Potting Soil Mix and Compost Tea

I've done a bit of assembling the soil mix that we use to grow the seedlings in. The secret recipe is this:

• 1 part compost
• 3/4 part vermiculite
• 1/6 part sand
• 1/6 part carbonatite

The compost is beautiful stuff that is made from the cow and pig manure plus the bedding used for the animals on the farm. I believe it's 'aged' for a year before being used. Making compost for the farm from the farm is one of the principles of biodynamic agriculture to which Whole Circle farm ascribes.

From the recipe you might suspect the mix to be rather dense, but it ain't.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, the seedlings are given regular boosts of compost tea to keep up the nutrients in the soil. Compost tea, well, it's essentially what you'd expect from the name. We simply take a hessian^* bag filled with a shovel full of compost and steep it in a bucket of water for a day. We use a small fish tank bubbler to oxygenate the water so that aerobic bacteria grow rather than the water putrefying with anaerobic bacteria. The resulting mixture is supposedly full of dissolved nutrients from the compost and helpful bacteria. The seedlings get a shot of this once a week.

^*I just realised this probably isn't a north american term, but I'm not sure what the proper term is. The bag I'm referring to is the sort you might find potatoes in if you bought them in bulk. I think they're made from Jute.