Bring Your Soil To Life
Brewing Guides
Learning to brew compost tea is one of the most valuable skills a grower can develop. Done right, a quality compost tea can transform your soil, strengthen your plants, and reduce your dependence on synthetic inputs — all from ingredients you can source locally.
We spent decades refining our recipes and methods, working with home growers, commercial farmers, cannabis cultivators, ranchers, and landscape contractors across the country and around the world. Everything we learned is going into these guides.
What's Coming
The Basic Brew
Everything you need to get started. Equipment, water preparation, aeration, temperatures, brew times, and how to know when your tea is ready. We will cover what to look for, what to smell for, and the most common mistakes that kill a batch before it starts.
Crop-Specific Recipes
Not every plant needs the same tea. We will break down formulas for vegetable gardens, cannabis cultivation, orchards and vineyards, pasture and rangeland, and landscape applications. Each recipe is built around the biology that specific crop needs to thrive.
Understanding Your Ingredients
Worm castings, alfalfa, kelp, humic acid, fish emulsion, mycorrhizal inoculants, Alaskan forest humus — we will go deep on what each ingredient does at the biological level, why quality matters, and how to source what you need.
Equipment Guide
From five-gallon bucket setups for the home grower to larger systems for commercial operations, we will cover what works, what doesn't, and what to look for when you're buying gear. Affiliate links to our recommended equipment will be here as well.
Troubleshooting
Bad smell, cloudy water, no foam, weak results — we will cover the most common problems and how to fix them, including how to read your tea under a microscope if you want to go that deep.
Advanced Techniques
Fungal dominant teas, bacterial dominant teas, foliar applications, soil drenches, timing applications to plant growth cycles, and how to adjust your formulas based on what your soil tests are telling you.
Content is being added regularly. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook so you don't miss new guides as they drop.
In the meantime, visit the Soil Food Web page to understand the biology behind why compost teas work — it will make everything in these guides make more sense.