Home made plant food maker

[Dynamo]

https://youtu.be/3LTtlf6g-E8

I saw a video on YouTube where a guy had a broken water butt that he turned into a plant food maker. Like him I've drilled several holes in the base, propped it onto bricks and put a collecting (washing up bowl) between them, placed a couple of bricks inside the butt and layed a stiff metal mesh on top of them. I then foraged around for any big leaf weeds, dock, dandelion, comfrey etc, put them in and put a bucket with bricks in it on top to weight it down and waited. I hoped to see results in a fortnight or so, but in reality, I started getting the tea within a couple of days, and it keeps coming and coming and coming as long as I keep topping it up with more weeds, which I do most days, and giving it a sprinkling with rainwater every few days.

The tea has a bit of a fishy smell aroma to it if you get close to it, but it's nowhere near as bad a smell as you get from making nettle tea in sealed buckets.

https://youtu.be/3LTtlf6g-E8

[Jungle Jane]

Is the fish smell ammonia from the nitrogen breaking down? In a sealed bucket,the gas won’t be continually escaping.

[ameno]

The fishy smell is the comfrey, I suspect. Whenever I make comfrey tea I always get a smell like that, but never with any other plants (my barrels of drowning weed roots, for example, usually smell more like cow manure).

[Jungle Jane]

I suspect your bucket with weed roots also contains some soil. This is weed tea without roots or soil,the ammonia smell is the nitrogen breaking down,you could look online there’s lots of info about it so you will know for sure instead of just suspecting.

[ameno]

Ammonia is not the smell of fish, though (not unless it's seriously rotten, anyway).
And I have made multiple other brews from other leaves, and although many have smelled foul, none have smelled of fish in the same way as comfrey does.

[Dynamo]

I'm not sure what causes the fishy smell, but to be honest, the latest batches of the tea haven't smelt at all. Maybe that was from it was just starting up.