What's the deal with anaerobic teas?...

Letting plants like nettles & mallow soak in a 5gal bucket of water for a week, 2 weeks, a month or more in non-aerated stagnant water.

How do I know if the "tea" is OK or not to pour into the soil? Are there any signs to look out for indicating the stuff would be detrimental to soil/plants?

It just seems like there would be a tremendous amount of "bad" bacteria and other undesirable nasties from such a concoction of stagnant water & rotting plants & zero oxygen.


I placed some shredded nettles & mallow in a 5gal bucket of water a while back. I was initially planning on using the "tea" after 10 to 14 days just to give my soil some stuff early in the season....but I honestly forgot about the thing. It's been somewhere around a month at this point.

Is it still OK to use or should I just toss it out & pour it into the yard waste heap in the corner of my yard?


I'm just trying to understand the whole anaerobic tea thing, when the impression I get is that in general anaerobic=bad for a healthy soil & harmful to roots.




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Hi Organilush,
I, like you, was wondering about this very topic a while ago and studied it pretty hard. Some new studies are suggesting that anaerobic microbes play a vital role in soil health. Hopefully Microbeman can enlighten us further.
My season is finishing up here but l have used a weed tea, that’s a year old, straight and watered down, on plants with no adverse effects. It’s black, but not smelly and obviously full of plant available nutrients.
Cheers,
40.

I am by no means an expert, just someone who likes to play and has a basic background in this sort of thing.

The problem with any teas, anaerobic or aerobic, is that no one can really tell you what is going to be in there. Sometimes there might be something “bad” in your mix even though you did everything right.

Im personally not super concerned with “bad” guys. The more important thing is biodiversity, so that no one group can dominate your soil. Everybody is in competition with each other, and many have their own niches. The benefit from teas is not only inoculating your substrate, but also the numerous chemicals (organic acids, amino acids, hormones, antibiotics, etc) that these organisms dump into the brew.

Something a lot of people over look is that when you apply a tea, there are millions of dead or soon to be dead organisms in the mix. Any obligate anaerobes are going to be killed off unless they find an anaerobic pocket in your soil. If you’re someone who tends to over water, you may want to reconsider anaerobic teas.

I would also like to suggest that sometimes I add anaerobic inputs to my aerobic teas. When I was in university we visited a sewage treatment plant. Their system alternated between aerobic and anaerobic conditions, which caused a die off and bloom of new organisms each time the switch was made. The sediment (dead bodies) were filtered each time, eventually reducing nutrient levels to negligible.

Also JADAM covers anaerobic fermentations on page 130. The full book can be found here:

https://future4200.com/uploads/default/original/2X/e/e940152ae5e68aa1eafb5f3873da7ee53ab5829c.pdf

Hookahhead said:

Also JADAM covers anaerobic fermentations on page 130. The full book can be found here:

https://future4200.com/uploads/default/original/2X/e/e940152ae5e68aa1eafb5f3873da7ee53ab5829c.pdf

Click to expand...

Thanks for sharing this buddy.

So I still have this bucket lol .

Originally a bunch of nettles and some mallow along with thick mallow stalks. It's been around at least 2.5 months at this point. Never removed/filtered off the plant material. When it started it was around 60 during the day and 40 at night, now it's up around 85 during the day and 60 at night.

I noticed it went through a few different stages in regards to the aroma/stench and the color.

When it first started to stink badly it was rotten, typical "rotten" anaerobic/stagnant water smell, I don't know how to describe it. A hint of bad breathe/shit. A distinct "indole" smell. It attracted a lot of flies. The water was still somewhat clear but tinged dark green/brown.

Then after 6 to 7 weeks the smell started to turn into into a pronounced sour smell, it wasn't as foul as before but wasn't nearly as unpleasant. Still a very pungent funk, but the indole/shit/rotten smell had become way milder and there was a distinct sourness to it. Not as many flies attracted to it. The color had turned dark brown-ish, almost black at first glance/looking down into the bucket.

Now, over the past 2 to 3 week or so the smell has become much more mild. As in I can't even smell it when I'm in the yard near the corner where it is located (it's not covered well). I haven't stuck my head down near it in a while so I'm not sure exactly what the smell has turned into but it is very mild. It doesn't seem to be attracting any flies besides a few curious ones here & there, nothing like the huge numbers that were attracted to it in the beginning.


I still haven't really used any of it. I will on a few things sometime in the next few weeks.

I wish I knew what was going on in regards to the biology and what is happening with the aroma of it changing over time and then becoming milder...and what is available/beneficial as it changes over time, or if/when there is a "prime time" to use it.

But just randomly thought I'd mention how it has changed over time. I'll probably use a little bit on some plants in the near future, diluted of course.



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Hi everyone, l think what we all need to remember is that standing barrels/buckets of weeds, manures, etc, etc was the organic way to make liquid fertiliser before microscopes and act’s.
I believe we can over think the whole good/bad microbe/bacteria/nematode, fungi thing......to the point we scramble our gut feelings and thoughts. I remember growing up my father always had barrels full of water with seaweed, weeds, manures, to drown seeds and even dead animals and fish scraps, everything went into these barrels to break down.
Thinking about it it’s a very good way to make nutrients available quickly and also kill off pathogens and disease. He’d tip the sludge onto the garden beds and dig it in.
As you can see the medium balances itself out, in this case, a bucket of water with weeds in it. The bacteria have bloomed (very stinky because of the gasses given off) and gone crazy, eating all the available food in the conditions they love. As the food runs out it becomes less and less stinky because the food has been eaten and the bacteria are decreasing in number. The ingredients have been turned into their simplest forms i.e. through digestion and chemical processes nearly everything that made up the plant has been changed into a plant available form, molecules, nutrients, elements and trace elements; therefore because you’ve put it in a bucket everything that went in is still in there, it’s simply changed form; remember, you can’t create or destroy matter only change it’s form. (Law of conservation of matter)
So what I’m saying is that as the smell decreases so to does the amount of anaerobic bacteria and this is the reason why people use these “soups” as fertiliser for aerobic microbes to use, incorporate, digest in the soil.
I agree with Hookahead, the soil will balance itself out, anaerobic can’t survive and thrive in aerobic conditions and hopefully your soil has plenty of oxygen in it, after all, this is one of reasons why we alow the soil to dry out between waterings.
Cheers,
40.

Hookahhead said:

Any obligate anaerobes are going to be killed off unless they find an anaerobic pocket in your soil. If you’re someone who tends to over water, you may want to reconsider anaerobic teas.

Click to expand...

Perhaps this concern can be alleviated by just aerating the tea solution prior to watering? This will kill off the anaerobes, no?