Boost soil life, feed your plants, and multiply beneficial microbes with this simple 24-hour brew.
Check out our video on a simple recipe you can use, plus a few optional upgrades you can use to enhance your tea.
Worm Castings…what do we do with them?
Other than burying them straight into the garden, it’s always been a question for me: “what am I supposed to do with these worm castings that keep piling up?”
It’s always felt like a slight waste just spreading them out over the soil and rubbing them into the upper layers. What good was that gonna do? A decent amount actually, but we can do much better.
And it starts with the actual purpose of worm castings.
A Big Misconception
I used to think, if only I could just plant directly into a garden bed full of worm castings.
But it turns out, that isn’t an ideal scenario, according to the research. Actually it seems that the benefits start to peak at around 10-20% of your growing medium being made up of worm castings. This would require a gallon and a half of worm castings per cubic foot of growing space…a bit out of reach for most of us.
Which is why it’s good news that the true value of castings are not the fact that they’re fertilizing soil. It’s not that they’re replacing soil as the growing medium. It’s the microbes we’re after.
Bacteria Bombs
Worm castings are bacteria bombs, and that bacteria is what does serious work in your garden—especially where you grow annuals. These are your veggies and your flowers that you plant in the ground at the beginning of the season and take out of the ground once they’ve produced.
Beneficial bacteria found in worm castings are going to match the fast-paced life cycle of the annuals you plant each year. They also wake up and die off quickly.
Maximizing the Microbes
If only we could make our worm castings go a bit further…especially considering they’re carrying so many goodies.
Enter Worm Tea.
No, not that liquid you catch on the other side of the worm bin spout–that’s what we call worm leachate. While it does contain beneficial bacteria, we can get more. A lot more.
When we steep our vermicompost in a constantly aerated bucket of water and feed microbes some sugary foods, we encourage those bacteria to multiply a hundred, a thousand, even up to a million times their original composition.
Not a bad return on investment. You can use this simple recipe to make your own Aerated Worm Tea or watch our video above to get the idea.
Basic Recipe
Ingredients
- Finished Worm Castings (1/2 cup per gallon of water)
- Dechlorinated Water
- High Quality Molasses (1-2 teaspoons per gallon of water)
Instructions
- Fill a bucket with dechlorinated water.
- Add your worm castings to a fine mesh bag (paint strainers work great) and hang this in the bucket of dechlorinated water.
- Insert bubbler hoses so that they touch the bottom of the bucket, sending bubbles upward through the liquid.
- Allow the contents to bubble for 24-48 hours.
- Apply undiluted to the soil or diluted 1:1 in dechlorinated water to plant foliage.
- You can use a watering can or a pump/backpack sprayer.