Please check my thinking here....
This plan is "general" to help me check my understanding of the compost tea process.
I know I'll have to make daily adjustments based on weather, plants, etc.
Assume I'm growing 18 outdoor trees in 100-gallon soil bags, with lots of pumice etc.
I want a 3-day cycle for each set of (6) plants: feed, skip water; feed, skip, water; etc
For the season, I feed with 3 kinds of compost tea: Veggy, Combo, and Bloom
Day 1: Feed set A, Water set B, Skip set C.
Day 2: Skip set A, Feed set B, Water set C.
Day 3: Water set A, Skip set B, Feed set C.
Day 4: repeat "day 1" ... etc etc etc ... feed/skip/water/feed/skip/water....
I need to have (4) gallons of 48-hour bubbled tea every day, starting 15-JUL.
I need (3) 5-gallon buckets. always running, with pumps and airstones.
I dilute each tea by adding 1.25 water per gallon of tea.
My schedule below lists amount of tea needed, before diluting.
SCHEDULE for Northern Cali:
Start (2) gallons VEGGY brewing every day from 12-MAY >> 14-JUL
Start (4) gallons VEGGY brewing every day from 15-JUL >> 15-SEP
Start (4) gallons COMBO brewing every day from 16-SEP >> 15-OCT
Start (4) gallons BLOOM brewing every day from 16-OCT >> 15-NOV
Harvest in late November after 10+ days of just water.
So, every 3 days, each plant gets 2/3 of a gallon of tea plus a gallon of water. I could have just said that, sorry. Then they skip a day, and then another gallon of water on the 3rd day.
Sooo are you talking Aerated Compost Tea (ACT) or a nutrient tea? Because they are not the same thing. ACT's are for microbial activity - in fact if you load them up with nutrients, you can kill off your microbial population in the tea. You should never mix an ACT with fertilizer or have a high NPK content in your ACT - all they should have is microbial food sources.
Do you have the capacity to brew a tea for all of them at once, I would really look into that, you'll drive yourself nuts with all the work you're going to do brewing teas every day and whatnot
Yes, ACT, bubbling in just TWO buckets using a (Hydrofarm AAPA15L 6-Watt 15-LPM Active Aqua Air Pump with 4 Outlets). And then no fox farm, miracle gro, etc etc.
And I could brew all at once... but I kinda like looking at them every morning. Setting up another 4.5 gallon brew should be pretty simple if I've pre-mixed the materials. Just empty a 5G bucket for 6 plants, refill with water, add the materials, and borrow half a cup from the other brew to get the party started.
Here's a link to the compost Brewers manual by Elaine ingham. Give it a read if you haven't already. Nice looking recipe, good call on the low amount of kelp.
Great article. While I'd been thinking of the cool nutrients the good organisms provide, there is much more to the story. Saturating the soil with good organisms denies space, food, and even some air to the bad organisms. The plants thus have time and fuel to grow stronger, so when smaller amounts of weaker, bad organisms eventually arrive, they find plants who are stronger than they would have otherwise been. Even if foliar sprayed microbes don't do much to feed the plants, they can do the same thing: denying space and food to the bad guys -- while also making the leaves less attractive to larger pests.
"... five gallons of tea to the acre ... every one to two weeks through a disease infection period give excellent protection of plant surfaces. ..."