The Manure Tea Barrel

Here is our new manure tea barrel. The recipe is simple.  Fill the barrel about a quarter full of fresh manure from your animal of choice. We use alpaca dung. It is allegedly a 'cool' fertilizer; i.e. it will not burn plants when applied. Here it is very diluted so there is even less chance of harm. If you use another hot manure, like chicken poop some caution may be required. In our case,  the fresher the manure the less dung beetles will be crawling around inside the manure. We like the dung beetles because they bury the manure in the ground for you so we don't like to drown them.

55 gallon manure tea pot

Any barrel will do; we use a lot of the stuff so this 55 gallon drum is nice. We filter it once through a screen, then through cheesecloth into our sprayer - Then we just spray the stuff around the garden.

Garden after several fertilizer treatments

This is what one of our edible back door gardens looks like after several applications of the manure tea. Before everything was struggling in our heavy clay soil. 

The tomatoes after feeding on manure tea

 The tomatoes like the tea too. This plant here is over four feet tall after a few weeks of manure tea.

Potatoes love manure tea

I'm having a hard time keeping up with piling hay on the potatoes after fertilizing them with the manure tea. The stuff is truly magical; especially if you have marginal soil to begin with. It feels like cheating. Over time as the soil improves less fertilizing will be necessary. But for now, this stuff is really handy.