Actively-Aerated Compost Tea
Why It ROCKS, and How to Make It

I used to think that compost tea was nothing more than a bucket of water with a bag of compost suspended in it for a few days to extract the "nutrients". But I now make it in a completely different way, a way that dramatically boosts the populations of the beneficial bacteria and fungi that are so necessary for making nutrients available to plant roots. By using a special recipe and bubbling air through the tea, I can create a very special liquid called actively-aerated compost tea, or "AACT". This is also now called microbial tea.

AACT explodes the populations of beneficial bacteria and fungi in your garden soil, which can dramatically improve your soil structure and increase the nutritional quality of your vegetables.

These microbial critters are what make the nutrients in the soil available to the plants, and when the plants are better nourished they are more resistant to disease - and more nutritious for us. Now this new kind of tea still contains a few nutrients like the old kind did, but it is also packed with helpful microbes, which are where the real miracle lies.

Those of you who have seen the wonderful  movie "The Biggest Little Farm" will remember that they didn't start reviving a dead piece of land with fertilizers, or manure, or even compost. They started by building an earthworm farm and then making an aerobic microbial brew from the earthworm castings ("worm poop"). This revived the soil, which was then planted with cover crops, which further renewed the soil.

(If you haven't seen the movie, it's worth buying on Amazon Prime.)

Here's how we're going to do it:

How to Make Actively Aerated Compost Tea

Start with Good Finished Compost and Worm Castings

The highest quality compost is made from many diverse ingredients, and you really need to make your own to get the best. See How to Make Compost for instructions. Compost isn't hard to make, and you don't have to have a lot of space. But it does take time.

Most store bought compost is made from waste products like wood chips and feedlot manure, and won't make good AACT. Good compost made from diverse ingredients will contain nitrogen and carbon compounds, some phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, sulfur, calcium and micronutrients, all needed by plants. It will have lignins and be rich in humic and fulvic acids, which are necessary for plant health, soil structure, and water and nutrient-holding capacity in the soil. And it won't have antibiotic, hormone, GMO, herbicide, or pesticide residues in it, which store bought "compost" most surely does.

It's also important that the compost be completely broken down. When you look closely you should not be able to tell what the ingredients used to be. (Though a bit of crumbled egg shell won't hurt anything.)

Good, completely finished compost is filled with trillions of beneficial bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and actinomycetes, and it is these microbes that we want to increase by making AACT.

While these critters might not sound so appealing to you and I, to plants, they are like an army of waiters delivering yummy dishes for the plants to dine on. They actually participate in the transfer of nutrients into the roots of plants, and many of them also eat or outcompete many pathogenic organisms that can cause plant diseases.

The best  thing you can use for a microbial brew is fresh worm castings - if you have a worm bin. This is my favorite way to use my worm castings, because I feel I am making them go farther. When I make them into microbial tea, I can spray the whole garden, instead of just pampering a few lucky plants.

There are two ways to make actively aerated compost tea.

• use a commercial compost tea brewer
• make a homemade brewer

As a diehard DIYer I spent my first summer making AACT in a tiny homemade brewer, using what I thought was a decent aquarium pump and a big 5" airstone. But no matter how careful I was, it always ended smelling a bit off. I used it anyway, thinking "Well it doesn't smell THAT bad... I think it's okay".

I'm now convinced that it wasn't okay. To really aerate five gallons of compost tea sufficiently to keep anaerobic bacteria (like E coli) from getting a foothold, and to really produce big numbers of the good guys, you need a LOT of aeration. The stuff I make now actually smells good, in an earthy kind of way.

I highly recommend the Keep It Simple (KIS) Compost Tea Brewer, because it has lab numbers to back up its claims that it produces extremely high fungi and good bacteria populations. I don't get a commission from saying this, but those guys are the BEST and if you don't want to fiddle with making one yourself, Google them and buy theirs.

Four Days Before You Start the Tea, "Feed" Your Compost Some Oatmeal

Fungi take longer to grow than bacteria, so about four days before you start your compost tea batch, add some baby oatmeal to the compost you're going to use. Add about 3-4 Tbsp of baby oatmeal per cup of compost, so the starter recipe would be:.

• 4-6 cups excellent, finished compost
  
• 12-16 Tbsp baby oatmeal or quick rolled oats (I pulse some regular rolled oats in the blender till they're finer
  

Moisten the mix until it's about as moist as a wrung-out-sponge and keep it out of the sun. Lowenfels and Lewis, in their excellent book Teaming with Microbes, also recommend adding a bit rock phosphate or kelp meal at this point to help the fungi grow and to give them something to attach to when they get mixed in the water. I use a fistful of kelp meal. Cover and wait for the white fuzzy fungi to grow.

After fungi have developed, add it to:

• 4 ½ gallons of chlorine-free water (let the bucket of water sit overnight, or just run the bubbler in it for a couple of hours before adding the compost. This will allow the chlorine gas to dissipate.)
• 2 Tablespoons of unsulfured molasses, honey, or fruit juice
• 2 Tablespoons liquid kelp
• 2 Tablespoons fish emulsion
• some more rock phosphate or kelp meal to provide substrate for fungi to grow on
• a cup of worm castings if you have them

Making AACT in a DIY Brewer

Here are the supplies you will need:

• two 5-gallon plastic buckets (one for brewing, one for straining into)
• two large aquarium air pumps (or one Eco Air 1 Pump)
  
• an old, 3-hole brick
• two large aquarium airstones (like “Top Fin” brand, 5-inch round airstone)
• about 8 feet of ¼ inch air hose (2  4-foot long pieces)
• a paint strainer for a 5-gallon bucket
  

To make your compost tea brewer, start by attaching the air hoses to the two large aquarium bubblers. I use one of those 3-hole bricks on the bottom of the bucket, set on its side, and I run the air hoses through the holes before attaching the airstones. This keeps the airstones from floating up or moving, without squashing the air hoses.

Run the hoses up and out the top, and down to the air pumps or the gang valve on the Eco Air 1. Put the bucket in a location that does not get direct sunlight (UV light kills the microbes) and is between about 60 and 80 degrees. I make mine in the garage.

Start your brew in the late afternoon or early evening, so that when it is ready in about 24 hours, you can spray it right away. This is because the microbes you have just grown are killed by strong ultraviolet light, and should be sprayed on the plants when the sun is low, so they have time to soak into the soil, and be taken up by the plant leaves before getting hit with sun in the morning.

Fill the bucket about ¾ full, and then run it without compost for 2 hours to dissipate any chlorine in the water. Take the compost you fed the baby cereal to four days ago, and gently crumble it between your hands down into the bucket.

Add the molasses or honey to feed the bacteria, add the kelp and fish emulsion to add micronutrients and protein for the bacteria, plug in the air pumps, and let the brew bubble for about 24 hours. 

When the tea is ready, take the other 5-gallon bucket, set the paint strainer over the lip, and pour the AACT through the strainer. 

There are several ways to spray it, but make sure that your spray is gentle. The fungal strands (‘hyphae”) are delicate living things, and getting shot out of a high pressure hose will break them up and kill them. I use a 1 1/2 gallon handpump sprayer that I got from the nursery if I'm spraying plant leaves, and a big watering can with a "rose" on the end for applying it to the soil.

The AACT should not smell bad. If it does, it means there was not enough oxygenation and the batch has gone anaerobic. Toss it out, and use more aeration in the next batch.

For more information about actively aerated compost tea, read Teaming with Microbes by Loewenfels and Lewis. It makes a wonderful wintertime read when you’re inside dreaming of next year’s vegetable garden.