Using Your Compost 
The hardest part of composting may be deciding where to use your precious “black gold” in your garden!
Using your Compost in the Garden
- Dig directly into your garden as a natural fertilizer
- Spread around the base of trees and shrubs as mulch
- Make a potting mix (1/3 compost, 1/3 soil, 1/3 vermiculite)
- Make compost tea (put a litre of compost in an old tea towel, tie and soak overnight in a garbage can full of water). Pour the tea on appreciative plants both indoors and out.
For extra deluxe compost, shake through a mesh screen to remove large chunks – return large chunks to the compost bin.
Compost use in Lawn Care and Maintenance
Use a rake to spread a thin (1/4") layer of compost over your lawn each year. Compost adds important nutrients and builds healthy, disease-resistant grass. Tip: Mix in some sand along with the compost to help spread the compost. The sand will also help improve your lawn’s drainage system. Once compost has been applied, overseed your lawn with a good quality lawn seed mix (ask staff at your local garden store for recommendations).
Compost tea is essentially compost added to a volume of water and steeped until it's ready for your plants to drink. The idea is to provide macro and micro nutrients, as well as beneficial soil micro-organisms, fungi and disease-fighters in a way that the plants can uptake quickly and efficiently. There are several different levels to making compost tea, as well as a whole variety of recipes and styles. Following are a few simple steps that we found at www.gardenweb.com:
Level 1: Put a shovel full of good compost in a 5 gallon bucket of water, wait one week, and apply to garden or lawn either full strength or up to a 1:4 water ratio. This is an excellent source of ready available soluble nutrients. NOTE: If you stir your brew daily or every other day, it helps get more oxygen to the mix for better decomposition and better aerobic microbial population growth.
Level 2: Do same as above, but now add to the recipe a few cups of alfalfa pellets or some other cattle feed. Now you have extra nitrogen and trace elements from the bacterial foods.
Level 3: Do all above plus now add an aquarium air bubbler. Now you have more aerobic microbes to add to your soluble nutrients in the tea.
Level 4: Do all the above and now add a few tblsp of molasses or other simple sugar products. Now you really maximize the aerobic microbes in the tea, which in turn produce even more extra soluble nutrients from the bacterial foods.
You can also add more high nitrogen foods to the tea, but the only ingredients that are really necessary aerobic compost and some sort of sugar product (see Step 2 below for a list). Everything else is optional. Your teas can be as creative as you are. For these examples (again, from www.gardenweb.com), we can assume a 5 gallon tea recipe for our example:
Step 1. Add 1/2 bucket of finished hot compost. This supplies most of the beneficial aerobic microbes and soluble nutrients. Some people use slightly immature aerobic compost because it has more fresh nitrogen in it, but less microbes than finished hot compost. You can bag it in an old stocking or cheesecloth bag or not... it's up to you.
Step 2. Use 2-3 tblsp molasses, brown sugar, or corn syrup. This feeds and breeds the aerobic bacteria. Sugar products are mostly carbon which is what the microherd eat quickly. Add about 1-2 more tblsp of molasses for every 3 days of aerobic brewing to make sure the sugar is digested before touching the soil at application time, and to guarantee that the aerobic bacteria population stays strong throughout the brewing process. Molasses also contains sulfur which is a mild natural fungicide. Molasses is also a great natural deodorizer for fishy teas. For a more fungal tea don't add too much simple sugar or molasses to your aerobic teas. Use more complex sugars, starches and carbohydrates like in seaweed, rotten fruit, soy sauce, or other fungal foods.
Step 3. Add 1-2 cans of mackerel, sardines, or other canned fish. Supplied extra NPK, fish oil for beneficial fungi, calcium from fish bones. Most commercial fish emulsions contain no fish oils and little to no aerobic bacteria. Fresh fish parts can be used, but because of offensive odors, it should composted separately with browns like sawdust first before adding to the tea brew. NOTE: For those organic gardeners who prefer vegetarian soil amendments, you can skip the fishy ingredients, it's not necessary. There is plenty of NPK in alfalfa meal and other grains that you can use.
(NOTE: If you use canned fish products, you may want to let it decompose mixed with some finished compost, good garden soil, etc. in a separate closeable container for a few days before using. Since most canned meat products contain preservatives, this will guarantee that the good microbes in the tea will not be killed off or harmed in brew making.)
Step 4. Add 1 pack fresh seaweed (the stuff from the grocery store, Asian food section, is fine) - you can also buy seaweed emulsions to apply directly to plants (diluted, of course) or add to your teas. Supplies all extra trace elements. Seaweed can contain about 60 trace elements and lots of plant growth hormones. Seaweed is a beneficial fungal food source for soil microbes. Liquifying the seaweed makes it dissolve even faster.
Step 5. Add 1-2 cups of alfalfa meal, corn meal, cattle feed, horse feed, catfish or pond fish feed. Supplies extra proteins and bacteria. Corn meal is a natural fungicide and supplies food for beneficial fungi in the soil.
Step 6. Add rotten fruit for extra fungal foods. Add green weeds to supply extra bacterial foods to the tea.
Step 7. Good ole garden soil is an excellent free biostimulant. Garden soil is full of beneficial aerobic bacteria, fungi, and other great microbes. Some people make a great microbial tea just out of soil. Forest soil is usually higher in beneficial fungi than rich garden soil.
Step 8. Fill the rest of the container with rainwater, compost tea, or plain de-chlorinated water to almost the top of bucket. You can make good "rain water" from tap water by adding a little citric acid (you can get this in little packets at the health food store - Emergen-C, etc. - or buy a bottle of powder) to the water mix before brewing. Urine water is also an excellent organic nitrogen source for teas (up to 45% N). Yes, we said urine-water. If you think it's unorthodox, you should know that in most parts of the world, they wouldn't even THINK of wasting such a precious resource (it's almost always completely sterile). We simply leave in an incredibly wasteful society. But we'll leave that one up to you...
Step 9. Some people like to add 1-2 tblsp of apple cider vinegar to add about 30 extra trace minerals and to add the little acidicity that is present in commercial fish emulsions. Many fish emulsions contain up to 5% sulfuric acid to help it preserve on the shelf and add needed sulfur to the soil. You can add extra magnesium and sulfur by adding 1-2 tblsp of Epsom salt to the tea.
Step 10. Apply the air pump to the tea. NOTE: Some organic tea brewers prefer not to use the air pump method. You can get some extra oxygen in the tea by stirring it daily or every other day. The air pump just makes the oxygen levels in the tea happen faster than by hand, thus greatly increasing the rate of aerobic microbial growth in the tea. If you prefer to use the air pump, let it bubble and brew for at least 1-3 days. (NOTE: The 3 days limit is just a guideline. The real test of brewing time is by your own sight and smell test, because everybody's tea is different due to the various microbial species and breeding activity that takes place during the brewing process.) The aerobic tea is ready to use when it has either an earthy or "yeasty" smell or a foamy layer on top of the tea. If you're not satisfied with the look or the smell of the tea, take it up to a week of brewing. The extra brewing time will help the microbes digest more of the insoluble bacterial and fungal foods in the tea and make it more available for your plant's or your soil's nutritional needs.
Apply this tea full strength to get full nutrient levels per plant, or dilute it from a 1:1 down to a 1:5 water ratio to spread the beneficial microbes over a 1-acre garden area (mix 5 gallons of tea per 25 gallons of rainwater).
To reduce straining, you can place all your ingredients in a closed panty hose or laundry bag during the brewing cycle (don't use a too fine mesh bag or the beneficial fungi can't flow properly through the bag). Another method is to simply turn off the air pump, stir the entire mixture real hard, and then let the mixture sit still for about 30 minutes. Scoop off the top juice straight into a watering can for application.
You can apply with a watering can, or simple cup, or in a sprinkling system. All compost teas can be used as a foliar feed or soil drench around plants. They also make great compost pile nitrogen and bacterial activators to heat up the pile for faster finished composting. Always take the remains for teas and recycle them back into your compost piles.
As stated, you can use your homemade tea as a foliar feed or as a soil drench or both. Soil drenches are best for building up the soil microbial activities and supplying lots of beneficial soluble NPK to the plant's root system and the topsoil texture. Foliar feeds are best for quick fixes of trace elements and small portions of other soluble nutrients into the plant through its leaves. Foliar feeds are also good for plant disease control. Foliar feeds work best when used with soil drenches or with lots of organic mulches around plants. You can poke holes in the soil around crop roots with your spade fork, to get more oxygen in the soil to further increase organic matter decomposition and increase microbial activity in the soil.
Aerated teas can also be used to greatly speed up the decomposition process of hot compost piles. The extra aerobic microbes in the tea will breed and cooperate with the aerobic microbes in the organic matter in the compost pile.
You should not use any liquid soaps as a spreader-sticker agent in a fertilizing/biostimulant tea like this. It can hinder or harm your aerobic microbes that you just grew in the tea. You need to use better products in your tea like liquid molasses, dry molasses powder, fish oil, or yucca extract as a spreader-sticker.
A good aerated tea is very economical. 5 gallons can be diluted to biostimulate an entire acre of garden via foliar spraying only. If you soil drench only, it takes at least 15 gallons of tea, before diluting, to cover an acre of garden soil. Also, there is enough aerobic bacteria and fungi in a good 5 gallon batch of aerated tea, that is the equivalent of about 10 tons or 40 cubic yards of regular compost!
These homemade aerated compost teas are just as powerful, maybe more powerful, than any commercial natural or organic fertilizer or soil amendment on the market today. And they are a lot cheaper too! So have fun, be creative, and keep on composting!
(Compost Tea Information Source: www.gardenweb.com)