Chicken Manure Tea Help Needed.

[luckitri]

A while back I saw a link on this site to someone who knows alot about it but my search function is not helping me to find this post.

Without knowing much about it I bought a garbage bucket and started brewing chicken manure tea. My first batch will be ready in 3 days. It has been a warm winter here in central AZ. The stuff stinks!

So now I am reading more and so many advise against use of the tea for fear of breeding bad bugs like e-coli and salmonella. I knew nothing about a bubbler or aerobic, anaerobic so now I don't know what to do with it. Don't dare put it in the garden area. Don't know how to test it for bugs. Don't dare put it in the grass area either. What if a dog or chicken ate the grass and got some kind of bug from it? And if there is some bad bugs in it would that area be permanently contaminated? If not, for how long would it be contaminated?

Do I have to flush this stuff down the toilet? 35 gallons worth? I'm kind of scared now. Have I brewed an environmental hazard?

Been researching for days on-line and not finding the info I need. Been through all the threads that the search function brings up on this site and not only can I not find the original post with the link but all the other links presented give incomplete information or advise against brewing this stuff.

 

[Renee]

Well, you are supposed to compost it before you brew the tea, so that all of the bugs are killed.

Nevertheless, I would not just throw it out.

Do you have any fruit trees you can drench with it? Any roses or other flower beds? If you can dump it onto the bare soil in your veggie beds and wait a week until you plant it should be okay. Just don't spray it on your lettuce.

 

[luckitri]

Thanks for your response.

My garden should be done already but I am disabled and have been under the weather so it is not done.

Many sites just tell you to throw the hot manure in with the water and brew it for time periods ranging from hours to weeks. None of them ever update and say they got sick from their produce. (Maybe they are dead.) But other sites say that I should have put a fish tank bubbler in there and many other worrisome things about killing myself and family with e-coli or salmonella from it in our vegetables.

I want to be responsible, don't want to get sick and die, don't want to kill anybody else or my critters and am thinking that it is very irresponsible to promote this if it can be unhealthy.

I will just saturate the whole property with it and believe that you are correct because I have literally spent days trying to get the answer and there does not seem to be any real answers with the first 20 pages of google search. I am sure it will be a week before we figure out fencing and tilling. Everything is a nightmare of vast and tedious proportions. The tiller never worked fresh out of the box so hours on the phone to find someone to back up the warrantee and so on . . . .

I am also concerned about the integrity of this site because I know that there was a post linking to a guy who has been doing this tea for years and is willing to share his expertise. I can no longer find that post or that link. If I knew how to "bookmark" or any of that other computer stuff I would have done so and not have to redo all my efforts.

Thanks for responding.

I will be very happy to accept anybody else's knowledge on this subject as well.

 

[Tweeza]

Quote:
I agree with Renee . By the time you eat any veggies it will have been long enough for the stuff you fear to be gone. I have to say though that I am a newbie to gardening. I used fresh horse manure tea on my garden last year and we never got sick from anything. I didn't sprinkle the greens with it just the base of the plants. I might add though that the faster growing things like lettuce and radishes I wouldn't use it on.

 

[luckitri]

Thank you for your added support. I will be dumping it all on the land before we even till so it will have a week to soak in, get tilled and then planted. Better late than never!

Guess I am going to have to get back to composting - but I am going to learn to do the worms with a small indoor container that goes quick I hope. It is already in the 90's here and I think the worms would just cook if outside.