Worm Casting Tea Saves You Money

Worm Casting Tea saves you money by stretching those castings dollars. Learn how to make an effective worm casting tea extract with the equipment you already have.
Compost tea takes the microbes present in your worm castings and multiplies them to create a natural liquid fertilizer for pennies per gallon.

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Worm Tea Recipe for 5-Gallons:

2 Cups Worm Castings
A handful of Sphagnum Peat Moss
3 TBPS. Azomite
2 TBPS. Unsulphered Blackstrap Molasses

Hi, I am Rick from Iowa Worm Composting. Today I'm going to talk about worm casting tea, and better than that, I'm going to show you how to save a little bit of this (money) and still have healthy plants. So, stick around, it is going to be fun.
Casting tea: What is it and why should you be bothered with it? First of all, the definition of worm casting tea. We are taking the microbes in the worm castings and putting it in an aqueous solution (water) We're going to attempt to grow out those microbes and increase the numbers. We're going to use that as a liquid fertilizer for application in our gardens.
Let me give you a simple analogy. Way back in the old days, you know when you used chemical fertilizer in the garden and it was pretty good for most of the year. But, then you know about the middle of the season you would break out your Miracle Grow. You would mix it up in your bucket and put it on your plants. You would use a watering can or a hose-end sprayer. Regular chemical fertilizer used in the spring is kind of like your slow-release fertilizer. The Miracle-Gro would give your plants that quick boost. That's kind of what worm casting tea does. The worm castings that you applied in the spring are your slow-release fertilizer. By applying worm tea through the season you can get like an instant fertilizer effect. It also helps with suppressing plant diseases and deterring pests. There's also a lot of other reasons to use worm casting tea.
I'm going to show you a way to make worm casting tea that everybody can do. I know we have all seen those videos of the guys with those big air pumps. They spent two million-dollars trying to put their systems together. It really doesn't need to be that hard. If you have a 5-gallon bucket and a few simple ingredients, you can make a really effective worm casting tea at home for your own use.
Let's get started. Let's see how we can make worm tea for home use. This is not an aerated brew. This is what they call a worm tea extract and there's no aeration in this other than stirring it with a stick.
We need a 5-gallon bucket or another container and it needs to be food-safe plastic. How do you know if it's food-safe plastic? Well, if you look at the bottom of the bucket, it'll tell you what the material is. This bucket is HDPE 2. That is a food-grade plastic. Does that necessarily mean the bucket is food-grade? Well, that depends. I bought these buckets at Menards new and we've only used them in the garden. There's never been any chemicals or paints or anything else in these buckets. I know the history of this bucket and I know that it hasn't had any chemicals and pesticides or anything else bad in it. Yes, it is a food-grade bucket and we can use it for this purpose.
Another thing we need to talk about is water. A lot of the City Water Supplies have chlorine or chloramines in them. Chlorine and chloramines are meant to kill bacteria and they do a good job of that. We need to use dechlorinated water for our worm tea. An easy way to neutralize chlorine or chloramines is with ascorbic acid. That is basically Vitamin C powder. Ascorbic acid is used in many commercial chlorine filters. It will neutralize chlorine or chloramines. It doesn't take much either. A 1/4 tsp. will neutralize a 5-gallon bucket of water in about 10 minutes. I will say that I do wait for an hour.
When I have to make my own worm tea, I usually do an aerated brew. I always let it bubble an hour or so. It kind of builds up the dissolved oxygen and it also helps to disperse the chlorine and spread the ascorbic acid all through the water. We have waited an hour and through the miracle of video, we are ready to go. Here's my favorite recipe for worm tea. You don't have to write this down. I'm going to post this at the bottom of the video.