In that sense it isn't actually a fertiliser. This explains one of the common observations that it works best the first few times you apply it (or on degraded soil) but not so much after that as the soil then has its microflora restored and adding more makes no difference.

Personally I couldn't be bothered, it is easier to apply the manure directly and get the same effect, plus the nutrients from bulk manure, plus the improvement of soil texture from the fibre in the manure that is not in the tea.

David

[DirtBag]

said

News Flash: Shit stinks - even mine. ;-D

[FarmI]

Commonly known as Blackjack or poo stew. Yup - good stuff. Dilute it with water till it looks like weak tea.