Making your own liquid fertilizers is easy, for a high potash and all essential trace elements feed, you need Comfrey and seaweed, for high Nitrogen go for Nettles, Borage, Plantain or even Dock. The key to a healthy living fertilizer is aeration.

Comfrey and Seaweed

Try and grow the Bocking 14 strain of Comfrey which is sterile and therefore will not reseed all over your garden. Seaweed washed up on the shoreline and dried in the sun is plentiful after high tides, don’t take seaweed growing on rocks for sustainability, it’s also illegal. You need one bucket of dried seaweed to 2 buckets of Comfrey leaves to make 4 gallons of feed!Make sure the seaweed is nice and dry, free of stones and other debris, cut it up into pieces with secateurs and place in an old juicer, or other processor, and blitz into powder, do a small batch at a time.Place into your 5 gallon container in layers with Comfrey leaves  This will ensure rapid breakdown of the mixture to extract the most potency. Once you have added all the mixture add rainwater till it is completely covered. If you don’t have collected rainwater, use tap water that has stood in open air for at least 48 hours, as the chlorine will kill the live bacteria and Mycorrhizae essential for soil conditioning.Use an old liquidizer to blitz the mixture into a mash and place your aerator, We used an old aquarium aerator with tube attached make several holes in the tube and bung up the end, this will ensure optimal aeration. Check your mixture every few days and blitz with liquidizer for a minute or so. After 2-4 weeks it should look like this Dark and frothy a lot like Guinness don’t you think, it smells strongly of Iodine, not like the stinking extract from other methods used which actually do more harm than good to your soil due to the anaerobic bacteria in them. Now you can filter the extract from the solids using a fine netting, squeeze all the liquid out using rubber gloves, especially if you’re sensitive to Iodine, but don’t discard the solids as these can be dried in the sun and crumbled to use as a potent slow release fertilizer and conditioner.

This fertilizer is alive with beneficial aerobic organisms which get to work immediately on your soil and aid the plants by breaking down and releasing the trapped nutrients in your soil, lessening the need for feeding, this reduces run off of fertilizers into streams and ground water. The mixture is used in a dilution of 10-20X or to the colour of weak tea, with unchlorinated water.

It is best to use it within 2 weeks or keep it in an open container in the dark in a cool place. Otherwise anaerobic fermentation will make it stinky! The results are amazing use it to feed your tomatoes, fruit trees, potatoes or any flowering or fruiting bushes. You won’t be disappointed.