A New Kind of Tea

Like any good southerner, I would enjoy a nice cold glass of sweet tea after a morning of installing garden beds in the hot sun. On cold winter afternoons I love to curl up with a hot mug of peppermint tea. When I'm feeling a little crazy I might even go for some chai.

Well, today Anne and I had an adventure with a new kind of tea. Loose leaf? Maybe, but it's made with what used to be leaves rather than what is still in its leaf-like state today. Where tea leaves are usually dried, our experimental leaves were, well, decomposed. What exactly were we doing? We were exploring the art of brewing tea for our plant friends.

Being inclined to have my tea sweetened with honey rather than rice hulls, I think I will leave it to the vegetables to do a taste test.

Here's how we made compost tea:






Step One: Get compost














Step Two: Find cheesecloth (at Market Basket it is located above the hot dogs in the refrigerator section), soybean meal (in lieu of aloe or yuca extract), and fish emulsion (a brown, lumpy, fishy smelling liquid fertilizer that shows up at GCG more often than you would wish for)







Step Three: Fill a bucket with water and place an air pump in the bottom to ensure good percolation
















Step four: Suspend a cheesecloth teabag filled with compost into bucket with water, soybean meal, fish emulsion, pump, and sit back and enjoy your handiwork. (As you can see, Anne knows this tea is where it's at!)