Worm Tea Easy Way – for Vegetables, House Plants and More

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If you Google worm tea or compost tea, you will find tons of articles about its benefits and how to make and use worm tea. I tried a lot of methods and came up with this simple one. It only requires a few ingredients and is super easy to make. You could make it every week and you wouldn’t consider it a burden.

Equipment we need: one 5 gallon bucket. 100 micro strainer insert for 5 gallon bucket. Air pump 40-60 gallon (at first I bought the “up to 10 gallon” pump and found it was not powerful enough and only has one outlet), tubing, air stones and ingredients (3/4 cup worm casting, 2 tbsp molasses, 2 tbsp humic acid (optional), 2 tbsp kelp meal (optional), 5 tbsp sea salt fertilizer (optional, some reviewer said it can be substituted by Himalaya pink salt)).

Put two air stones in the bucket; place the strainer in the bucket; fill the dechlorinated water just over the strainer net; put the ingredients in the strainer. Leave a small portion of the net uncovered so the extra air can escape.

It looks like this in the bucket.

Let it run for 5-6 hours. Afterwards, stop the pump, give the remainder of the contents in the strainer to your favorite plants (topdressing). Rinse off the air stones and the strainer. The tea is big ready to use!

Pour the worm tea into your watering can. If you have a lot of plants to cover, simply dilute the worm tea with 50% tea and 50% dechlorinated water. Water the whole plant with worm compost tea from the top, including the leaves. The leaves will absorb the nutrients and the beneficial microbes in worm tea might help protect plants from diseases.

What make this method “Easy Way” are:

1. It uses a strainer instead of other stuff like bags, pantyhose etc. Imagine that you need to clean the bag or pantyhose to reuse (EW!!) or throw it away (Not Green!!)
2. It only has to brew for 5-6 hours. I used to brew for 24 hours. I had to brew it in the garage (since it could rain at night) and had to clean stained garage floor afterwards. Then I read an article online that most of the stuff I’m trying to grow in my bucket will continue grow just fine in soil. 4-6 hours is long enough to wake them. So now I pick a fair day with no rain forecasted, set up the brewer on the deck (no need to clean afterwards) in the morning and give the tea to my plants after dinner. Quality wise, there is no difference between the 24 hour batch and the 5 hour batch.
3. It only requires five ingredients (3 of them are optional)! Easy to get and they seem to last forever. Works very well on all my plants: orchids, jasmine, bamboo, Japanese forest grass, lilies, fruit trees in container, vegetables, Hosta plants etc. They all responded very well. Here is an example.

The picture of this Grand Duke of Tuscany Jasmine was taken June 2nd, 2020. Just took it outside in full sun. Worm tea woke it up (noticed the new growth three days after applying worm tea). It started grow new branches, leaves and flower buds.

It then started to receive worm tea once per week. Here are the after pictures I took on July 11, 2020.

Never tried worm tea before? Only two ingredients are required to brewing worm tea! Worm casting (or compost if you have some) and molasses (can be substituted by brown sugar). Give it a try and you will love it.

Notes:

• The bag of the worm casting I’m currently using was purchased in August 2018 at local nursery (a little bit cheaper than Amazon). It’s been 2 years and worm casting is still viable. I store it in unheated garage (zone 5b).
• I used to use worm casting as fertilizer, for new plantings or topdressing established plants. It was really good. I went through 1 x 15lb bag and 3 x 30 lb bags in 5 years. Now looking back, It was a waste of money. Worm tea has everything worm casting offers, just much much cheaper.

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Update on Jan 5, 2021

In Winter, I only have indoor plants that need to be cared for– several orchid plants, three jasmine plants, a lemon tree, a kumquat tree, two loquat tree, a papaya tree, a fig tree and a bamboo plant. I don’t need 5 gallon bucketfuls of worm tea every time. In past years, I just quit worm tea brewing in Winter– it didn’t seem fair to my Winter fruit bearing plants. So I thought up an easier way to brew worm tea indoor– brew it in a water can!

Put soluble ingredients in 2 gallon water can: 2/5 tbsp molasses, 2/5 tbsp humic acid (optional), 2/5 tbsp sea salt fertilizer. Then 5 tbsp worm casting, 2/5 tbsp kelp meal (optional) in the tea infuser I purchased for this purpose. Brew it for 5-6 hours and apply.

As you can see, the tea infuser is very small and can only hold 4-5 tbsp of worm casting and kelp. For outdoor brewing, I used 3/4 cup of worm casting for a 5 gallon bucket. I didn’t know if it would work, but it did. I applied worm tea once a week to indoor plants for 5 weeks and all of them are doing great. Among them, the bamboo plant grew even better than it did outdoor, proving that the worm tea is working. For the bamboo plant, the whip shoots grow smaller than culms. It grew much slower indoor than in full sun outdoor. The worm tea woke up the bamboo. Now I have two whip shoots taller than the culms– the power of worm tea. This test means I put too much worm cast in my outdoor brewing bucket. I’ll do more testing in the Summer and update again.

Not ready to buy the tea infuser yet? We offer 4″x6″ cotton tea bags in our Amazon store which is perfect for brewing worm tea. Go to our “Free Gifts” page to order a free sample (free shipping too).