How to Grow Amazing Plants with Compost Tea - Masterclass with Dr. Elaine Ingham (Part 2 of 5)

so um has to we're going to keep it aerobic by using air blowing into your tank of water to move the water so we're going to extract the organisms off the surfaces we have to make sure oxygen is adequate and again it's looking at your organisms the organisms respond most rapidly to what's going on in that water your organisms will tell you when you're starting to go anaerobic and you need to fix that kind of problem water extract so we've already gone through a lot of this the energy to extract the organisms off of the surfaces what's the temperature of the water that you should be using ambient temperature wherever you're going to be applying that tea i know that people will always tell you that organisms grow faster the hotter it is the warmer it is the faster the organisms are going to grow yeah except which organisms are you going to be growing the ones that grow at that temperature what if you're outside the surface of your leaves is 40 degrees and you're brewing at 95. all those organisms at 95 degrees what you know if you're out on the beach in waikiki in your little bikini and your speedos and we suddenly transport you to the middle of downtown uh minneapolis minnesota in the middle of the winter time what are you gonna do you aren't gonna do your job are you you're going to freeze to death so match the temperature you're brewing at to the temperature of the place you're going to put that compost tea yes you're if you're in las vegas in the middle of the summer brew at 110 degrees okay it's a little fun trying to keep that aerobic so um have some fun every once in a while so brew at the temperature and again we deal with salts in your soil in your water in on the ph problem don't worry about it your microorganisms are in control of that we're going to get rid of the salt in your water the toxics in your water by putting in the humic acid complexing that so the definition of compost tea

as opposed to compost extract as i've already gone over with the extract you're just using the water to rip the organisms off the surfaces of the compost and you're ready to roll we don't have to be adding food so if we go back one we're going to add foods to a compost tea to grow the organisms so we have to understand what foods to grow which kinds of organisms so which is better to use what do you need it's always going to come back to what do you need to be doing are you going to just need to inoculate these organisms into your soil you've got plenty of foods in your soil how do we know we have plenty of foods in our soils what's the percent organic matter that our soil should be at that will maintain this life even when your plants not growing we have to have foods for these organisms to grow on so what's the minimum percentage organic matter that we have to have in soil for our organisms to make it through the winter time at least three percent organic matter if you're lower than that spend your life increasing that organic matter in your soil how fast can you get that organic matter how fast can we go from point five percent organic matter to three percent organic matter one application of compost is typically all we need as long as you've got some residues undecomposed plant material and those organisms can start to chew on it so compost in place you know put down layers of your uh residues get the compost or the compost tea on top of that and get that decomposing in place because then you don't have to you know if you got to collect all your residues off your soil and compost it all over here and then go spread it all back ouch that's painful so make small amounts of compost get that really good inoculum and then go spread that over the surfaces of all your residues on your farm best time of year to do that in the fall when you have fall rains and then all winter long your microorganisms have the chance to decompose those residues and by next spring you got soil beautiful soil as long as you have the life in that compost well do you have to spread solid compost or can we spread a compost extract so if we're going down onto our soil compost extract you don't need to be growing the organisms as long as you've got good compost just do an extract you don't have to brew you don't have to add foods but what if you don't have a lot of compost you know you've got you know three foot tall pile by three foot wide pile and that's all the good compost you've got and you've got ten thousand acres that you have to cover okay you're still going to make tea because you're going to have to grow those organisms in that brewing process to get enough to take that tiny amount of compost and turn it into an inoculum for all of your fields so there's that size thing we've got to think about as well compost leachate how many of you have heard about compost leachate quite a few of you so let's put it straight here compost leachate is what happens when you just passively run water through your compost so when i was talking about making the humic acid that's a leachate we passively move water and you collect that liquid it does not contain the organisms it should not contain any of the organisms because if we've got happy healthy organisms they are glued they are bound to the organic matter in our compost so a leachate is just going to have the enzymes the hormones the soluble organic material the soluble inorganic nutrients that might be present in your compost so short-term benefit you may see an instant response of your plant because we've got some good enzymes that went in there were some soluble nutrients there were some good humic acids but it's a very short-term response you're going to see a benefit to your plant of maybe a week maybe 10 days and that's it because the biology in your pot has done everything it can possibly do with that so compost leachate there's your humic acid compost extract we're ripping the organisms off the surfaces of the compost but we're not feeding them they're not going to be growing if we're making tea then we are indeed growing the organisms and that's why we have to brew we have to give them time typically at 72 degrees we're going to brew for 24 hours if it's colder than that we're going to brew probably for 36 to 48 hours we want organisms to use up all the foods that we put into the compost tea and that's going to take time the colder it is the slower they're going to grow now just to differentiate a couple of other things plant teas there is no compost involved when we're doing biodynamic work and you're putting you know comfrey leaves into a tank and you're filling the tank up and you let that ferment away that's a plant tea there's no compost involved oh but i took a pinch of my horn manure compost and put that in there yet that's an inoculum of organisms that's a compost tea composting has to be made with a lot of compost so differentiate that can plant teas be useful absolutely but what's the biology in your plant tea exactly what did you do what did you grow a whole different story easiest way to know what's in a plant tea is to look at it with your microscope and you've got to be managing a plant tea correctly because it always goes through an anaerobic phase when we start that plant tea for as long as that plant tea stinks smells bad you probably don't want to be putting that right on your plants because there's some diseases there are some pests there's some problem organisms in there and you could be applying them to your plant surfaces manure tea time and time again people have made this mistake they will go and take manure straight out of an animal or been sitting around on the barn floor for a while and they throw manure into the bucket swirl it around you know get it nice and aerated and then they leave it overnight sitting in the garage or sitting in the kitchen what happened when you weren't stirring it how anaerobic did that go and when i do when i read in the scientific literature and people are describing in papers they say compost tree doesn't work and i read the methods they took manure well what's in manure anaerobic organisms because think about the cow's digestive system is that aerobic or anaerobic in there anaerobic so what's coming through in the manure a whole bunch of pathogens and so if we take that manure put it into water yeah we spin it around for a while but then we leave it setting overnight how fast did it go anaerobic once you stop stirring probably about 20 minutes anaerobic what are we growing in there so these papers they take that manure water let's call it what it actually is manure tea if you will and they spray their cherry plants with it what's going to happen to your cherry plant it dies i'm not surprised at all because we put out some wonderful pathogens that were only too happy to take out your cherry tree but in no way is that a test that shows that compost tea doesn't work they didn't do anything to make compost tea they had no compost because what they used was manure so when you're reading some of those papers if there's no mention about biology scientific paper has to be looking at the biology what's in the compost what's in the tea when they get finished demonstrate that it's actually the beneficial organisms that you're putting out yeah so a worm tea exactly what that is that you're gonna have to go back to the person who made it and find out how they made it because if you got a worm bin that's constantly dripping dribbling water out the bottom what does that tell you about that it's anaerobic yeah this is anne so what's in that worm tea and we she really shouldn't call it tea yeah we should yeah anaerobic stinky smelly liquid stuff you know so now what if their worm bin they are purposely you know like once a month uh putting on a lot of water letting it pass through and collecting that liquid okay now i'll give you that that's some really great humic acid that should have all those enzymes all those hormones but it's passive movement of the water through the warm compost so it should not have any organisms in it so don't expect the inoculum of the organisms in there that you would get in an actual compost tea or a compost extract passive movement of water through a compost does not pull the organisms out when we're looking at soil where the organisms are actually growing in the soil is in the soil solution so these are all basically aquatic organisms they're just adapted to gluing themselves to the surfaces binding themselves but what they're really living in is the soil solution so we're just increasing the amount of water there's more space between surfaces when we're extracting these things into the compost tea doing a con compost extract they're not really in a malu that's that different from the soil now if we try to you know rip the organisms off the surfaces and somehow extract pull away all of the solid material i think things would grow very differently where we don't have any surfaces for these organisms to grow on but when we're doing these compost teas there's always small little bits of the organic matter coming with we've got the sands the silts and clays often certainly the clay is coming through with the bacteria clay is the same size as bacterium rod shape but you know same size so we our only subjecting them to these kind of well things are getting a little strange conditions for these organisms for a short period of time and then we're putting them back out into the real world which is why we don't want to have you know some people say well elaine why can't i start a tea brew and then just keep adding to it and you know for the next 150 years we'll have this compost tea because only one or two species win in competition and that is not adequate we have to have this massive diversity of organisms and that's why we want this compost with all these different kinds of food sources in there conditions in that pile so we can maintain this massive diversity of organisms when we look at a typical gram of healthy soil there are 75 000 species of bacteria per teaspoon there are 25 000 species of fungi per teaspoon a thousand species of protozoa and maybe 10 to 100 species of nematodes per teaspoon and that's the kind of diversity that we have to have so somebody's always awake and functioning around your root systems every second of every day that your plant is growing your plant will never be stressed it will never have problems with oxygen getting to the root system but if we have that kind of diversity so somebody's always building soil somebody's always protecting your plant surfaces somebody's always cycling nutrients so i have to get this diversity back into the soil so diversity is a very important part of all of this so factors involved in making good

compost tea the things we need to think about so we really get through all the basics here well first of all i'm hoping that you've all got this down you know the compost has to have the organisms they've got to be the aerobic organisms they you need to have the nutrients as long as you're making your compost out of organic matter no need to worry about the nutrients every single plant cell has to have the full complement of nutrients in it if you've got organic matter in your soil stop worrying about putting on any kind of fertilizer because you don't need it get above three percent organic matter yep the organisms are going to be able to take the nutrients out of that so in our compost we've got the nutrients we need to make sure certain organisms are there then we've got to look at the machine you know how are you aerating how are we extracting those organisms from the surface we got to get that water moving and it has to be rapid enough that we are actually extracting off that off all of those surfaces so what kind of pump well now this is a air pump that you should be using not a you're not you do not want to be taking the tea out of your tea brewer through a pump and pumping it back in through some kind of nozzle every time you pass your teeth through that pump it's killing some organisms i don't really care what kind of pump i've never seen any pump that doesn't have damage done to the organisms as they're passing through some pumps aren't as bad as others but especially in a tee brewing operation if the all of the water in your tank is going through that pump every five minutes and we have a 20 attrition rate how can you have good biology left in that hebrew so we want to be using an air pump so however you want to get the air down to the bottom of the tank and release those air bubbles why not a nice uh you know the valve at the bottom of a cone tank and just hook your air pump up there so a valve you close that valve you fill up your tank with water you turn your air pump on please make sure that your air pump is above the level of the water and the t brewer just in case the electricity goes off because you don't want to have this little explosion happening when the water hits your pump yeah so make sure that pumps above or you know the pipe or something is above at some point so now you're uh turn the air pump on open the valve bubble bubble there it goes right from the very bottom so you don't have any collection of sludge that's going to occur on the bottom of that tank if you've got a tank that develops a layer of sludge on the bottom as your water is moving through the course of extracting any of your water that passes through the sludge on the bottom of the tank is going to happily filter out all your bacteria your fungi your protozoa your nematodes and so all your biology is going to be left on the bottom of the tank not in the water so be aware of these kinds of problems and when you're going to go buy a brewer make sure you can see every part of that brewer because if you can't if something's enclosed something is where you cannot see it and you cannot clean it guess where the sludge is building up so don't even consider tea brewers where you can't see part of the inside of that system close pipes badners now a little chamber where you can't see inside oh we've got a little crystal down there in this chamber and that crystal is going to help improve the growth of the organisms really could you show me the data on that because little enclosed chamber guess where the sludge you open up the chamber after five or six tea brews get your saw out sawed open and the slime on the surface of the crystal is just ungodly good question back there let me i'll go through some brewers that you know i'm good or bad i'll go through them so cleaning your machine again if you can't see some surface how do you know when it needs to be cleaned so biofilms will form anywhere the water slows down anywhere the water is not moving very rapidly so that means edges that means 90 degree turns that means pipes where the water is going to slow down as it passes through that's where the biofilm is going to start to develop and also bacteria start gluing themselves to the surface of the plastic or the surface of the metal and one layer of microorganisms sitting there not a problem because plenty of oxygen in the water going by but then these bacteria are going to reproduce and now we got two layers four have 16 84 layers so if any of these organisms that first attached are capable of growing in reduced oxygen conditions and some of them will be pathogens if you're not just absolutely certain about your cleanliness so now we could have pathogens starting to grow anaerobic conditions we're starting to put out some toxic chemicals we're starting to produce alcohol the laric acid putrescine all those nasty toxic chemicals formaldehyde and the quality of your tea is going to plummet so we have to be able to see where those biofilms are starting to form so make sure when you're buying that brewer that you can see every part of the inside of that brewer the simpler the easier the better in my opinion i do not like cleaning as you might suspect i am not a fan of cleaning anything my idea of cleaning stuff is take the hose put my thumb in the end and blast it out and just clean it all out high pressure water i do not have to climb inside the tank i've been stuck inside tanks too many times big 500 gallon brewer and we got to go down and you know scrub the um the port that takes the water out so you climb down inside and of course you don't think about the fact is you're climbing down inside and you let go of the lid and you drop four feet how are you getting back up there um and they all went off for lunch while i was cleaning the tank so i'm inside the tank going anyone out there hey guys

finally took a nap they came back they couldn't find me they started putting water in the tank i woke up so ah some of the stories you can have cleaning make it easy don't have stuff inside the tank if you possibly can temperature we've already talked about that hotter is not better we have to match the brew temperature to where you're going to be putting it foods what what's missing in your soil you got to check your soil and you put in the food for the organisms that aren't where you want them to be what's the balance that your plants require weeds require strictly bacteria if that's all that's in your soil that's what you're growing you've got to start having that fungal component if you want to grow brassicas you have to have at least 200 parts per million fungi 300 parts per million bacteria i'm definitely on the bacterial side but you need some component of fungi in order to not allow the weed seeds to germinate and start to grow there are many places where we've demonstrated this over and over again as soon as you start to shift that fungal to bacterial biomass ratio the weeds don't grow you don't have thistle you don't have nut grass you don't have johnson whatever weedy species you want to talk about pardon get the fungal the bacterial biomass ratio so we're are you starting to get a lot more fungi than bacteria now it's going to depend on exactly which kind of plant you want to grow but even brassicas have to have sun fungal biomass in the soil and that's what selects against the weeds and for your brassicas now you want to grow most of our vegetables we need to have about 300 parts per million fungi and about 450 parts per million bacteria and we're going to grow our tomatoes our potatoes our carrots our celeries and no weeds and we will increase water holding capacity so you don't have to irrigate so the necessity to get this biology back into the soil if you're trying to grow really healthy pastures or row crops you have to have an equal biomass of fungi and bacteria so you got to check your soil what's in your soil what's missing and now we're going to use our compost extracts compost teas to put back in the biology that you're missing so do we need to feed our organisms the compost doesn't really have quite enough fungi so i need to put in fungal foods because my fungi are low i'm going to grow some and i'm going to put fungal foods in there so what are fungal foods just hold on we'll get there so water we've already talked about this time of day that you're going to apply your tea if the nozzle on your sprayer is large enough it makes absolutely no difference what time of day you spray if the nozzle opening size is less than one millimeter then you're going to have to be careful about ultraviolet on a bright sunshiny day you have to spray tea before 10 o'clock in the morning after three o'clock in the afternoon because ultraviolet will kill the organisms if your drop size is less one millimeter how do you know what size drop your sprayer is putting out you take a piece of tablet white tablet paper yellow tablet paper put it on the ground or you know use a clothes pin to clip it up onto one of your leaves and then you go through with your sprayer the instant you pass take a look at that piece of paper and you can measure the drop size that's it this is not market science so as long as that drop size is bigger than this you're okay spray whenever you want to foliage or soil so nozzle size there we go b please look at your sprayer and make sure you've removed all the filters because if you got a filter in line you're going to develop a sludge as your accomplished goes over through that it's going to end up forming a sludge and now where are all your organisms going to end up on the filter not going through and protecting your plants so exit all filters which is why you want your nozzle sizes pretty large greater than a millimeter check your pumps and make sure that the pump is not killing most of the organisms so get a diaphragm pump are usually the easiest on your organisms and yes we are passing our organisms through that pump once but just once not once every five minutes if you have a recirculation pump on your sprayer please check that just think about the fact though that as you're driving down the road as you're driving through your field um and that um sprayer with your tank is bouncing along behind you isn't the bouncing enough aeration to keep that aerated yeah you don't need that recirculation pump is if you stop and you leave that sprayer sitting for you know half a day yeah it's not tea anymore dump it out on the ground and start over and clean the tank because you got some fun biofilm growing so if you have to leave the spurs sitting for any length of time get the recirculation pump on so don't do that basically is the take home message question into your um vessel is there a certain diameter like the bag that you put your compost in do you want a fine mesh bag a large mesh bag yep so he's asking about the um the bags that we're putting our compost into and so i should have talked about that back up here with the um with the design of the tea brewer you want to be putting your compost into a bag that the opening size on the bag is greater than 400 micrometers so there's six different scales of mesh sizes so i'm not going to go there you want to just look and make sure that the opening size get your microscope put a little bit of that fabric underneath the microscope and measure the opening size all of your organisms can pass through opening sizes that are larger than 400 micrometers most of the particulate material in your compost is going to kept it be kept in the bag so we're not going to get big chunks of stuff coming through and there's a quite a few of them i'll show you um some of the bags in just a minute question there um typically what we want to do is have enough air flow so that as the um air bubbles are going leaving the surface you have a rolling boil you don't want you know big fountains of water popping out of your that's too high we want enough so it's like a rolling boil on the surface yep it should be fairly centralized and typically what we're trying to do is bubbles coming up off the bottom passing through your compost bag so your compost is constantly mixing and moving and bouncing around and extracting the air bubbles going out of the surface of your water is gonna move around and so you set up a vortex quite often a taurus effect so we do see improvements in the rate of growth of the organisms when we have that vortex happening so almost every brewer you're going to encounter is a vortex brewer i know there are people out there that say ours is the only vortex brewer really right not true so yeah um the bag right in there about siphoning straight into a drip irrigation system absolutely just make sure the filters are out of the irrigation system typically with a compost tea we're gonna be adding it into a lot of water because when we make a good compost tea really good composting you're putting out one gallon an acre if it's an okay compost tea five gallons per acre not so wonderful compost tea 20 gallons per acre so into an irrigation system now typically we're putting out what two thousand gallons through the irrigation system so we wanna be metering that one gallon or ten gallons or twenty gallons into that two thousand gallons of water the water is just a carrier what we want to be thinking about is we're delivering these organisms at a high concentration the inoculum is we got billions of organisms in here and so we need to spread that equally out over this one acre it's just an inoculum they're getting into the soil they're getting into your organic matter and now they start to grow the joyful thing about life is it reproduces we don't have to put on the right number of bacteria to occupy all two million pounds of soil in your top four inches so get the inoculum out there get them growing and your plants gonna help because of the exudates coming out of the root system of your plant so nozzle sizes pumps uh application factors yeah how what's missing in the soil make certain that we're getting that out there and then two weeks after you apply this compost or compost extract or compost tea let's check the soil again you got the microscope use it how much improvement in the biology of the soil happened have we reached the goal no then we put out some more let's say i go out and i put on my application of compost tea i know i had just bacteria in my soil i had no fungi no protozoa no good guy nematodes the only type of nematode i had was root feeding nematode i apply my compost tea two weeks later i come out and look and there's not a roofing nematode to be found i've got bacterial feeding nematodes i've got my fungal feeding nematodes my fungi are going crazy my protozoa are happily decreasing my bacterial population yay nutrient cycling life's wonderful i've done it i'm going to see the benefits i want to see let's say you come out two weeks later you look in your soil and you go i'm finding refuting nematodes i have no fungi i have no protozoa and i got bacteria out the gazoo there's something toxic in your soil there's something left over from i don't know pesticides to high salt levels you got a serious problem because you didn't get any benefit okay that's where we're going to go find that inoculum of those pseudomonads and those bacillus species you're going to go out and find some specific things to chew up the toxic material that's in your soil i don't care what kind of toxic material it is these guys are going to do the job so i don't have to identify what kind of pesticide that it's clopirolid that's gotten out into your soil i'm going to go get these good guys you make another tea where we add at the beginning of the brew cycle these particular organisms and so we're gonna solve the problem two weeks from now we're gonna look again and we're now in the right direction