Worm Tea to Nourish Your Plants

Author Ellen Vande Visse

Teas # 1:

Worm Tea to Nourish Your Plants

In a typical worm bin, red wiggler worms digest and decompose kitchen waste, damp newspaper strips, and other organic matter. The red wigglers poop, and these accumulated “castings” are the vermi- compost. This product is a wet, crumbly, organic material. It is sweet-smelling and loaded with minerals and microbes. It’s very much like your finished compost from your outdoor compost heap, but vermi- compost is reported to contain somewhat higher populations of beneficial soil microbes per cupful.

Make your worm tea from two sources:

1. LIQUID: the leachate or excess liquid that drains from a worm bin faucet—also called worm juice or worm pee. Dilute with about 4 parts water and feed your plants with drench and foliar applications.

2. SOLIDS: the worm castings mixed with water to make a tea. Caution: make sure that the castings or worm compost that you harvest is well-matured, rather than a mix of partly- digested waste. Use de-chlorinated water. Simply scoop enough vermi-compost into a 5 gallon bucket to fill it about 1/5 full. Now top off the bucket with water and stir. You’ve made a muddy slurry. Ladle this slurry onto your garden beds as a drench. Or strain this bucketful of slurry, pour into a watering can, and apply as a foliar feed.

So enjoy nourishing your plants with vermi-tea’s supply of minerals and microbes.
contains a fraction of the beneficial microbes compared to actively aerated compost tea, it is an excellent home-made fertilizer. I love feeding my hungry garden plants a boost of nutrients in July and then again in August with worm tea.