Compost teas to the rescue

If you have grown anything before you have no doubt gotten the sense of satisfaction from it, and possibly some of the dismay when plants simply do not grow well. For new gardeners, over fertilizing and/or over watering are the primary causes of poor yields, and it is easy to fall into a vicious cycle, which all too often leads to a would be gardener simply giving up.

So here is what that vicious cycle looks like broken down, to help new gardeners avoid it... Hopefully.

The cycle starts when plants don't appear to be performing well, which could be for a variety of reasons. The typical reaction is to add fertilizer and water, often in excess, which only slows plant growth further which in turn leads to even more extreme measures, like more potent fertilizers.

When growing plants in soil, it is imperative to remember you are not simply growing a plant. You also need to maintain the colonies of fungus and bacteria that the plant has symbiotic relationships with. Without these microbial colonies, plants can not process many of the nutrients they need, and have limited access to the nutrients they can process directly.

So, to get healthy plants, you need healthy soil that is full of microbial life. Chances are your soil has at least some of the microbes necessary, but they may be struggling to survive due to too much water and higher salt and nutrient concentrations.

As a result, the soil's PH level gets outside the range in which the microbes can breakdown the nutrients they need, and as a result of that, they are not breaking down nutrients into a form the plant can use directly.

Now, to get out of this vicious cycle.

• First step. STOP WATERING.
Let the soil dry out to the point where picking up a potted plant feels almost as light as an equal sized pot full of dry soil. Depending on the pot's size this could take 3 to 14 days. You can still mist your plants leaves and topsoil occasionally, just don't saturate the soil.

• Second step. REINFORCE THE MICROBIAL COLONY
As mentioned, you likely have at least some of the beneficial microbes your plant needs, but until recently it's just been too wet for them to work on feeding your plant. Now that the environment has dried out a bit, it's a good time to work on increasing the size of the microbial population. A good way to do that is with compost teas, possibly adding a microbial inoculation, to ensure you have the various types of fungus and bacteria your plant needs.

Here is a basic compost tea recipe I use once a month, or roughly every 3rd or 4th weekly watering. I came across a recipe that made 5 gallons a long time ago, and have forgotten the original source, but I prefer to not store it long term, and only need small amounts so I reduced the recipe to roughly 1/3 gallon. You can easily double the amounts as needed

Small batch compost tea recipe

• 0.3125 gals of water, rounded to 1/3 gallon which is 5 cups or 1.2 liters.

If you can get aquarium water, that may also introduce some beneficial microbes and it will provide an accessible nitrogen source.

• 2 tablespoons of worm castings.
• 1/3 teaspoon liquid or powdered kelp
• 1/3 teaspoon un-sulphered molasses (black-strap preferred)
• Microbial inoculate (OPTIONAL, apply as directed)

Compost teas like the one above, contain nutrients plants can use directly and food for the microbial life your plantts rely on. The optional inoculate will help to increase their numbers and variety

Keep in mind this recipe initially yielded 5 gallons, and amounts needn't be exact. Using 1/2 teaspoon of kelp, or even a full teaspoon of molasses is not going to kill anything as these are all mild and somewhat slow to release nutrient sources.


Once these ingredients are combined, many people swear by using an aquarium fish pump to aireate the tea for a day or more to increase the oxygen levels in the water, and give the micobes a chance to esatblish a colony prior to applying the tea. Personally, I make mine in a 2 liter bottle, which fills it by about 2/3rds. I make it a day ahead and occasionally remove the cap for a moment, put it back on tightly and give it a good shaking for about a minute. Maybe do this 3 or 4 times, and a final extremely vigorous shaking session prior to pouring over your soil.


You can also tailor this basic recipe based on what stage of growth your plants are in, either vegetative or reproductive

Optional compost tea ingredients during vegetative growth

• More worm castings.

You can double or even triple the amount of worm castings since they are a natural nutrient source that is practically impossible to overdose. In fact you can grow most plants directly in pure worm castings if you add something to help with drainage.

• Seabird, or insect eating bat guano.

Roughly 1/3 to possibly 1 full teaspoon for this recipe. Provides more macro-nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorous, along with some of the trace elements that are necessary for plant growth.

Optional compost tea ingredients during reproductive growth

• Seabird, or fruit eating bat guano.

Again, roughly 1/3 to possibly 1 full teaspoon for this recipe. Bats that eat fruit produce guano that is higher in phosphorous, which is ideal for flowering and fruiting plants.

• Trace element supplements.(apply as directed)

Besides the macro-nutrients (Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium) plants also need the micro-nutrients, which is short for a lot of other elements, like iron, calcium, magnesium, copper. Even some of the more obscure elements like beryllium or cobalt play an important role. Your plants don't need much of these trace elements, but they do need some since they are vital in the chemical interactions the plants and microbes use to feed themselves.

In closing, I would just like to give all home gardeners pat on the back. Whatever your reasons are for gardening, you could certainly be doing worse things with your time.

Your plants can tell time

We dont often think about plants having a sense of time, but in fact they do. Granted they aren't as concerned over a few minutes as we humans are, but they are surprisingly aware of what time it is.

Humans have been looking up and judging the time of day based on the position of the sun for eons. Plants aren't so concerned with the time of day, they have no busses to catch or parties to attend. But plants do determine what time of year it is based on the duration of daylight and other tell tales signs of the season.

Besides the length of the day, sunlight itself is slightly different depending on the season. Another clue is the temprature, and range between high and low temps throughout the day and of course humidity levels fluxuate too. Plants evolved to notice all these things and respond accordingly.

As the days get gradually longer during Spring, the overall average temp and humidity also increase, and the amount of blue light from the sun's spectrum starts to decrease slightly. Plants respond accordingly by focusing on vegative growth.

Then of course the opposite happens as Fall approaches, days get shorter and cooler however the sunlight still has less blue spectrum than it did in the Spring.

This is all someting to consider when gardening indoors. With just a couple timers you can easily recreate the light cycles, for a vegative grow area and a flowering fruiting area, but to fully recreate these seasonal enviroments you also need to consider temps, humidity and the lights spectrum.

To trigger Spring like vegatative growth, you will want lights with more blue spectrum, generally higher humidity , and ideally, allow temps to flucuate by around 10 degrees farenheit between "day" and "night".

To trigger Fall like reproductive growth you will want lights with more red spectrum, lower humidity, slightly lower average temps, and a smaller temprature range between daytime highs and lows. With daylight cycles of 10 - 12 hours, your plants will be thoroughly convinced it is time to focus on reproduction and produce the fruit, flowers and seed they do in nature.

Brighter light is not always better for gardening

Today, in early 2013, if you've searched the INTERNET for information on lighting for indoor gardens, you have no doubt read the opinions of a lot of people. While much of what you read may be true, there are a lot of preconceptions that are quite simply dead wrong.

These incorrect presumptions about how light and plants interact continue to prevail simply because at first glance it makes sense, and more and more people share their "knowledge". Such is the case with the myth that a brighter light is always better for growing plants. To set the record straight, higher wattage bulbs DOES NOT ensure bigger plants, and here is why.

We typically measure brightness in "lumens", and one lumen is about as bright as a candle flame. This is an indicator of how much white light is produced, and it is in fact a useful number when determining the lighting needs of humans, but often people forget that white light is actually a combination of all the colors of the rainbow.

The human eye makes use of the wavelengths between 350 and 900 nanometers (nm), commonly called the "full visible spectrum". By comparison, plants have evolved using only about half of the visible spectrum, in 2 sections. The blue region of the spectrum around 400 - 520 nm, and the red region, 610 - 720 nm.

In addition to length of day/night periods, plants detect the amount of red or blue in the light they receive to help them determine what season it is. In fact natural sunlight has slightly more blue in it during the spring and decreases as fall approaches. Plants naturally assume they should be growing when the light is blue dominant, and flowering when it is red dominant.

In the case of actually growing plants indoors, while High Pressure Sodium (HPS), Metal Halide (MH) and florescent lighting will almost always be much brighter to the human eye, much of the lights output is wasted, converting electricity to visible light that is outside the red and blue ranges your plants can actually use.

To further confuse home gardeners, many lighting manufacturers and retailers compare various lighting solutions by calculating the watts consumed divided by the output measured in lumens. This is fine way to measure light efficiency for humans, but is quite misleading when to comes to gardening.

Because the light generated by LED grow lights contains only portions of the light spectrum plants actually use they typically create purple light that to the human eye appears dimmer when compared to the same wattage using full white LEDs. This is the time to not believe your eyes. Brighter is not always better.

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A historic look at lighting and the LED lighting revolution.

One of the earliest known functional light bulbs was lit way back in the year 1802, by a man named Humphry Davy. The principles behind incandescent lighting had been known possibly as early as the 1760s, shortly after electricity was discovered. In a nutshell, by running electrical current through a conductor encased in a gas filled or vacuumed transparent globe of glass you create an incandescent light bulb.

Using a platinum filament, and inefficient vacuum pumps, the first lights were pretty dim, and burnt out quickly, but it was the first step of a journey that continues today, over 2 centuries later. The pursuit of efficient lighting.

33 years later, in 1835, an inventor named James Lindsay had improved upon Davey's design so that he could "read a book at a distance of one and a half feet", which is roughly equivalent to a candle flame, producing about 1 lumen. Another 20 years later in 1855, the first florescent lights were developed, but they were too expensive to produce, dim and didn't last long enough to be practical.

Finally, after another 24 years, in 1879 Thomas Edison perfects his methods, leading to a commercially available incandescent lamp for home use, however, similarities to other already patented methods would result in 10 years of litigations for him, which he eventually won. Contrary to popular belief, Edison did not simply invent the light bulb, he actually purchased the patent rights to a variety of methods developed by others, and then went to work on determining and combining the to most effective aspects of each.

All of these incandescent bulbs, including those made today are simply very inefficient at the task of converting electricity into visible light, wasting the majority of the power they consume generating infra-red light, aka heat. Even today's incandescent bulbs are estimated to be only 2-3% efficient, wasting as much as 98% of the energy they consume.

Then in 1895, 16 years after Edison's breakthrough, the first commercially available florescent lighting was produced, by one of Edison's former employees, a man named Daniel Moore . By 1904, Moore was producing fluorescent tubes that were far more efficient than the more popular Edison type bulb. They lasted longer and they produced a more "natural" light.

It was Moore's breakthrough that motivated General Electric to continue researching new ways to improve the efficiency and lifespan of their incandescent bulbs, although they are still a long way off even today. Despite their inefficient use of electricity and shorter life spans, the lower manufacturing costs of incandescent lighting made them the preferred choice for most consumers for the following 100 years.

Another 16 years after Moore's breakthrough, the first light emitting diodes, or LEDs were produced, although "Light" is potentially misleading at this point, since no visible light was produced, only infra-red. It wasn't until 1961-62 that LEDs finally produced visible light.

By 1972, the brightness and efficiency of LED lights had improved 10 fold in just 10 years, but still were not considered bright enough for home lighting applications and primarly used for electronic signs and indicator lights.

Fast forward to the year 2013 and surprisingly we still have incandescent lighting very similar to those made 137 years ago, although much of the world is phasing them out. Todays incandescent bulbs can produce 800 lumens of light using 60 watts of power, or about 13 lumens per watt. This is a tremendous improvement over the incandescent lights made over 200 years ago, but is still nowhere near as efficient as today's fluorescent lighting, such as the compact fluorescent lights (CFL) which are roughly 4 times as efficient as today's incandescents, consuming only 15 watts to create that same 800 lumens.

But today, the big winner in the realm of efficient lighting is the light emitting diode (LED), which is roughly 10 times as efficient as incandescent, and twice as efficient as CFLs. Using as little as 6 watts while producing that same 800 lumens. Some LED lights can use as little as 10% of the energy and last up to 20 times as long when compared to incandescence bulbs,

Even still, many people seem reluctant to start using them due to their higher initial costs when compared to CFL. In most cases, switching to LED lighting pays for itself within a couple of years, well within their typical 5 to 6 year lifespans.

Add to that, unlike incandescent or CFL lighting, LED lights can be tailored to produce specific wavelengths of light, and then combined to create lights for specific needs. A red and blue mix for example is ideal for indoor gardening, or a white and blue mix for operating rooms and similar environments, where seeing tiny details is crucial and a white red mix for general lighting.

UPDATE: Below is a short yet informative video which explains the basic physics behind the various types of light bulbs. ENJOY!