How to Make Compost

Video Transcript

"I'm Bill Elzey with Showplace Lawns. We want to talk about making compost tea. Now, commercially we have nice machines that we can pour things in, and mixes it and run it, and does that for us. However you can make the same compost tea yourself by using a five gallon bucket, an aerator from a fish aquarium will work just fine. Place that in the bottom of that five gallon bucket. Always remember to plug it in so you have power. Then, fill your bucket up with five gallons of water. After the bucket is full, you want to turn the aerator on, you need to run that aerator in that water for twenty four hours. That's going to help purify that water, get out the chlorine and the things that are put in there, and get it a more pure water state, gets the salts and all the things out. Once that twenty four hour period is up, you bring your compost and put it in there as well. Now, compost can be turkey compost, dairy cattle compost, beef cattle compost, or any of the different styles of compost that are on the market today. You may even mix one or two of the composts together for a better more complete compost tea. Worm castings is also a good compost to use. Basically, you'll put that compost in an old pair of pantyhose or something of that nature, you will suspend it down in the water, so that the water will engulf it. Then you will mix two tablespoons of fish emulsion, one and a half tablespoons of humate, four ounces of molasses the horticulture variety, the amount of compost that you put in your pantyhose will be two pounds, mix that together, run that for another twenty four hours. At that point, take your compost out, squeeze it, get all the draining out of it that you can, run it for about another thirty minutes, and then you're ready to go. That is the simple version of making compost tea."