Seven Nutrient-Rich Brews Your Plants Will Love

[NJCher]

I've been looking around for additional ideas for brews I can make for my plants and I even did a Google search a few weeks ago and what I found was...lacking.

I have three cats and often buy litter in the big plastic pour containers. I recycle the used containers when I wash vegetables and lettuce. I like to pour the used water in them and use it later in the garden.

With the containers located conveniently outside my kitchen door in a shed, I often will put eggshells in them, as this is a known way to get more calcium to the plants. Ferns are known to love this treatment.

Then, of course, there are compost teas and manure teas one can make.

So I was looking around the net for novel ideas for potato containers, and I came across this site "tipnut." They had the article I was looking for, which is the subject of this post.

In addition, there are comments by readers. I intend to add Lyric's grandma's milk feeding solution using instant milk that is so popular on this forum. It is one with which I have had great success, and I look forward to using it again this year.



Cher

[Kolesar]

1. Kelp is expensive if purchased: foliar fertilization applies the nutrients efficaciously

I have not done it yet. Two months to make an infusion? Better start tonight

[beac]

2. My well water is already super-high in calcium, but I love the

idea of repurposing vegetable scraps into vegetable fertilizer.

[beac]

3. Thought I'd add the link to Lyric's original post on DU2 about that

miracle milk bath for any of our new members who haven't yet experienced its miraculousness!:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=246x12904


Must remember to add nonfat dry milk to my shopping list soon.

[Lugnut]

5. The milk bath really works!

My tomato harvests have been amazing since I started using Lyric's milk bath recipe.

[NJCher]

4. Directions for Weed Tea

First, don't Google this unless you want to make marijuana tea. It took a little extra effort to find good directions on how to do this. These directions come from Farmer D. You do have to have a container with a top to cover your weed tea with, as it gets, ahem, aromatic, and it takes 3 weeks to make a batch.

What follows is a cut and paste from Farmer D. See the link for the rest of the directions, as per DU policy I can only cut and paste so much:


Continue good garden housekeeping by making compost tea from weeds pulled from your garden! Just like their tenacious ability to pop up in all areas of your garden, weeds' tenacity extends to nutrient uptake as well. Weeds compete with desirable plants for nutrients from your garden soil, and they are very good at it. Because of this, weeds are full of mineral nutrients. You can give back what weeds rob from your precious garden plants by making "weed tea" from the weeds you pull from the garden. Apply the nutrient rich concoction to your garden veggies and watch them flourish because one plant's trash is another plant's treasure!

Step 1: Weed your garden.

Step 2: Collect weeds and put them in a permeable bag such as a Hessian sack, onion or muslin bag, etc. Tightly tie off the sack-o-weeds.

Step 3: Find a bucket or container to fill with water. The ratio should be 1 part weeds to 10 parts water (25 liter container, 2.5 liter weed sack). Make sure your container has a tight fitting lid to keep the insects and fermenting odor away.
....

This is an amazing way to create something positive out of something seemingly negative by closing the loop on weeds. Now that's biodynamic!


Cher

[TuxedoKat]

6. Thanks for posting this

They treated the lake behind my house yesterday for invasive plants so before they did that I went and raked up several of the plants from the lake to make some "tea".