I've made several 4 gallon batches of alfalfa tea this season. I just use about 2 cups of alfalfa meal and hot tap water in a 4 gal. bucket of water. It smells nice and alfalfa-y the first few days, then gets stinky after that, sometimes with growth floating on top. I use it all just the same, with what seems like the same effectiveness and no apparent ill-effects. I think of it as having gone stinky rather than having gone bad.

No. If the mold creeps you out, you can skim it off. Otherwise, use it.

Thanks! I'll use it today.

Where do people get these ideas? This method if making "tea" is the worst possible thing you can do short of outright poison. At best you have a bucket of slime. At worst you are making a pot of anaerobic diseases. Please, all of you, do some research...and stop just reading magazine articles.

dchall thats just plain STUPID to say have you tried this and it killed all your plants?
This method of getting nitrogen into the soil works fine for me and everybody else

was the "do some research" supposed to be a link for making alfalfa tea?

No it was not. There are no links to making alfalfa tea. That's why I'm asking the question, "Where do you get these ideas?" The link I provided was to a website where compost tea is promoted. Compost tea has something of value in it but only when it is made properly. If you read about compost tea and learn how to make it correctly, you'll likely learn about the problems in your recipe for alfalfa tea. It is scientifically impossible to make anything but slime water using the methods posted in this thread.

dchall thats just plain STUPID to say have you tried this and it killed all your plants?

I'll leave the intelligence of what I say up to the reader. If that's what you believe, fine. I have not tried it because I have read about the method from scientists that I trust. I never said it would kill all your plants. I am more concerned with it killing people but I don't want to sound sensational about it. The probability of someone dying from alfalfa tea poisoning is pretty remote.

This method of getting nitrogen into the soil works fine for me and everybody else

When you say it works fine, that probably means everything seemed fine because the plants got greener and became more healthy. That is because alfalfa is a source of protein for the soil microbes. You could have applied dry alfalfa pellets at a rate of 10-20 pounds per 1,000 square feet and achieved the same result with much less hassle. About every other year I switch from fertilizing with ordinary corn meal to fertilizing with alfalfa pellets. They're great! I'm saying the brewing process being promoted here is not a good one. There is a LOT of flexibility in nature that prevents diseases from taking hold. Going back into history and to the present day, fresh raw sewage is still used to fertilize farms and gardens. You can easily say that nobody you know has ever been harmed by that practice. Even if you lived in China where the farmer's outhouses drain directly into the soil, they probably don't know anyone who has died from the practice. Does that make it healthy or the right thing to do? Not at all. Once the cholera bug enters the picture, everyone associated with the practice dies and there is nobody left to remember them. I'm not saying alfalfa tea leads to cholera; I'm just trying to make an analogy.

Any time you put something in water, especially warm water, you are going to have bacteria growing in it. The warmer the water the faster the oxygen becomes depleted. Once the oxygen is gone, the bacteria that were growing in it die and another type of bacteria start to grow. Among these bacteria are those that cause disease. Once that happens, you have no control over the "brew." Fermentation of the mix is the best outcome, but the other end of the spectrum is that you start breeding the more dangerous bacteria that live in your intestines.

The Soilfoodweb.com website has changed their format. Here's a slightly better link. Read the e-zines back from the beginning to learn more. Then search the Internet for "actively aerated compost tea" with the quotes. The purpose of this is to expose the problems with the alfalfa tea brewing method y'all are using. If all you were doing was dumping alfalfa into a bucket of cold water and immediately pouring it onto the plants, I'm all for that. Letting it sit and develop pathogenic bacteria is my problem.

Actually, I got the idea fron the FAQ section in this forum, the article is "What are the Benefits of Aerated Compost Teas vs. Classic Teas?".

Here is a copy and past of a portion of the article:

There are several different levels of teas as well as different recipes and styles. Here is the simple steps as outlined by one of our own GardwenWeb members who is an expert on teas and compost. This is a brief description of the different strength levels of tea making as outlined by "BILL_G" :

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.

I am trying to track down the problems you're asserting about alfalfa tea. I'm not quite clear if it's plant health or human health you're saying is at risk. I'm also not sure of the technical definition of "slime water" or the source of pathogenic bacteria in alfalfa water (or old/slimy alfalfa water), but I'm looking. I would think that compost and alfalfa meal are pretty different starting materials so that the results of tea-making are different, too.

Here's a link to a rebuttal of some tests that purportedly found e. coli in compost tea. From this rebuttal it seems that the e. coli in the compost tea arguably came from incompletely composted manure in the compost. According to the linked article, aeration seems to help keep down e. coli in compost teas, but where do the e. coli in alfalfa meal (tea) come from? Quoting the article: "Why do we get concerned about E. coli? Because if E. coli is present, it means there is contamination by fecal material where sooner or later there will be a human pathogen present, and then we have disease. So, E. coli is an indicator of a problem, not something to go nuts about. There's a problem, work to fix it."

It seems that the ingredients and risks of compost tea (with partly raw manure) and are quite different from alfalfa tea. I'm still searching, but I haven't yet found a clear indication that the stinkiness of alfalfa tea poses a hazard...

Can anyone else find data on the risks of alfalfa tea?

As for why to try, there seems to be pretty solid acceptance among rose growers that alfalfa tea is beneficial. Also, it looks like alfalfa meal can take about 30 days to get nitrogen to plants, if I remember extension service studies I found online. Alfalfa tea is an attempt to use alfalfa, rather than blood meal, to give some vegetable plants a faster nitrogen dose in the way blood meal does. I don't know that it works, but it seems to help in the situations I've used it. That's where some of these ideas come from - at least on my part. Your comments are the first I've heard that non-fresh alfalfa tea might actually be harmful to plants or people. (You seem OK with fresh alfalfa tea.) A bit more specific citations would help sort through at least the risks of the different teas.

Here is a link that might be useful: E. coli in compost tea or just the compost?

Here's a Gardenweb discussion that includes a link to a Rodale Institute article citing a study that concludes that the risk of e. coli in compost tea seems to arise from composts that already have e.coli.

Here is a link that might be useful: Discussion with Rodale Inst. link

Reading much of the the Soil Foodweb link posted by dchall I see that the site focuses heavily on compost teas. The April 2006 issue has this helpful hint:

It seems clear from this and other studies that a best management practice for compost tea brewing is to START with lab-verified "no detect" (for E. coli) GOOD QUALITY compost and/or humus substrate to avoid any potential E. coli problems in the finished compost tea.

So, from the research I've done, it seems that compost tea made from poopy compost has some health risks. Aeration might help kill some of the e.coli in the original poopy compost, but it's much better to start without raw poop in the tea. I don't see the connection to alfalfa teas - which are poop-free. Is there an actual basis for concern about alfalfa teas, or is this merely a case of alfalfa tea being mistaken for compost tea?