Actively Aerated Compost Tea Kits

Using fresh fungally-rich vermicast, and adding quality natural ingredients, makes this tea an exceptional boost over other compost teas!

Tea Kits for Sale

Each kit includes a water treatment capsule (dissolvable & compostable) to safely and quickly treat the appropriate volume of water for the kit.

5-gallon balanced vermicast tea kit: $12

5-gallon balanced vermicast tea kit, without fish hydrolysate: $11

Hydrolyzed fish proteins are a potent microbial boost, but can smell. If you're brewing indoors and/or are sensitive to odors, you may want this tea instead.

50-gallon kit: $ 80.00

Tea brewing instructions

Aerated Compost Tea: the tradition, the hype, and the science

I've used aerated tea for years now, and offering tea kits has been very popular and I'm super excited to make them available! A quality aerated compost tea takes a balance of quality ingredients that can be hard to obtain, so having a good ingredient kit makes this wonderful soil amendment available easily to gardeners. It's highly perishable though, which is why I don't sell pre-prepared tea: it just wouldn't be healthy after any time in storage so if you see it on a shelf, don't fall for it! I've seen really great results with aerated teas in my plants and garden. Actively Aerated Compost Tea, or AACT, is a time-tested method for growing up the beneficial microbes in compost quickly and into a medium (water) so that it can be applied easily. The science on AACT is catching up quickly, and my kits reflect what we've learned in the lab. For example contrary to "conventional wisdom," molasses or other processed sugars are likely not the best "food" for compost microbes. Oh they work, and work well, that's the nature of highly refined sugars after all! What we've learned though is that it is mainly only a modest cohort of strains of beneficial bacteria that grow super quickly and out-compete some of the other complementary organisms that we also want to grow. If your needs are strictly for annuals, for example in a vegetable garden, an optional modest molasses addition is described in the instructions.

My kits follow newer protocols developed by Dr. Elaine Ingham and others; it uses the natural but more complex sugars in things like alfalfa and oats. This cultivates a more balanced tea and also does not support the potential explosive growth of pathogens like refined sugars can. Attention to this detail also "flattens" the growth trajectory so that more oxygen is more available throughout the growth cycle, and adds more foods for the critical fungal elements that grow more slowly than the opportunistic bacteria. These kits will brew a tea balanced between bacteria, protozoa and fungi.

My kits also provide you an easy, safe, and natural way to neutralize chlorine and chloramine in municipal water to make it safe for your microbes! People in the compost and especially the compost tea communities often get the science flat-out wrong on water treatment, so let me soapbox for a moment.

Myth: by letting your water sit out for a day, exposing to sunlight, or aerating it, you can neutralize the chlorine in water.

Fact: this was true... decades ago. But today many municipalities in the developed world also add chloramine which is longer-acting and more stable, if not quite as potent. This is great because it allows lower chlorine levels overall, but it means that you must take more active steps to neutralize it.

Luckily, a basic understanding of chemistry makes this neutralization pretty straightforward. Your kit comes with a neutralizer capsule and instructions, but because I'm in this for the education and saving the world I'll spoil the surprise and share that it's just carefully-measured natural Vitamin C (citric acid). I measure out a tiny amount that will almost instantly neutralize the chlorine and chloramine in municipal water supplies and leave no harmful residue.

Easy, safe and natural courtesy of science (and the aquaponics community who turned me on to this technique).

Contact me to ask questions or arrange a purchase!