Amazingly we have blogged for almost a season now and we haven't yet discussed our compost tea efforts in the past couple years. We have incorporated more and more organic fertilizer sources in the past 3 years and after a little bit of research and curiosity we decided to start brewing our own compost tea. There are a many who say there are few if any benefits to using compost tea, however there is an equal number of people who wholeheartedly stand behind it as an invaluable tool in their agronomic programs.
At the risk of over generalizing, the primary motivation with compost tea is to increase microbial populations in the soil. Some are attempting to increase fungal based microbes in to the soil to combat destructive turf diseases and lessen reliance on fungicides to fight them off. Others are more geared towards a bacteria based microbe that can fix nutrients in the soil and lessen a dependence on synthetic fertilizer sources. We would be in the latter group of tea brewers.
We just so happened to have an old RGF water recycling system that was installed (almost completely) when the course was built. The intent was to recycle the water used to wash equipment off, however it was never installed correctly and parts quickly became extinct for this particular machine and it has sat inoperable for many years. We took this as perfect opportunity to free up storage space and make use of something we already have!
Anyways, we modified it, rebuilt an old aerator pump from one of our lakes and vuola, we have a 250 gallon compost tea brewer. While it is a little different than most brewers you will find for sale, and louder than a 747 taking off, it certainly does the job.
For no more than $100 we modified our water tank trailer into a compost tea sprayer, which we still use in the winter for spot watering. The next step, which we are still working on, was to work out our recipe. Based on what we know and have read, this year we purchased 250 lbs of vermicompost from Full Circle Compost in Nevada.
They actually make a variety of different composts blended with a ton of different products and additives for the very purpose of brewing compost tea. Our particular blend contains vermicompost, seaweed, hydrolyzed fish, humates, mycorrhizal fungi, and paramagnetic rock dust. We are very pleased with our progress this year and hope to dial in our recipe further next year.
We failed miserably at producing our own vermicompost this spring, utilizing food scraps from the Grill at Legacy Ridge (no meat or dairy!), but we will give it another try this winter and see what we can come up with. If you have any questions about our tea program, please feel free to ask our staff members.
