Monday, October 8, 2007

Our Brewer Works

Two years ago my brother showed me a compost tea brewer. I asked him how it worked; he told me that it turns compost into foliar. My father got so excited, he bought one. I was not convinced with my brother’s explanation so I made my own research. Then several days after my father bought the brewer, there was chaos. Everyone within 5 meter distance from the brewer could smell rotten egg or even worse. There was something wrong with this brewer. I can’t believe the commercially sold brewer could win an award with so many faults. I decided to intensify my research and eventually make my own brewer. The first compost tea brewer I made was so big for our farm. It was so big; it can brew up to 100 gallons of compost tea. I made a smaller one, good for 5 to 30 gallons. The brewer was intended for our farm, when visitors ask where we get our organic foliar fertilizer, we just point them to the brewer. Since then, people started asking us to make one for them. I named it the R.E.A.C.T.O.R. which stands for Reliable, Effective, Aerated Compost Tea Of Raymond. We now custom build compost tea brewers, from the small 5 gallon brewers to the biggest 250 gallon models. I also teach the principles of compost tea brewing so everyone can make their own brewers. It is very important to understand how it works before building one, rather than building one and discovering it doesn’t work. Our brewer works, we have the farm to prove it!

Fast Forward

First I would like to apologize for not posting updates about our farm. We’ve been so busy preparing for agri-link. Here’s what happened in the farm for the past several weeks. First, the mung beans grew to almost a meter high. We then incorporated them in the soil. While waiting for the mung beans to decompose, we started sowing lettuce seeds and other vegetable seeds in our greenhouse. With regular watering of compost tea (more about compost teas later) the leaves of the green manure decomposed faster than expected. We then planted our first set of vegetables on their respective plots. By-the-way, we also built trellises for our creepy crawling veggies. A little background about our trellises; it’s made of good lumber coated with wax. Why wax? Because we can’t use chemical wood preservatives since we practice organic farming. We even used beeswax on six of our eight sets of trellises. Here’s a short list of vegetables and fruits we’ve planted so far: twelve kinds lettuce, bitter gourd (ampalaya), cucumber, upland or Chinese kangkong, water gourd (upo), papaya, okra, coriander, Chinese parsley (kinchai), Chinese kale, arugula, spinach, eggplant, tomato, three kinds of pepper, beet, turnip, radish, carrots, two kinds of onion, soy beans, pole beans (sitao), snap beans, corn, French marigolds and stevia. WOW! I never realized we had this much variety in our farm until now. And we still have so many seeds waiting to be sowed.