Smelly compost tea

[DHB]

I had a batch of compost tea that had just the slightest tinge of a bad odor, suggesting some level of anaerobic activity had started. I went ahead and used a little bit of it on my beefsteak tomato seedlings and bell pepper seedlings. I found out later I should have just dumped the stuff onto my compost pile and used a fresh batch. Lesson learned for the future, but if it was only slightly "bad," does anybody know if I've done real harm to my babies, or even made them unsafe to eat eventually, or will they probably be okay?

Thanks!

 

[Chuck]

You didn't hurt anything. Even bad compost tea is wonderful

 

[aquaticneko]

Does anyone know if compost tea is really worth it? I've been trying this for a while now and I seem to have mixed results. It's also like @DHB said it is rather smelly! What are you experiences with this? Any advice?

 

[Chuck]

Does anyone know if compost tea is really worth it? I've been trying this for a while now and I seem to have mixed results. It's also like @DHB said it is rather smelly! What are you experiences with this? Any advice?

Yes it is definitely worth it if made properly and by properly I mean aerated with the proper additives. With aerated compost tea you are adding not just nutrients but more importantly millions upon millions of micro-organisms that enable your plants to uptake those nutrients, break down the organic materials you should have in your soil and allow bacteria and fungi to turn those broken down materials into plant nutrients. Smelly? Not ever if properly made. It should have a sweet loamy odor. Just putting weeds and thistles and other organic materials into a bucket of water and letting it soak and rot for weeks is not compost tea, it is called leachate. It also has great benefits but not even close to actively aerated compost tea.

 

[DHB]

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Does anyone know if compost tea is really worth it? I've been trying this for a while now and I seem to have mixed results. It's also like @DHB said it is rather smelly! What are you experiences with this? Any advice?

I'm new to gardening, this being just my second year, but I did have some success my first go-round, and I've done a lot of reading. Compost tea shouldn't be smelly, first of all; if it gets smelly, it means there's some anaerobic (no oxygen) bacterial activity, which is generally bad. Done properly, it will just smell earthy, and the bacterial activity will have been strictly aerobic.

Compost is an easy way to add the vital NPK nutrients and microbes that plants need, and compost tea is simply a way to make those nutrients even more readily available to the plant, by mixing the compost with water. You can add molasses and put an air pump in, to stimulate the microbial action, or just put some compost in a bucket, fill it with water, and stir it up. The latter method just gets the nutrients into the water, without doing much to get the "good" microbes going. I did it that way, but then let it sit around too long (a couple of weeks), and that's why it got a bit smelly.

It's basically a weak fertilizer; you could make it stronger or weaker by increasing or decreasing the compost-to-water ratio, but since it's just organic matter and water, there's very little danger of "burning" your plants like you could easily do with synthetic fertilizers.