Manure Tea

I have just had my first attempt at manure tea on my garden. Lots of research I did on organic gardening all seems to talk about manure tea and compost tea and the huge benefits to the soil. Putting something back for getting something out of soil - keeping everything in balance, so I decided to have a go. My first thing was to find out the difference between compost tea and manure tea. Well the obvious is one uses manure one compost. Some of the information I looked at seemed to say that if you don't use aerators for compost tea not only would the good bacteria die off but you will increase the bad bacteria. None of the information I found on manure tea even talked about aerating beyond just agitating the manure tea a couple of times a day - so this made my decision for me, plus the fact that my compost heap is yet to yield compost yet. I used the following

1 part Compost or Manure to 10 Parts water
Brew for a week
agitate daily
Dilute the concentrate at 1 part Tea to 4 parts water

I got this from the Gardening Australia website:
http://www.abc.net.au/gardening/stories/s2002063.htm

I love this website because not only can you watch the show but it is one of the few websites I have found that even if you miss the show all the information including transcripts are on the website for free.

Here is the summary of my first attempt

Wednesday 4/9/07 20 litres of water left open to evaporate off chlorine
Thursday 5/9/07 2 litres Cow Manure in Hessian bag added
Wednesday 12/09/2007 1.5 Ltr Tea topped up to 9Ltrs with water on all Fruit/vegetables/herbs
left over poured straight onto empty bed 1
NB To much in total - reduce to 10 litres starting water

1.5ltrs of tea to 9 ltrs of water isn't exactly 1:4 but it was easier to measure out than 1.8 ltrs ( I must get some measuring cups and jugs for the garden) but I decided to err on the side of caution for my first go. As you can see the 20lts was also to much and I can't seem to find out how long you can keep the stuff for - I am planning to do this once a week on a Wednesdays - ( The day I am down to only one helpful munchkin, cause the top three are at school and number four is at kindy, much easier to deal with yucky manure with only one!!) so I will just do 10 litres and see how that goes. - Will keep updating