Well hey guys Natalie here and welcome back to Hey It's A Good Life. I am so glad you're here because today I'm showing you how I pack a big punch in my tiny space when it comes to homegrown homemade fertilizer. You guessed it, I'm talking all about aerated worm tea. Probably says that in the title so I was probably a dead giveaway. But there you go, aerated worm tea. That is what we're talking about today. It is so simple to do and it is so powerful and effective for growing your garden and really replenishing that soil and getting that regenerative cycle going where it's not just about depending on outside nutrients and outside fertilizers but we can actually create regenerative cycles of gardening and farming right here in our very own even suburban lots like the one that I have. So I really hope to show that cycle to you at least one little part of it today. This is how we do regenerative gardening here in our neck of the woods and because we don't have a lot of space to work with we keep it small and simple and I'm excited to share this aerated worm tea brewing method with you guys today. So if that is something that you're interested in you are in the right place so glad you're here without further ado let's get into it. All right so the first thing you're going to need are worm castings. Now you can buy worm castings at your local hardware home improvement store, Walmart sometimes even has them but these are homegrown and homegrown are so potent. I'm working on a firm accomplishing one on one videos if you have questions about homegrown worm castings leave them in the comments of this video. You're also going to need some kind of a mesh bag to hold said worm castings. This one is just from Amazon but cheesecloth or muslin will do will also need some twine and something to cut the twine so you can secure that mesh bag to this giant five gallon bucket. Now this bucket is filled with city water that I let sit out for about 24 hours to let all the chlorine out because we are working to get good bacteria going and we don't want the chlorine killing all our good bacteria. The next thing you'll need is an air pump. We are working to create an aerobic process which means it's full of oxygen which is going to feed and promote healthy fungal bacterial growth. This air pump is awesome you'll also need something to plug the air pump into. I'll show you my setup in just a moment. We're also going to need some quarter inch tubing. I had a really hard time showing you what that looked like so there it is. Now bacteria need a food source and a favorite amongst gardeners is molasses. This is pretty generic molasses that I found at our local rotary store and it works great. And last but not least you will need some sort of a sprayer so that you can fully refeed your plants all of this bacterial goodness. I'm really digging this thing from Chapin, Shapin. I don't know how to say it but you get the idea. I almost forgot to tell you I will of course link everything down below so that it's super easy for you guys to look through everything and get an idea of what you already have or what you might need to get started with your own aerated worm tea brewing process. All right so it's time to make our tea. First we're going to add this molasses to our water and about one to two tablespoons is what you're going for here. Stir it up with a one by two that you have left over from your thousands of woodworking projects and you know just like that you're good to go. Once it's all diluted you can go ahead and get your worm castings in there. I like to kind of open up the net, add the castings and kind of drench them. Drenching them really ensures that they've made good contact with the molasses and the water and just making sure that you've got really good contact between all of those castings and your tea essentially. Now this is called a snake bubbler from tea labs and I absolutely love this thing. It is vigorous, it is so much more effective than other methods I've used in the past and I highly recommend these guys. I will link them down below. What is so great about this is that they stand in the bucket and you can attach your worm castings to this and I think that you can actually even get that silver ring to connect to the five gallon bucket but I can't undo the hooks of my five gallon bucket to make that happen so I just do it like this and it works fine for me. Now here's that small space solution is that when I was designing our garage renovation which if you didn't catch it all didn't get above is I wanted a space specifically for brewing tea. Oh and here's the little tricky part of getting that connection between the quarter inch tubing and the tubing that's provided by the air pump company is essentially I just shove the quarter inch tubing in there and then I turn the pump on and we're in action. We're starting to brew our worm tea as you can see by the vigorous bubbles. Get ready for some zoom enhance action. Are you ready? Whoa, look at those bubbles. So in about 24 to 76 hours even we will have a very potent very effective all natural homegrown homemade fertilizer. Something worth noting is how perfectly this air pump fits with these shelves. It decreases rattling or the air pump moving around and I'm really happy with that. Now let's say that it's been 2436 or 72 hours. It is time to sfull your feet your plants and you want your tea to be rather dilute. You don't want it to be too strong because obviously you don't want to burn your plants. This is a good color. If you want it to be safe of course oh god don't spill your precious worm tea don't do that. Keep it in the jar and then put it in the sprayer. And once it's in the sprayer if you need to dilute it you can just to be safe. That's what I did the first time around just to be sure that I wasn't going to burn my plants. Then you can get really excited that you've got some homegrown homemade fertilizer and yeah get out there and fully refeed your plants. I'll include a clip of what my plants look like one week after feeding. Such a difference you guys I cannot recommend this system enough. My plants are so happy and healthy. One of my happiest plants is this bear's lime tree which now has blossoms at every node just 10 days post-foolier feeding. One final thing to keep in mind is that you want to have this part of the nozzle open. If you don't it does this and I don't understand the the reason for that. This is what you want. A nice mist. Really cool thing about this mist setting is that it not only allows you to fully refeed your plants but it also allows you to knock aphids off at the same time. I learned that from Stephen Cornette over at nature is always right and I have some kind of aphid attacking my beloved fava beans over here so I'm going to show you guys how I use this to knock some of those aphids off. All right now this is where my inner biology garden or just Steve Irwin comes out and goes look at what we've got here. We've got a giant praying mantis doing something laying babies perhaps I'm not quite sure if you know let me know but this gets me so encouraged that slowly but surely we are turning this urban area into an ecological oasis. Now you know how to make your very own aerated worm tea. I hope this video was helpful to you and don't worry I've got you guys covered with lots more worm videos and I know you guys have questions about getting started where to start how to start how much it costs to start and I'm working on a much more comprehensive video so I hope to serve you guys well with that here very soon and in the meantime I hope this video has proven valuable to you. I hope this helps you start your regenerative gardening process this season and I'll catch you guys in the next one. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.