Rockydogg3 said:

Is it beneficial to use compost tea if using liquid nutes? Ffm trio

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What's your medium? If you want to do something organic I would include earth worm castings possibly.

2Bad said:

What's your medium? If you want to do something organic I would include earth worm castings possibly.

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Ffm ocean forest

Rockydogg3 said:

Ffm ocean forest

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I've never used it tbh i've done coco coir and bottle nutrients so far but i'm switching to this method tho. https://www.thcfarmer.com/threads/growing-with-gaia-green-shadeds-method.140538/

Someone else should stop in and help you soon. I don't think compost tea would do too much since fox farm trio will probably kill the microbials

2Bad said:

Someone else should stop in and help you soon. I don't think compost tea would do too much since fox farm trio will probably kill the microbials

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Thx, makes sense, just checking with the pros

Compost tea can be kind of a misnomer. Actual compost tea is primarily compost (and water) that you add sugar (most people use molasses) in order to feed the microorganisms in the compost to make a shit ton of them. This way if you only have limited amount of compost you can make a lot of microorganisms. (By itself compost doesn’t have a lot nutrients, so not really a fertilizer.) Growers add various ingredients like kelp, fulvic acids, and rock dust as “homes” for the microorganisms (a surface that they can attach to). And then finally you can add other ingredients that serve as long term MO food (organic fertilizer). But you really don’t need to add these organic fertilizers if these are already in your soil.

So 1) a lot of the store bought “teas” are primarily fertilizer with some Mycorrhizal fungi (which isn’t actually the same thing as compost fungi and bacteria). Some of this is good stuff, but a lot of just a marketing gimmick to sell over priced fertilizer.

2) to finally answer your question, the reason you want microorganisms in the first place is that they have a symbiotic relationship with the plant, breaking down the organic material in soil and converting it into plant available nutrients. If you’re using synthetic salt based fertilizers (which is the vast majority of store bought bottles) you don’t need microorganisms as these fertilizer are already “plant available”. So if you’re using synthetic ferts compost tea would have no benefit. And if you’re purchasing store teas, there’s a good chance that the microorganisms contained in them, won’t thrive in your environment (and once again just be a waste).

Here’s a little card one of my local shops used to have when they sold teas. But no reason to get fixated on ever ingredient. The most important ingredients is good compost (or EWC). If you don’t have compost, you can always just grab a couple cups of dark dirt from the woods.