Compost Gardening Page

Compost Gardening with Compost Tea

What is Compost Tea?
by: James Ellison

Organic gardeners all know compost is fantastic. But now there's something even better - compost tea! If you start with a good compost, and you'll have a versatile elixir to make compost tea for all of your garden needs.

Compost tea helps prevent foliage diseases. At the same time, it increases the nutrients to the plant and shuts down the toxins hurting the plants. It will also improve the taste and flavor of your vegetables. So why not give this tea a try? You can either buy it or brew it yourself. You won't believe the results!

But first, the basics of compost gardening. The four ways that good bacteria work in garden compost are:
- Helping compete for the nutrients
- Dining on the bad organisms
- Helping produce antibiotics against the harmful organisms
- Eliminating the bad organisms

Compost tea that is correctly brewed has a wealth of good bacteria and micro-organisms that will benefit your plants' growth and health as well as the soil that they live in.

Compost tea can be considered yogurt for the soil. The micro-organisms living in soil are both good and bad. What the tea does is make sure the good organisms win by introducing helpful bacteria, fungi, protozoa and beneficial nematodes.

Harmful bacteria lives best in soil that does not have good air circulation. Good bacteria lives best and will thrive in soil that is well ventilated with oxygen. This is where a good compost tea, made the right way, comes in.

When you have well oxygenated compost you automatically get rid of ¾ of the bad organisms. Also by using harmful insecticides or chemical fertilizers, we reduce the number of beneficial micro-organisms in the soil.

Plants produce their own energy and food. Half of that goes to the roots and some of that goes into the surrounding soil. This benefits the good organisms living in the soil, and then it turns into a beneficial cycle.

This article is provided courtesy of www.basic-info-4-organic-fertilizers.com