Tea, anyone?

I have a wish list of what I want to have in my garden. I'm doing this on a budget, and don't want to add any  pesticides, herbicides or other poisons. This is food after all and I need to be able to feed it to my family! My next project was to make some tea. Not tea that you'd want to drink though. This will be plant food. An instant boost to my plants to keep them in tip top shape.

This is just a regular rubbish bin you can buy at a hardware shop. When I bought it, I also bought a tap. I drilled a hole a few inches above the base, and inserted the tap (the instructions were with the tap). That's it, all I needed to do to set it up. I set it up on some old bricks (they really do come in handy!) so that I could get a watering can under the tap, then got the hose to it & filled it to about 6 inches from the top. Next, I filled it with lovely nutrient-rich stuff. I got salmon heads & fish skeletons from my brother-in law, added comfrey leaves, (this is a great plant, with a really long tap root which mines the nutrients from way down in the soil/subsoil and brings it up to store in it's leaves). I also added leftover bones from the kitchen, some twitch/couch grass (that I normally would put in the rubbish bin as it will regrow even from tiny pieces of root and the compost doesn't always kill it), and other food scraps that I didn't want to compost. The meat bones I put into a net bag like you get when you buy oranges, and tied a piece of string to it. Use quite fine string, as if your string is too think, there will be a gap between the lid and the bin, which will allow flies to get in.

I tied the other end around the handle of the bin so I could take the bones out after the flesh is gone, without putting my hand in the goop. Otherwise the bottom would get clogged with old bones. Plant material should break down totally as long as you don't put wood in there. Rinsed seaweed is another excellent ingredient if you can get hold of it. Finally, I put the lid on & left it, adding to it whenever I had something suitable to dispose of.

Well once this lovely mixture had steeped for a few months, I started using it. Mmmm! Before you apply a mixture like this you must water the garden, then dilute it 1 part to about 5 parts of water in your watering can. The tea is too strong to apply straight, and will burn your plants. It's great on fruiting plants like tomatoes which are really hungry, and also as a foliar spray, where you put it in a misting bottle & spray directly onto the leaves. Do this on a cloudy day, or in the evening so it doesn't burn.

Such an easy way to make your own plant food, and a great way to reduce and recycle the waste you produce.