Not Miss Bell’s Sweet Tea…

…but your turnip greens and all your other veggies will LOVE it! :-)…It’s chicken manure tea!

If you aren’t familiar with the song, it’s Good Directions by Billy Currington:

Lyrics | Billy Currington lyrics

Anyway, manure tea is how I fertilize! I have chickens so it’s free and easy to make…if you don’t mind the “aroma” while it’s brewing. Manure tea is a great liquid fertilizer, an “energy drink” for your plants. I water my seedlings with it after they develop their second set of leaves, I soak the roots of my transplants in it before planting and I give them another drink when the plants begin to bloom.

Here is the recipe:

Get a 5 gallon bucket and fill it one third with cured chicken or other manure. Fill the bucket with water and give everything a stir. Set it out in the sun for three days, giving it a stir each day.

I‘m using an old plastic wheelbarrow as a tub since a 5 gallon bucket doesn’t produce enough at one time for me.

At the end of three days,pour the liquid into another 5 gallon bucket, straining through a piece of screen, or loosely woven fabric or anything else that will act as a sieve for you to keep the solids back. I’m using the top to an old fire pit…which I am repurposing.

Pour the tea concentrate through the sieve

and then dilute the concentrate to the look of “sweet tea”. It’s now ready to serve…no ice needed! :-)

Save the leftover solids, they still have lots of nutrients left, to put into your lasagna beds or compost pile.

Today was a major manure day around here! My oldest son and his fiance are the barn managers at Double C stables, so I have access to ALOT of horse manure! After they cleaned out their paddocks, they gave me 3 dump truck loads of manure, soil hay mixture. My son brought the tractor over and spread the mixture over the lasagna beds that I’m starting.

It sure beats using the wheelbarrow! It would have taken me weeks to do what he did in an hour! Beautiful! Thank you Steven!!!

 

And here is my bonus:

Many, many of nature’s tillers, earthworms! They are wonderful at preparing the ground!

I’ll leave you with something prettier to look at, I gave my large clay tipsy planter a make-over.

Before:

I sprayed 3 new smaller clay pots with sealer to help hold in the moisture.

I put it together the same way as I put together my smaller Tipsy Planter. Now it looks like this:

Happy Gardening!

Sharing my tea recipe here: