Herb tea as fertiliser: which plants contain what?

Hi all,

I'm considering to guide my plants to high yields and better looks by using herb teas, which I would create by solving herbs in a bucket of cold water for a few days. For example:

- Tea from plant A contains much nitrogen, medium phosporus, low potas
- Tea from plant B contains low nitrogen, low phosporus, high potas
- Tea from plant C contains medium nitrogen, medium phosporus, medium potas and high magnesium

- My plant in full growth demands much Nitrogen, so I give it a tea from plant A
- My plants are sensitive for aphids and deseases, so it should get more potas; I give it a tea from plant B
- Most probably that plant is suffering from low consentrations of Magnesium, so I need to give some tea from plant C
- That plant stopped growing so I must not add tea from plant A but I should give it some from plant B because it just started flowering now
- etc

But now the problem is that I don't know which plants produce which elements in chich quantities. I only know a few examples like nettles contain much nitrogen and borage contains much silicium.
Does anybody knows if there's some information on internet where I can lookup a detailled list of plants and the compositions of their extrakts or teas?

Much thanks in advance,

Hendrik

I have never seen this type of data in any books or articles that I have read. The sales catalogs will most of the time tell you what the NPK is for the product in their bottles or bags.

Your best practice would be to simply go into basic organic soil building and in a year or two you will not have need for the data you seek in this post. I do not feel that pill bottle gardening is of much value to soil building. The major issue is not being able to biologically test small plantings for the biological needs that willl always build better and stronger soil with the total community working together. Trace minerals are all in a few simple products. PH can be tested and ammended.

Biology strength and ballance will deliver all of the plant's needs. The science of NPK is better for making bombs than garden chemistry elements. A balanced soil is always far better than one all loaded up with one element or another.

Thanks for the information. I totally agree with it.

But how about hydroponics? I grow many of my plants on hydroculture media where complete control over the added nutrients is necessary. I guess this strategy might still be the best solution for those growing their plants on hydroponics. Or am I wrong?

Hendrik

I use no man made chemicals in my gardening. I don't grow or knowingly eat hydroponic grown food. I guess I have at a restrurant eaten what I call cardboard fruit. Not being an absolute purist I would admit to having been trained to eat with Ronald Mcdonald on occasion. I however would not think of calling that food good.

I'm not sure you could really use organic fertilizers like that for hydroponics, for one thing the amount of nutrients is much more variable than with synthetics and there's really no way around that since you're dealing with natural materials. And there's always other stuff in them too which is great if you're gardening in soil, but might not be ideal in a hydroponic situation.

Thanks,

Well, maybe I wil test a part of my hydroponically grown plants and put them on different plant extracts during different growing phases (growing, flowering, fruiting), I'll see what happens.

Cumulus, I hope you will report back in and let us know how things progress for you.

I used to make a great weed tea (leach) from various plants and had excellent results. Although I never broke it down into what you hope to do (certain plants for N, others for P and K, etc) what I ended up with seemed to be an 'all purpose' plant food.

Again, please check back in and keep us up to date.
And WELCOME to DG! Hope to see you around the site!

Shoe

Hydrophonics in US where I live is largely done in relation to waste heat supplied at low cost by the utilities companies. When that source increases in cost the hydrophonics companies say they can not compete and shut down.

Coupled with the fact that the food is inferior and the US shopper is becoming more educated in this matter a major factor might be consumer rejection of a significant portion of their productions.

Hi,

Sure, I will post my results as soon as I get clear results from my herb tea fertiliser- experiments.

Although it may take much time because there's now another experiment running to study the effects of hydroponic culture to different plant species (which ones are responding better), see also my webpage for more information about it.

I'm thinking about creating a kind of spreadsheet which shows teas from different herbs in one column and tested plants in the other row, and the results (poor- inadequate - solid - exellent) for each combination, but this may take years (but I'm still young) because even with two greenhouses the available space isn't infinite. Maybe other people can also do some testings so all the results can be collekted in the spreadsheet.

To be continued...