Mar 03 2009
Manure Tea – Best Natural Fertilizer?
If you’re growing your own food you need your plot to be as fertile as possible. Manure is the small-holders best tool for improving fertility quickly. If you have a supply of manure then making up some manure tea or manure water is a quick way of ensuring plants have a soluble supply of all the nutrients they require.
Make Manure Tea / Manure Water
- Fill a bucket 1/3 full of manure.
- Fill up with water and put on a not too tight lid.
- Leave the manure water for two weeks to ferment and allow nutrients to dissolve.
- Dissolve the manure tea with ten times as much water and use. The brew applied to plants should look the colour of week tea.
- Keep topping up the manure water bucket with more water as you use it to ensure a continual supply.
This is a great ‘pick me up’ or reviver for plants which have gone through ‘troubled times’ such as club root or bad weather. It is also useful to apply as crops first start cropping as a booster feed. We use it on tomatoes, aubergines and peppers until fruit starts to set.
In the long term a self sufficient gardener would be looking to improve the soil en-mass with regular compost and manure applications so this ad-hoc feed would be rarely needed. But as you start to improve your soil’s fertility this quick-fix solution can be invaluable.
To make compost water or seaweed tea use exactly the same method described above. You will need to rinse some of the salt from your seaweed haul before making the seaweed tea. Seaweed tea is probably the best as seaweed seems to contain every nutrient a plant could want. But as ever, use whatever you can get your hands on.
Basically you’re making your own liquid fertilizer which can even be used as a foliar feed (though not on the bits you want to eat any time soon). Even if you were buying or bartering in manure this is a very cheap way of making liquid feeds which are ecologically sound too due to the absence of chemicals. And, if you’re using compost or manure produced on your own vegetable plot, or seaweed picked locally yourself, this is a free organic liquid feed. You can’t get better than that.
For a more self sufficient future
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Thanks for the advice. Just off to buy organic chicken sh*t – hope that’s as good as cow pats etc.
J
ps I have just found your blog as I was searching for manure water. It looks very useful for those of us interested in self-sufficiency/low-impact/… Thanks very much.
Glad you found us. Chicken sh*t is full of goodness but very concentrated. It’s what we use, just don’t throw it around when fresh or it can be too good and burn plants.
manure tea sparayed on plants is dangerous. what were you thinking??? if you want to use manure, let it rot for a couple years and then till it under the soil weeks before you plant. this is a much safer way to use manure.
Hi Tina,
We’ve used manure tea for years with no problems. The manure is always rotted first and then ferments further in the ‘tea’. Primarily we pour it on the ground around plants as a liquid feed, but it can be used as a foliar feed too (not on edible leaves though obviously)
Manure tea? Is that the brown goo shown in the picture? Gross!!! I would never make it, spray it on my veggies, or pour it anywhere near them. I use well rotted compost mixed well in the hole under, and around my tomatoes. I usually pick 30-40 nice tomatoes off of each plant…sometimes more. It is a risk to use manure tea due to possible ecoli poisoning. A fly can land in the tea, then land on an edible vegetable. If the vegetable is eaten the person may become sick or worse. The risk of manure tea outweighs the benefit.
Not sure how many times I need to say this but our manure has been composting in a big pile before it goes into my manure tea! Just like farmers have always done. Manure is brilliant plant food! To waste all that nutrition is madness.
I see why they call you dirty boots…
Even if you rot the feces it is still rotten feces.
Then, by adding water to it, the bacteria comes right back…ECOLI SOUP! It is a tricky endeavor at best and can make people very sick. In fact many people were dying last year due to stupid ideas like this.
Oh dear, sorry we’ve upset you Betty. The soil is full of all sorts of bacteria but we still like to grow our veggies in it! We find washing our hands a real miracle worker to ensuring we stay healthy.
It is amazing to me how few people out there actually understand the benefit of live, biologically active soil. That includes a myriad of microbes needed to feed the soil and plants. If earthworms like it, it is a good idea. If it harms earthworms, like chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, then it is a bad idea. The harm from these things, which do not come off from washing your hands and your vegetables, FAR outweighs any risks from raising food naturally. Using manure tea, and washing your vegetables before you use them are great practices that sadly many people don’t follow. Keep up the good work!
FarmerMike – thankyou!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wow.
Mrs. Dirty Boots, Farmer Mike, I am with you both. Some people are grocery-store hippies who haven’t yet realized that their plastic wrapped produce is grown in DIRT (#&%$&EEEWWWW!!!!!!). Don’t let them get you down, and keep up the good work.
Sara.
p.s. My father-in-law worked to build a public sewage treatment plant (you know, the place where it goes if you don’t compost your own and you flush the toilet!) where the dried sludge was sold and literally fought over by all of the commercial farmers in the county that grew food for everyone to eat! The sludge was very well treated and tested, but it all comes from the same place. Go figure!
Sara, thanks very much for the support and glad you’re proof of the sludge debate – a lot of folks are in denial about where their s**t goes and what it helps them eat!