A Basic Compost Tea Guide

[jaykush]

with dechlorinated water ^^^

 

[CT Guy]

CT Guy, this conflicts with the first post that recommends the above recipe. I doubled the seaweed because I'm using the less concentrated liquid variant. I trust you and what you've been saying and I certainly don't want to create an environment for nasty pathogens. So when you say 1 tsp, you're saying one teaspoon? My god I'm giving way to much molasses at even 1 tablespoon, let alone 5 We'll i'll brew up a batch with what you're recommending and compare tastes/smells/growth rates. I'll be sure to report back.

I haven't done too much experiments with molasses personally. When I want to test a compost, I'll put a tsp. of compost in a pill bottle and add 1-2 drops of molasses and then shake it really well and let it sit for 12-24 hours before looking at it under the microscope.

Every rate or homemade recipe I've seen from Dr. Ingham has recommended 1 teaspoon and possibly going up to 2 tsp., but that's the max. Typically that's supplemented with a humic acid and soluble seaweed (ascophyllum nodosum (sp?)).

If there's not as much biology in your starter composts though, you may not get that bacterial bloom that drops the dissolved oxygen levels rapidly.

~Tad

 

[Guest]

What would one recomend if a fellow had the following products

Peruvian Seabird Guano 10-10-2
Em1 Bukashi Rice
MetaNaturals Organic 16-0-0 (1tbs per gal)
MetaNaturals Organic 3-3-3 (1tsp per gal)
EarthWorm Castings
MaxiCrop Liquid Seaweed
Molasses
Liquid Karma
Per gallon please.
Temp?

will be brewing for 4-5 days.

Looking for a BIG boost of nitrogen for well established sites indoor two weeks before flip!!!!
Thanks for your help on the poo

Sorry to repost.

 

[halloweed2006]

Jay and V, l love you both. I definitely diluted with 1:4 tea water ratio. I use distilled water I buy at the store. I'm pretty sure that has no chlorine in it.

stickynicky,

I'd just do the veg recipe mentioned on the first page, but make sure you include that liquid karma as all the good oragnic growers on here rave about it.

 

[halloweed2006]

Ok, my plants loved the nute tea so much i'm going to make a bacterial tea for every watering.

I'm brewing in 5 gallons of bubbling and temp(80 f) controlled water:

2 tbsp of seabird guano ( this smells so good I almost want to eat it, what's wrong with me?!)
1 tbsp of mexican bat guano
1 tbsp of jamaican bat guano
1 tbsp of indonesian bat guano
5 tbsp . Liquid Karma
1 cup of worm castings
10 tbsp. of liquid seaweed (this is weak stuff, needs lots of it)
3 tbsp. of molasses ( i know the uber users say less, but my plants look so happy with 5! i'll just subtract two tbsp )

I'm trying to avoid any high NPKS, i just want the bacteria from the bat and bird poop, do you think i can get a good bacteria population with less than 1 tablespoon?

 

[vonforne]

Ok, my plants loved the nute tea so much i'm going to make a bacterial tea for every watering.

I'm brewing in 5 gallons of bubbling and temp(80 f) controlled water:

2 tbsp of seabird guano ( this smells so good I almost want to eat it, what's wrong with me?!)
1 tbsp of mexican bat guano
1 tbsp of jamaican bat guano
1 tbsp of indonesian bat guano
5 tbsp . Liquid Karma
1 cup of worm castings
10 tbsp. of liquid seaweed (this is weak stuff, needs lots of it)
3 tbsp. of molasses ( i know the uber users say less, but my plants look so happy with 5! i'll just subtract two tbsp )

I'm trying to avoid any high NPKS, i just want the bacteria from the bat and bird poop, do you think i can get a good bacteria population with less than 1 tablespoon?

Yes you can. The worm castings alone with a sugar product would give a good bacterial dominant tea. And I would cut back the Liquid Seaweed also to about 2 cap fulls. 2 cap fulls equals about 3.25 TBS. In 5 gallons of water this is enough.

V

 

[C21H30O2]

so how do we go about brewing teas that don't kill off the beneficial fungi in the soil? since mike is killed by molasses.

 

[Clackamas Coot]

And I would cut back the Liquid Seaweed also to about 2 cap fulls. 2 cap fulls equals about 3.25 TBS. In 5 gallons of water this is enough.

V

Depending on the brand, that may not be the exact amount for a capful. By that I'm thinking of MaxiCrop - at least the size sold for consumers in the US, i.e. a capful is actually 3 tablespoons (1.5 ounces).

I follow the suggestions from the Soil Food Web, et al. and use 1.5 teaspoons per 5-gallon mix in the brewer. The tea took the same amount of time to brew as it did previously with higher levels of carbohydrates. I've used agave nectar, brown rice syrup as well as molasses - just because they were in the pantry and I thought it would be an interesting experiment and it was - LOL

The latest batch of teas were brewed in my new brewer I build a couple of weeks ago were used on our and the neighbor's vegetable gardens (organic) 2 weeks ago and we had a sample of the tea tested locally. By using top quality earthworm castings the tea had very high levels of bacteria, fungus, et al. - far exceeding Soil Food Web's recommendations. The quality of the compost/vermicompost proved to be the key to making teas with a wide diversity of microbes. The earthworm castings that we're using have been tested by the packer (they post their results on their web site) and it has an extremely high level of microbes.

Back to molasses - I'm still shaking my head after reading posts on this and other cannabis-related sites about how 'important' molasses is for the 'final flush' and how it will 'sweeten' the taste of their buds.

I guess if I poured strawberry jam on a Haze plant then I'd end up with 'Strawberry Haze' right?

My wife is Jewish and loves a good pastrami sandwich - maybe I can try pouring the water left from cooking a pastrami slab, mix in some Grey Poupon, some rye water on a strawberry plant out in the garden and VIOLA! - I've got 'Deli Delight Danky Berries' - it could be a real hit in some areas around the USA right?

Pretty funny stuff indeed!

HTH

Clackamas Coot

 

[GeorgeSmiley]

I called the water company and asked if the water was chlorinated and they said it has chloramines in it which they said is chlorine and ammonia. Will bubbling the water off gas this or do I need an aquarium conditioner?

 

[Clackamas Coot]

I called the water company and asked if the water was chlorinated and they said it has chloramines in it which they said is chlorine and ammonia. Will bubbling the water off gas this or do I need an aquarium conditioner?

George

EDIT: I cannot find the source for the information I originally posted so I have removed the post until I can provide a link.

Here is a good informative article about chloramines - here

 

[Clackamas Coot]

George

Okay - I found the article. The author of the book Teaming With Microbes runs a Yahoo.com group on the topic of aerated compost teas. There are posters from around the world with the majority of them being organic farmers, landscape companies using non-chemical nutrients, etc. It is not a cannabis site at all.

One of the participants on that venue, Ted Peterson, owns a company called Earth-Wise which designs and manufactures compost tea brewers of any size. He also has plans which you can purchase.

Bottom line is that he's a very smart guy and is well respected at the Yahoo.com venue.

Since it requires one to join the group before you can browse through the archives I'm going to post some of what Tom wrote on this subject last summer. I hope this is not a violation of the rules here.

This is interesting. My water provider told me that the chlorine I was smelling in shower water was really chloramine. Having had and maintained a large pool for a number of years, I begged to differ. To me, the liquid chlorine I was using in my pool smelled the same. He was adamant as were other professionals I contacted about this. Their point was that to get chlorine to the levels of smell, such a large amount of chlorine would have to be present in the water as to make it nonpottable or not fit for human consumption.

So I called the university and got the same story about chlorine and chloramine. Here's what they suggested. By the way, they told me that test strips were as good as other methods as long as they hadn't been exposed to air or been around for more than a year.

They suggested I try taking water from a tap and using a test strip then adding some dirt or compost, waiting about 10 to 20 minutes and then testing it. If it is chloramine, nothing will happen to the test strip immediately unless there is a break somewhere in your line and organic matter gets into the water. After organic matter is introduced, you should get a reading. Soon, though, just left in a glass or whatever container you use, the chlorine will dissipate. I thought the reactions would be long because I was initially told to aerate the water for roughly 6 hours to dissipate any chlorine/chloramine. It turns out that this is far longer than needed but I guess the people telling me this were erring on the side of safety.

I told them what I was doing and they suggested two things. First, get a charcoal filter. While this will not do much to chlorine, it will allow chloramine to convert to chlorine. When I add compost and nutrients into the container I am using, the chlorine already converted and the existing chloramine will be converted and dissipated in the first 30 minutes of the cycle.

So I tried some experiments using purified water, water that I dechlorinated with a product called de-chlor (Which supposedly works on chlorine and chloramine), water that I dechlorinated using aeration for 6 hours and water right out of the tap. Then I used the same amount of compost, nutrients and aeration and mixed it in a bucket. I examined samples using a microscope (Spencer 1000x monocular) and counted the biology present at 30 min, 60 min, 90 min, 2h, 3h, 4h, 5h and 6h. (I have done other experiments before and gotten similar results.)

I made the test as rigorous as I could. I took the samples from the same location in each bucket using separate siphons (These are flexible plastic uniform siphons used for waste treatment sampling. 100 cost $3) for each bucket to avoid any contamination. I rinsed the siphon in a separate container of purified water for each bucket and dried them on single sheets of paper towels.

When I looked at the biology, I noticed very little difference in each sample. In the first test, I noticed slightly lower biology in the sample of water directly from the tap. At first I chalked this up to the chloramine/chlorine but on subsequent tests, I noticed that sometimes lower biology would be present in some of the purified samples. I finally decided it must have more to do with the compost than with the biology. Biology grew equally in each container. I did the test four times in a four day period. The results were not different enough to make much of a difference.

You can see a picture of the test rig I used if you go to www.earth-wise.com and click on Experiments in the list at the upper left of the page.

I don't have cool photographs like Tim does and I didn't even think of photographing the project until much later. I test all the time anyway and photography usually doesn't enter into the mix.

Ted Peterson
Earth-Wise, LLC​

I hope that this information is helpful/useful on your project.

 

[Dignan]

Clackamas,

Welcome to IC... I am enjoying your posts and your style.

I posted this info from Ted Peterson last year in these forums and elsewhere and it amazes me how many of my wonderful grower friends don't seem to want to consider that chlorine, and even chloramines, aren't necessarily insurmountable obstacles to a person interested in a healthy soil food web.

I also posted last year excerpts from a series of email exchanges that I had with Dr. Elaine Ingham about this very thing. Elaine acknowledges that she is in the business of absolutely maximizing microbial life in every way possible, such that it would hold up under intense scientific scrutiny... but that for the average gardener, there is little to fear in chloraminated water and almost nothing to fear in chlorinated water, which is almost entirely released from water by the mere act of it spilling from a faucet or hose nozzle.

I could also tell that I had to sort of break through her initial tendency to be defensive because, like Ted Peterson, she often takes the brunt of people's attacks online. I feel for both of them in that regard. We organic folks can be hard-headed.

Only recently did I finally get around to reading Teaming With Microbes because I have been tending toward the oldschool soil health books lately, which my library has a plethora of (Building Better Soil; Albrecht writings; etc) and I found it curious that people so often equate Elaine Ingham and that book, based on that fact that she wrote the Preface/Introduction. But there are several things in that book that Elaine's lectures, articles and her emails to me contradict. I think the authors of Teaming With Microbes are self-taught soil scientists and they tend toward the extreme with it, but because that book is the most up-to-date and is put together very well (high quality paper, printing, excellent images and illustrations, well-written), and because it has the endorsement of Dr. Ingham, people lately have a tendency to take it as gospel.

At any rate, great post and welcome to ICMag. I hope to see you around more often.

Dig

 

[Clackamas Coot]

Clackamas,

Welcome to IC... I am enjoying your posts and your style.

I posted this info from Ted Peterson last year in these forums and elsewhere and it amazes me how many of my wonderful grower friends don't seem to want to consider that chlorine, and even chloramines, aren't necessarily insurmountable obstacles to a person interested in a healthy soil food web.

I also posted last year excerpts from a series of email exchanges that I had with Dr. Elaine Ingham about this very thing. Elaine acknowledges that she is in the business of absolutely maximizing microbial life in every way possible, such that it would hold up under intense scientific scrutiny... but that for the average gardener, there is little to fear in chloraminated water and almost nothing to fear in chlorinated water, which is almost entirely released from water by the mere act of it spilling from a faucet or hose nozzle.

I could also tell that I had to sort of break through her initial tendency to be defensive because, like Ted Peterson, she often takes the brunt of people's attacks online. I feel for both of them in that regard. We organic folks can be hard-headed.

Only recently did I finally get around to reading Teaming With Microbes because I have been tending toward the oldschool soil health books lately, which my library has a plethora of (Building Better Soil; Albrecht writings; etc) and I found it curious that people so often equate Elaine Ingham and that book, based on that fact that she wrote the Preface/Introduction. But there are several things in that book that Elaine's lectures, articles and her emails to me contradict. I think the authors of Teaming With Microbes are self-taught soil scientists and they tend toward the extreme with it, but because that book is the most up-to-date and is put together very well (high quality paper, printing, excellent images and illustrations, well-written), and because it has the endorsement of Dr. Ingham, people lately have a tendency to take it as gospel.

At any rate, great post and welcome to ICMag. I hope to see you around more often.

Dig

Dig

Thanks for the welcome!

The authors of the book are 2 attorneys (at least one of them is, Jeff L.) and live in Alaska of all places. He/they have been writing a garden column up in Anchorage for many, many years. I was lucky enough to hear him speak at a garden & home show a few weeks back and it was very interesting and there was a good exchange of information between Jeff & the audience.

Back to the brewing of teas - I think that the process outlined in the book is a good place for the beginner to start. Particularly the method to kick-start the fungus for the brew.

I have had a worm bin for several years 'just because' and have used our EWC on our raised beds and have always been blown away with quality and quantity of our vegetables, berries, apples, pears, melons, herbs, etc.

Since my wife of 30 years pretty much runs things around here there isn't much in the way of our castings to use on growing my medicine - LOL

I was lucky enough to find Alaska humus soil locally for $25.00 for 50 lbs. which is a great price! I use castings from a company in Washington which has been around for several years and publishes the soil tests conducted by Dr. Ingham's group in Corvallis and this product is very, very high in all microbes and it's only $11.40 per cubic foot. I'm not sure how that works out on a 'per pound price' deal but you get the idea.

I also include the compost from our bin which includes goat, rabbit, chicken, turkey (last year on that deal - trust me) manures, barley straw, oat straw, kelp (both fresh kelp from the coast as well as kelp meal), rotted fruit, vegetables, glacial rock dust, etc. and while I've never had our compost tested I can tell you that it's black, rich and grows 750 lb. pumpkins like nobody's business.

Back to the teas - some of what I see popping up on the cannabis related boards is a bit depressing. By that I mean it's the usual/typical deal that if a 'truth' is found then it must be abused to the 'nth degree if it's going to apply to growing cannabis and in this case it seems that some folks believe that these teas work best if applied constantly. They do not.

The goal is to establish a healthy soil environment and 'let nature take its course' as the expression goes. Continuing to pour compost teas (even assuming that they've been made correctly) on a container plant is more than a bit silly. But it does satisfy that basic need to 'do something' to our plants even when common sense & knowledge would dictate otherwise.

But the race is on. In my city there are at least 12 'grow stores' with a couple dating back to 1983. Definitely the earliest players in the grow store shell game(s). I'm starting to see bottled 'aerobic compost teas' (good luck on that one), compost tea brewers costing hundreds and hundreds of dollars, high-priced botte 'compost tea starters' - to what? Grow a few plants? Wee!

And then there's the crowd trying to brew tea with a $10.00 air pump from WalMart or a used one from their neighbor's yard sale. Good luck on that.

Try these teas on a strawberry patch around the middle of May (in most parts of the USA) and then again after the fruit sets. Feed weekly with kelp meal tea (about 1.5 teaspoons per gallon and let it sit for a couple of days. Aerate if you wish just to bounce the kelp particles around) and top dress your plants with glacial rock dust. Best berries you'll ever grow - we've got 6 varieties in our patch. One local favorite with the organic crowd finishes almost a purple color - it's so dark.

It's just amazing what people are able to do without Earth Juice, Liquid Karma, Tiger Bloom, etc. isn't it?

Thanks again for the welcome.

 

[Scay Beez]

so how do we go about brewing teas that don't kill off the beneficial fungi in the soil? since mike is killed by molasses.

Molasses in small amounts favor bacterial growth. In greater amounts it favors fungi growth. In non diluted amounts it is antibacterial and anti-fungal. That's why you don't have to keep blackstrap molasses in the fridge like maple syrup.

stickynugs: Way too much N with both metanaturals N and PSG.

Clackamas Coot: Maxi-crop liquid isn't completely organic and not the best choice of seaweed. Use any other kind of cold pressed seaweed for better results. I did some experiments with Agave nectar and it takes too long to break down in a normal brew cycle. It left spots on my leaves after a foliar. Brown rice syrup is excellent stuff! I haven't experimented with it yet but I would assume that a small amount could benefit. Don't listen to commercial growers when they say to flush with sugars. It makes the herb burn fast and hot. Flush with water. I have grown crops with and without flushing and I will never grow another crop again without flushing. I don't care if it goes against popular opinion... proof is in the pudding and I haven't found tastier smoother pudding anywhere.

I agree with Clackamas Coot -> I think we're all just trying to brew the best most potent compost tea (just like our herbs) and anything that is not 100% productive quickly becomes taboo as far as the chlorine/chlorimine topic. Chlorimine screws up my digestion and gives me stomach aches so that's why I'm super anti chlorine. Also being a beer brewer the taste difference in a beer brewed with pure mountain water and compared to one brewed with filtered water is HUGE.


- sbz

 

[Clackamas Coot]

Maxi-crop liquid isn't completely organic and not the best choice of seaweed. Use any other kind of cold pressed seaweed for better results.

ScayBeez

I keep MaxiCrop around because it's easily available, cheap, functional. We use it on our vegetable garden and on the fruit trees. It works well for my basic needs but your point is well taken.

At a rather unconventional farm store here (they've been around for 75 years) is a kelp meal from a Canadian company called Acadian Seaplants that I use to feed the worms, kelp teas, compost teas, etc. The price went up (fuel surcharges) to $55.00 per 50 lbs. which is pretty good.

Acadian also has a dried seaweed extract (powder form) which is $9.00 per lb. which makes it less than 1/2 the price of the dried seaweed extract from MaxiCrop and is definitely more convenient. I will probably buy that product when I finish up the gallon jug of MaxiCrop which won't be hard with all of the outside garden work on my wife' work detail list that I have to effect to keep the peace.

I only recently discovered Kelpak which then led me to another Canadian kelp product called KelpGrow. I now have a gallon of each and have been experimenting with them to start some kitchen herbs for my wife's kitchen garden. Based on what I know so far, my money is on the KelpGrow product but I have an open mind on the deal.

I had a conversation with a field rep from KelpGrow who had worked for Kelpak for 8 years prior and he had some interesting information about the various forms of using kelp products - from extracts, meals and even composting fresh kelp. I've got some fresh kelp in a smaller separate compost pile because I wanted to keep tabs on how it breaks down, heat, humus mass, etc.

At the very least it's an interesting hobby this organic growing.

On another note, I'm working with a fellow berry grower down the road and we've set aside a small strawberry patch to play around with roasted barley meal teas - same thing they use in white flour to facilitate faster rising by feeding enzymes to the yeast plants. Commercially it's flour marked 'bromated' on the package.

I know that barley straw, soaked in water like alfalfa, makes a wonderful tea for plants in the hot summer months. Barley straw is also used to control algae growth in ponds and since I'm not a botanist or a scientist of any kind I don't know what the connection is but I have seen increased growth to plants sprayed with these teas. I know it's only anecdotal but there it is!

LOL

Cheers!

 

[vonforne]

Back to the teas - some of what I see popping up on the cannabis related boards is a bit depressing. By that I mean it's the usual/typical deal that if a 'truth' is found then it must be abused to the 'nth degree if it's going to apply to growing cannabis and in this case it seems that some folks believe that these teas work best if applied constantly. They do not.

Most strive to give a NPK value tea but what we have been working towards is along the same lines as Dr. E.......to infuse the soil substrate with fresh bacteria on a regular basis. I do agree with one statement though and that is to build a healthy soil substrate from the start with an active food web as closely as we can in our closets. LOL and that seems to be difficult for some to understand. So, we have been evolving over the last few years.
If you had come here 2 years ago there were only a few of us even posting in the organics forum.

Any way good post and welcome to the discussion. Its good to have some new input.

And SB.....good posting as always.....you are a great asset here.

V

 

[CT Guy]

George

Okay - I found the article. The author of the book Teaming With Microbes runs a Yahoo.com group on the topic of aerated compost teas. There are posters from around the world with the majority of them being organic farmers, landscape companies using non-chemical nutrients, etc. It is not a cannabis site at all.

One of the participants on that venue, Ted Peterson, owns a company called Earth-Wise which designs and manufactures compost tea brewers of any size. He also has plans which you can purchase.

Bottom line is that he's a very smart guy and is well respected at the Yahoo.com venue.

Since it requires one to join the group before you can browse through the archives I'm going to post some of what Tom wrote on this subject last summer. I hope this is not a violation of the rules here.

This is interesting. My water provider told me that the chlorine I was smelling in shower water was really chloramine. Having had and maintained a large pool for a number of years, I begged to differ. To me, the liquid chlorine I was using in my pool smelled the same. He was adamant as were other professionals I contacted about this. Their point was that to get chlorine to the levels of smell, such a large amount of chlorine would have to be present in the water as to make it nonpottable or not fit for human consumption.

So I called the university and got the same story about chlorine and chloramine. Here's what they suggested. By the way, they told me that test strips were as good as other methods as long as they hadn't been exposed to air or been around for more than a year.

They suggested I try taking water from a tap and using a test strip then adding some dirt or compost, waiting about 10 to 20 minutes and then testing it. If it is chloramine, nothing will happen to the test strip immediately unless there is a break somewhere in your line and organic matter gets into the water. After organic matter is introduced, you should get a reading. Soon, though, just left in a glass or whatever container you use, the chlorine will dissipate. I thought the reactions would be long because I was initially told to aerate the water for roughly 6 hours to dissipate any chlorine/chloramine. It turns out that this is far longer than needed but I guess the people telling me this were erring on the side of safety.

I told them what I was doing and they suggested two things. First, get a charcoal filter. While this will not do much to chlorine, it will allow chloramine to convert to chlorine. When I add compost and nutrients into the container I am using, the chlorine already converted and the existing chloramine will be converted and dissipated in the first 30 minutes of the cycle.

So I tried some experiments using purified water, water that I dechlorinated with a product called de-chlor (Which supposedly works on chlorine and chloramine), water that I dechlorinated using aeration for 6 hours and water right out of the tap. Then I used the same amount of compost, nutrients and aeration and mixed it in a bucket. I examined samples using a microscope (Spencer 1000x monocular) and counted the biology present at 30 min, 60 min, 90 min, 2h, 3h, 4h, 5h and 6h. (I have done other experiments before and gotten similar results.)

I made the test as rigorous as I could. I took the samples from the same location in each bucket using separate siphons (These are flexible plastic uniform siphons used for waste treatment sampling. 100 cost $3) for each bucket to avoid any contamination. I rinsed the siphon in a separate container of purified water for each bucket and dried them on single sheets of paper towels.

When I looked at the biology, I noticed very little difference in each sample. In the first test, I noticed slightly lower biology in the sample of water directly from the tap. At first I chalked this up to the chloramine/chlorine but on subsequent tests, I noticed that sometimes lower biology would be present in some of the purified samples. I finally decided it must have more to do with the compost than with the biology. Biology grew equally in each container. I did the test four times in a four day period. The results were not different enough to make much of a difference.

You can see a picture of the test rig I used if you go to www.earth-wise.com and click on Experiments in the list at the upper left of the page.

I don't have cool photographs like Tim does and I didn't even think of photographing the project until much later. I test all the time anyway and photography usually doesn't enter into the mix.

Ted Peterson
Earth-Wise, LLC​

I hope that this information is helpful/useful on your project.

Okay, just have to state that I have a few issues with this post.

1. You would never use a 1000x microscope to look at compost tea or biology, it's way too much magnification.

2. You can't "rinse" with purified water to remove biology. You should use hydrogen peroxide or some other product that will kill any remaining biology

3. Within the Yahoo Group mention above, if you look carefully, you will see that Dr. Ingham and Jeff Lowenfels do not respond to any of Ted Peterson's posts. There's a reason for that. Tim Wilson sent him a free copy of his DVD as an attempt to educate him on identifying these organisms correctly.

4. We've tested with different water samples using Soil Food Web labs and gotten very different results with different water supplies (though I'm hardly claiming that we instituted rigorous controls when we did it). http://simplici-tea.com/water_quality_article.htm

5. That yahoo group does have some great information in the archives and is worth joining and checking out.

6. Jeff Lowenfels is a former lawyer and in the Garden Writers Hall of Fame. He's got a radio show and holds the record for the longest running weekly garden column in the country. He's an excellent speaker and most of his book is derived from the work of others like Dr. Ingham.

~Tad

 

[Guest]

Vonforne-thanks for the info bro here's a few pics...this one i fed them your tea recipe the hole way thru..i fed them every other watering was scared didn't want to burn or over feed..but this next one i am going to feed them two time a week now




thanks for the info

 

[vonforne]

Vonforne-thanks for the info bro here's a few pics...this one i fed them your tea recipe the hole way thru..i fed them every other watering was scared didn't want to burn or over feed..but this next one i am going to feed them two time a week now




thanks for the info

I am glad it helped out in your grow. Very nice plants you have there but remember less is better. You have done a very good job and you will give some confidence to other up and coming growers wishing to feed with organic teas.

V

 

[CT Guy]

but remember less is better.
V

I couldn't agree more! It's hard for people to switch from the NPK paradigm and realize it's about moving away from tons and tons of artificial inputs. Once a healthy system is established it should be self sustaining (though I realize that's not possible for indoor growers).