Hello everyone, the rainy season is definitely among us, and I have to keep reminding myself that April showers bring may flowers! Lately I have been using my time tending to my seedlings, building flower beds with Cash, and honestly just finding places to put all these plants I plan to grow.
A few weeks ago we moved our chicken enclosure in order to give our 26+ chickens a bigger space. While working on that project we decided to clean the coop out and collect all the manure into buckets. I had read about chicken manure compost tea before but had never made it. So cash and I took on another project. We took a plastic food grade fifty-five gallon drum that we had gotten for free, painted it black with spray paint to attract heat from the sun and also for cosmetic reasons (it was an ugly eye sore previously), and cash and my father in law put a spout at the bottom of the barrel. Now in order for this to flow through a hose on the spout it will need to be gravity fed, so cash built a stand for it out of wood from the downed trees, yes we could have used cinderblocks too but we wanted to save our money and use what resources are on the property. (However, if you don't mind to spend the extra money and dont feel like a project one of these
would work beautifully also.)
Next up we got some panty hose (people also use pillow cases for this) and cash filled them with the old manure, but when it came time to put the manure filled panty hose into the barrel we quickly realized we needed to cut a whole in the top of the barrel so it can fit, so we got the saws-all and cut a square big enough. We then attached the panty hose to a string and lowered it into the barrel, and attached the other end of the string to a stick and laid it across the top of the barrel to hold it in place. We did not fill the barrel all the way. Instead we left space to dilute the tea as to not burn our plants. We stired this mixture everyday, its fine if you forget from time to time but it does need to be stirred up here and there.
Here is the supply list and recipe we used:
supplies:
Barrel or bucket
spout (not necessary, but kinda handy)
drill (if you put in a spout)
black spray paint (not necessary but will help heat it even more)
saws all (if you use the barrel like ours)
a stick
Recipe:
4 parts water
1 part chicken poop
*steep for two weeks
*stir every day
*dilute with 50% more water when finished brewing
Thank you for reading! I will provide up dates on how this liquid benefits the plants, we cant wait to see the results !
Update: the batch was very large and ended up needing an aerator due to bad bacteria that started growing in the barrel. Which was yucky. But it quickly improved once we aerated. And I poured a cup of sugar into the barrel to feed the good bacteria. It did benefit our plants very well. This was such a large amount though and for the average gardener an over kill, haha. We ended up diluting and filling the tractor bucket up with this good stuff and dumping it around the flower beds. (When using compost tea, it has to be used when it's fresh), if the compost smells bad, don't use it. It should smell earthy not disgusting haha. Now I'm experamenting with making banana peel compost tea, we will see how that one goes. Thanks for reading 😀
(I am an affiliate marketer with amazon and may make a percentage of products listed on my blog).
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