I've had really good results with Compost Tea. If you're using fresh homegrown compost, yours should be even better. I make it like you do in a 5 gallon bucket, but I only add the molasses to feed the compost. The idea is that you're trying to create an explosion of benefical microorganisms. I dont know how the other stuff (corn gluten meal, fish, etc) effects that. I'd wait till after its brewed to add that. I apply the compost tea as a foliar spray about once a month. Whatever I have leftover I just dump onto one of my trees that needs a boost. Seems to do wonders. Of VITAL importance is to get the chlorine out of the water if you use city water. I use a chlorine filter that you attach to your hose, fill up a 5 gallon bucket and let it sit for a day to get as much chlorine out as possible.

I have been making this ice tea for 14 years now. My family, husband, and friends LOVE IT. I have friends that will drive by my house just to come in for ice tea. It is just good. The funny thing is it is simple and easy. I got the recipe while visiting my aunt in Boston. We couldn't stop drinking it. Ok, here is the recipe: Get a medium size sauce pan and fill it will water. Boil the water, then remove it from the heat. Get 6 Lipton tea bags and tie the strings together as to put them in the hot water. Keep the tea bags in the water for 8 minutes. Then take the bags out and throw them away. Important: Do not sqeeze the tea bags after taking them out of the water. Then at 1/3 cup of sugar to the warm tea mixture in pan and mix until the suger dissolves. Fill a good size tea pitcher half way with water, then pour the tea mixture in. You can add more water to fill the pitcher if needed. Put it in the fridge or try it over ice. Oh so good! Enjoy!

Nice post. I wanted to point out however that bacterial brews actually only need 24 hrs or less and fungal brews need around 48 hrs. Also if you are using a bag for your casting/compost adding a stone inside the bag will help dislodge fungal spores. A quick note on worm bins. in general if you exclude animal byproduct you will have much higher microbial diversity and much higher number of biodegraders in your castings. Also by adding small amounts of compost and minerals such as greensand and/or rock dust you can help further feed and breed your microbial community. Also there are quite a few ingredients you can add to your teas to enhance them. Some enhance the microbial content by adding food, others enhance the micro-nutrients in your tea, while will do both. The teas that we create have at the very least all of these ingredients. Worm Castings, Alaskan Forest Humus, Organic Compost, Hydrolyzed Fish, Sea 90, Micronized Kelp, Micronized Humic Acid, Demerara Sugar, Azomite, Alfalfa Meal, Kelp Meal, Humates, Fish Bone Meal, Fish Meal, Feather Meal, Soybean Meal, Cameline Meal, Fossilized Kelp, Rock Phosphate, Langbenite, Volcanic Ash, Green Sand, Sulfate of Potash. While I'm not suggesting you need all of these ingredient I am suggesting that you experiment. Have some fun, keep notes, and learn.

I started gardening by following GrowingYourGreen method, John Kohlar is the most popular organic gardener on Youtube. He does a great service in getting people into gardening, including me, but overtime I shy away from his method. I spent a lot of money on that boogiebrew website. I bought rockdust, wormcasting, biochar, compost tea brew, sea90, and insect frass. The problem I see with this method is you ended up spending all your paychecks on organic products and go broke (and, imo, the result is no better than simply using good compost and mulching). The one thing I see with some successful organic gardeners on YouTube is that they stopped making compost tea. The problem with compost tea is that the nutrients are dilutes, and it takes a lot of work, especially cleaning up. For all the microbes you created from aerating the water, there are much more microbes occurs naturally in the soil that have good organic matters, compost and mulch added. Bacteria alone is just part of the equation, you need good fungi activity in the soil as well which I don't think you can brew (unsure on that). One can speculated that the benefit from the boogiebrew formula are due to the organic fertilizers used in the tea, not from the actual result of brewing it. I do believe in compost tea in the idea that it helps to disperse nutrients to a wider area if you are lacking solid compost to cover the area. If you make a thick tea out of rich compost, where the level of nutrient is more dense, though this is not ideal for indoor. Sorry I'm don't know much about apartment growing, I do grow indoor but using hydroponic to keep things clean, I do organic for everything outdoor. The only fertilizer I buy now is MiGardener's Trifecta+ and it basically include all the essential organic fertilizer ingrediants in one bag so I don't have to buy them individually, I would simply brew that along with wormcasting and unsulphured molasses, the latter is a food for the microbes. Trifecta+ is not 'vegan' however, but you may be able to find similar all purposes fertilizers that are. There are lots of debate about the ineffectiveness of adding rockdust to the soil, a product that I no longer buy because the minerals in it takes a long time to breakdown to be readily available for plants, but it's also debated that by feeding the rockdust to earthworms or brewing may release the minerals in the process, but that would need some scientific trials to confirm. I'm sure there are many DIY compost tea formulas on the internet you can find. I'm no scientist, but my opinion is I feel microbes proliferates better in rich organic soil and compost than in water, hence I would just add wormcasting directly to the container mix and water with molasses.