Compost tea offers natural alternative to fertilizers

By SHARON STURDEVANT| Special to LakeLife
June 2008

Want a lush, healthy lawn around your lakefront home but have concerns about applying fertilizers and pesticides?

The answer, one area company says, may be sharing a gallon or two of compost tea with the grass.

"Applying compost tea brings the environment back to where the natural biological processes can work," said Dane Terrill, sales and marketing director for Flowerfield Enterprises, LLC.

The small Portage firm was formed decades ago by vermicomposting expert Mary Appelhof to publish her research into worms and sell products she created for using the critters to turn kitchen waste into compost.

"Mary was a real scientist and educator who was simply fascinated with worms and the environment," Flowerfield Enterprises owner Nancy Essex said. "She spent years researching worms but also wanted to share her knowledge and looked at other environmental ideas like compost tea".

Essex assumed ownership of the company after Appelhof died in May 2006, and started exploring ways to diversify the product line.

"I thought that compost tea might be the answer," Essex said.

The Search
Fast forward to late 2006 when Joe Miazgowicz walked into the single-story brown building on Shaver Road that houses Flowerfield Enterprises.

He was looking to buy some worms.

"I have always been interested in composting and had actually heard about compost tea during an NPR broadcast five years before when I was living in the San Diego area," he said. "I moved here in late 2005 and ended up living in Three Rivers with a really big garden. Now I had somewhere to play with the idea.

"But I needed compost to brew the tea."

Miazgowicz decided to try his hand at vermicomposting - or using worms to turn kitchen food waste into organic compost. He bought a used copy of "Worms Eat My Garbage", written to Mary Appelhof, to explain the process, and then searched the Internet looking for some worms to establish a bin. He found directions to Flowerfield Enterprises.

When I walked in here, I didn't know that it was where Mary Appelhof had worked," Miazgowicz said. "They didn't actually have any worms available but they were willing to answer questions and we talked about vermicomposting."

The conversation turned to compost tea.

"I had no job yet and so I offered to work and help them develop ideas about compost tea," Miazgowicz said.

So he signed up for symposiums about worms and workshops in Oregon with Elaine Ingham, a recognized authority on the soil food web and how compost tea can restore biological processes, and became the firm's compost tea brew master.

"My focus is to study compost tea and understand the science behind it," Miazgowicz said.

He also started refining ways to brew and apply compost tea.

The Science
Compost tea essentially is created by dissolving the rich organic matter formed during the composting process with water to form a liquid that can be sprayed to drench soil or cover foliage.

The process also involves pumping a steady supply of oxygen into the mixture during the "brewing" process so microscopic bacteria and fungi living in the compost multiply exponentially.

The microscopic organisms are the key.

To help people understand this point, Miazgowicz starts by explaining that one teaspoon of healthy soil contains hundreds of thousands of bacteria and fungi that help create a healthy soil food web for plants and trees.

He also tackles the general belief that root systems exist to gather food for plants.

"Photosynthesis actually creates the food a plant needs," he said. "About 30 percent of the food created by that photosynthesis process is actually used by the plant as it lives and grows. The rest of that food is sent out via the root system and the surfaces of the plant."

That extra plant food - a "cookie mix" with some carbohydrate and sugar molecules mixed with a few protein particles - sent out via the roots attracts aerobic organisms, like bacteria, to the plant, Miazgowicz said. Soil also contains anaerobic microorganisms that tend to carry pathogens and diseases and deplete oxygen levels.

The microscopic bacteria that thrive in oxygen-rich environments then deliver nitrogen that the plant needs.

"Nitrogen is actually one of the substances that property owners add to the lawn when using fertilizer," he said.

Applying nitrogen-rich fertilizers may temporarily meet the needs of the plant, Miazgowicz said.

"But the fertilizer also knocks out the natural system a plant has for feeding itself," Miazgowicz said. "It breaks the natural cycle so there is no longer a bridge between the plant and its environment."

Some of the water-soluble fertilizer left after an application also ends up pushed down the hiss, down the street and down into the lake when it rains, Miazgowicz says. The excess nitrogen and other nutrients can cause plants along the lakeshore and in the water to grow stronger.

"Then plants growing in a lake use up oxygen that fish and other animals need to thrive," Miazgowicz said.

"The plants also decompose eventually, helping to create algae and an anaerobic environment that depletes oxygen levels more."

Applying compost tea delivers bacteria that bring nitrogen to the plant without those excess nutrients that can filter down to the lakefront, Miazgowicz said.

"Compost tea is not a plant food," he said. "It is a soil food. It is a simple tool that helps to reestablish the complex environment."

It takes between 24 and 48 hours to brew each batch of compost tea.

"It takes that long for the next generation of microorganisms to breed," Miazgowicz said.

"And the tea has virtually no shelf life," Essex said. "It has to be applied within a few hours after aeration stops or the beneficial microorganisms die."

The Method
Workers don't don protective gear to apply compost tea. They don't use big trucks or heavy front loaders.

"We don't have to wear any bunny sits when applying compost tea," Terrill said. " We wear whatever clothing is appropriate for the weather."

The product is pumped from the brewing tanks into holding tanks on a truck, driven to the desired location and sprayed to drench soil in the lawn or cover the foliage surface of the tree or plant, Terrill said. The firm recommends that compost tea be applied four times each year.

The product works best when the first application is made during the fall so the microorganisms found in the tea can work beneath the winter snow to reproduce, Terrill said. Other applications are done in late spring, early summer and late summer.

The firm sells the compost tea for $5 per gallon. In general, 20 gallons of compost tea are needed to spray an acre of lawn. A property owner would need to purchase and spread between one and two cubic tons of compost to get a comparable benefit, Terrill said.

In the short term, it is a little more expensive to apply compost tea than traditional fertilizers and pesticides, but it costs less in the long run because the environment stays healthy," Terrill said.

Some of the product cost stems from the firms' decision to use compost - about eight quarts for every 250 gallons of compost tea brewed - shipped in from Alaska where 10,000-year-old compost is removed to accommodate new buildings.

"We've tried creating different compost tea recipes," Miazgowicz said. "We also monitor what we are doing with a microscope so we can ensure there is an aerobic composition in the tea."

But the firm has not yet located a local source that produces a rich, diverse organic compost, Miazgowicz said.

"Just like so many other industries, we want to use local products," he said. "We want to put Michigan biology into the compost tea since they prefer the environment that we have here."

Terrill and the rest of the small staff at Flowerfield Enterprises are trying to educate people about the benefits of compost tea by distributing informational sheets to lake associations and presenting educational seminars at various environmental association meetings.

"We are trying to help people understand that Mother Nature works," Terrill said. "She creates healthy plants and environments. She can support herself if we, as humans, don't screw up the process."

source: LakeLife
photos: MERISSA FERGUSON

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