Quick Compost Tea!

Extend your compost —make into a liquid fertilizer.

Here’s your Home-made Recipe for Compost Extract Tea

Revised Jan 25, 2026

This is a wonderful nourishing tea for your plants & soil when you do not have time or equipment to do a “24 hr bubble brew” of actively aerated compost tea…or when you only have a little compost and a lot of crops to feed.

It’s quick, but rich with microbes, dissolved minerals, and microbe foods. I call it Enhanced Compost Extract Tea, or Muddy Slurry Tea, or Compost Leachate Tea.  

You’ll need 

• a clean 5-gallon bucket

• de-chlorinated or un-chlorinated water 

• compost—mature worm castings, or finished and high-quality pile compost

• sugar

• Maxicrop soluble seaweed powder Available HERE

Place 4 level cups of compost into the bucket (ideally first into tea bag of cloth or mesh, such as a paint strainer bag).

Add 4 gallons of de-chlorinated or un-chlorinated water

Add sugar:  choose one: 1 level cup of white cane sugar or ¾ level cup of brown sugar or 1 cup liquid molasses or ½ level cup of granulated molasses.  

Add 4 level teaspoons Maxicrop after pre-mixing it with a little water in a separate container

Stir with stick or non-aluminum spoon, or massage the tea bag for a few minutes. You can strain and apply in 30 minutes, or you can breed even more beneficial microbes by letting it steep for up to 5 hours (not longer!).  Stir occasionally while steeping.  This is assuming air temps from 50F—75F.

Then remove tea bag.

To apply:  scoop and pour, or use a watering can.  This tea is difficult to strain clear enough for a nozzle of a pump sprayer. 

You’ve just created a liquid that boosts soil health and plant vigor. 

Use remaining solids as a mulch.

Make a batch every 2 weeks & apply.  Now…for more plant nutrition, consider using this with Fish the Flats, Fish the Crops recipe

Packets with instructions HERE