How to Make Actively Aerated Compost Tea

Hey friends, Deanna here with Homestead & Chill and I'm here today to talk to you about something that I'm really excited about and I think you guys are going to love as well and that is actively aerated compost tea or also known as AACT. Aerated compost tea is something that we love to give to our garden in addition to using worm castings just straight in the beds. We actually aerate and make a tea out of the worm castings. I mean it vastly increases the already beneficial properties of worm castings and gives our garden a great nutritious natural feeding of sorts and I swear it's what contributes to a lot of the vitality and success in our garden. And so you don't have to use worm castings to make aerated compost tea. That is what we use. You can also use other forms of homemade compost and even if you don't have your own worm bin you can buy. There's usually like bags available at local nursery centers and things of worm castings that you can already make even though the stuff you make at home is going to be probably the strongest and most fresh and microbally active. So I'm going to show you what we do today on how to make actively aerated compost tea and if you don't have a worm bin set up already remember we already did do a couple of posts leading up to this one. So this is kind of the third part in the series of the vermicomposting that I've been sharing on the blog and on YouTube. So we already went over how to make a basic worm compost bin like a simple tote style bin so check that out if you haven't seen that already already and then we also just showed how to harvest castings to get them to this nice fine screened finished product once you're ready to harvest from your worm bin. So check those out and that's kind of leading up to now what to do with worm castings. So you can add worm castings straight to your garden beds that's great as well but as I mentioned when you add and you actively aerate the worm castings with bubblers and things and I'll talk more about these supplies in a moment, it vastly increases the microbial activity and the nutrients that are already in here so it's basically like taking your kick-ass worm castings and super charging them and making a aerated alive fertilizer for your plants. Worm castings are really great at enhancing nutrient uptake in plants, increasing their resistance to disease and drought and pests basically like an immune system booster for plants and it also helps with the soil properties so it increases soil moisture retention and drainage generation as well. So we love worm castings and then making worm tea is just one step further. So to go over some of the supplies that we have here today we obviously have our worm castings like I said you can use other supplies though or I mean other forms of compost and I will show a close-up of all this as well and then to actually make like tea bags that we're going to steep in these buckets we have a few different things. You could use cheesecloth that works as well we found that it's harder to reuse over and over though because it gets kind of funky and breaks apart sometimes. This is like a big tea sack that we made out of a burlap bag and then I just sewed it up and made a bag so we have that and then these are like paint strainers that you can get you know at any hardware store for keeping chunks out of paint and they make really good little tea bags as well and so we have bags that we're going to put our worm castings in. Obviously we've got some buckets over here and this is rainwater if you don't have access to capturing rainwater that's fine just try to use dechlorinated water if possible and so we have rainwater capture but if you use like tap water that has chlorine in it just put your buckets out in the in the sun for a day or two before you're going to make your compost tea and usually a lot of the chlorine will dissipate and burn off unless your municipal system uses chloramines those don't burn off quite the same.