How often have you had weeds spring up out of your garden bed because the seeds of grasses, or the roots or bulbs of invasive plants haven't been properly broken down during the composting process? It is a common problem which will affect you if your composting system isn't working well enough to complete the decomposition of weed parts such as Kikuyu rhizomes(Pennisetum clandestinum) or Oxalis bulbs (Oxalis pes-capre, Oxalis latifolia). Part of the solution can be to make Weed Tea.
Weed Tea
Weed Tea is easily made and enables you to kill two birds with one stone; destroying the weeds before they are added to your compost, and releasing most of the nutrients they hold into liquid. This liquid can be used to directly fertilise your plants.
Ingredients
To make Weed Tea you need the following: enough weeds to loosely pack into a bucket or other, similar sized container, a bucket (or pot) with holes in the bottom, another container which is large enough to hold the bucket and allow it to be covered with water, and finally, a lid for safety and to keep out the light.
Any weeds can be used, but this method is particularly useful to get rid of the aforementioned Kikuyu and Oxalis, along with many other weeds with stolons, small tubers, corms, bulbs, rhizomes, and those which root easily at their nodes. Weeds such as Couch Grass (Cynodon dactylon),
Fishbone Fern (Nephrolepsis cordifolia), and Tradescantia (Tradescantia fluminensis) can be particularly hard to get rid of.
Method
Quite simply, all that needs to be done is to roughly chop up all your weed parts to aid their decomposition and place them into your first container. Next, place this container into the larger container, fill it with water, and cover it with the lid. The weeds can be weighted down with a small rock or a brick; this keeps them submerged under the water throughout the entire process.
Place the container in an out of the way part of your garden, in a part shaded position, for about six weeks. Two weeks into the process the weeds will be well on their way to being dead, but it is essential to leave the mix for the whole six weeks to ensure their complete destruction.
Using Your Weed Tea
At the end of the six weeks you will have a gloriously smelly, brownish liquid and a soggy mess of plant matter. Strain off the remaining plant matter, which can now be safely put into your composting system. The liquid you have left is quite a powerful concoction so it needs to be diluted before using as a foliar spray or liquid fertiliser. Diluting the tea by one part to ten parts water will be adequate.
Making Weed Tea goes a long way toward you becoming less dependant on having to buy chemicals to feed your plants, and helps toward gaining the ideal of utilising everything that you have in your garden.
Frances Cameron - I live on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne, Australia. I work for myself as a gardener and am currently building an edible ...
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