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My mum used to throw tea leaves and teabags on her garden beds. She told me that the worms liked them and helped the plants. I thought they looked ugly.
My dad was a keen composter. So when I got a garden, I started a heap, and tea leaves and bags went there. But a few years ago my resident Champion Tea Drinker got fed up with the slimy garden waste bin in the kitchen, for which tea leaves were the prime suspect. So I switched to mum's method. The bin stayed slimy, but next season some tired old day lilies bloomed magnificently, having had quite a lot of tea. Was mum right all along?
More recently still, I discovered bokashi, which takes all the kitchen waste. The more I discover, the better it seems; we have no more slime (or stink, or flies, etc.). But the tea leaves filled quite a proportion of it, and I worried about the beds they used to go on. I decided to experiment.
I devised a home-made mini bokashi bin. I filled it with well-drained tea leaves and 2 tsp bokashi bran. In another mini bin I put some normal kitchen scraps with bran. After a few days the scraps produced the classic white mould and a drop of juice, and went into the main bin. The tea leaves showed nothing; this went on for weeks.
I’d found something that wouldn’t bokashi, and yet which seems to do the garden good. This mystery made me investigate bokashi further, as you can read here, followed by Jay-ell’s challenge and my response.
It could be that my experiment was badly executed. However, my current hypothesis is that tea leaves are already fermented in production, so there’s nothing left for bokashi to ferment. If tea does indeed improve the soil, it does so in the same way as bokashi, which is to feed soil organisms, especially worms. I am a bit doubtful of this because surely tea brewing would extract whatever food value is in them, wouldn’t it?
I've reverted to mum's method. I’d be grateful for other observations of adding tea to soil.
My dad was a keen composter. So when I got a garden, I started a heap, and tea leaves and bags went there. But a few years ago my resident Champion Tea Drinker got fed up with the slimy garden waste bin in the kitchen, for which tea leaves were the prime suspect. So I switched to mum's method. The bin stayed slimy, but next season some tired old day lilies bloomed magnificently, having had quite a lot of tea. Was mum right all along?
More recently still, I discovered bokashi, which takes all the kitchen waste. The more I discover, the better it seems; we have no more slime (or stink, or flies, etc.). But the tea leaves filled quite a proportion of it, and I worried about the beds they used to go on. I decided to experiment.
I devised a home-made mini bokashi bin. I filled it with well-drained tea leaves and 2 tsp bokashi bran. In another mini bin I put some normal kitchen scraps with bran. After a few days the scraps produced the classic white mould and a drop of juice, and went into the main bin. The tea leaves showed nothing; this went on for weeks.
I’d found something that wouldn’t bokashi, and yet which seems to do the garden good. This mystery made me investigate bokashi further, as you can read here, followed by Jay-ell’s challenge and my response.
It could be that my experiment was badly executed. However, my current hypothesis is that tea leaves are already fermented in production, so there’s nothing left for bokashi to ferment. If tea does indeed improve the soil, it does so in the same way as bokashi, which is to feed soil organisms, especially worms. I am a bit doubtful of this because surely tea brewing would extract whatever food value is in them, wouldn’t it?
I've reverted to mum's method. I’d be grateful for other observations of adding tea to soil.
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