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"Stinky Tea" (your roses will love it!)

Making it:

• Choose a garbage bin or barrel with no leaks and a tight fitting lid. Position it in an out of the way place - you don't want to have to move it once it's full.
• For a full size garbage bin (20 gallons) add 16 cups of alfalfa pellets or alfalfa meal (4 cups to every 5 gallons or 22 litres of water)
• Add 2 cups of Epsom salts (magnesium sulphate crystals) (or half a cup to 5 gallons)
• Fill with water
• Let stand for one week until it bubbles with fermentation. Your nose will tell you that it's ready - there's a reason I call it Stinky Tea!

Using it:

Apply alfalfa tea once per month in the spring and summer, especially after the first flush of flowers, to encourage repeat blooming.

Stop applying it in the fall, when you want the plants to start hardening off for the winter, and don't want to encourage soft new growth.

• Put on some old clothes - you're going to get splashed, and you don't want to be socializing with anyone while wearing the alfalfa tea ('cause it STINKS!)
• Scoop off the liquid with a bucket and apply.
• Pour a gallon of tea per rose around the base of the plant; more for large climbers, less for potted roses and minis.
• Soak small potted roses in a bucket of tea for 15 minutes each.
• When you have scooped off most of the liquid, you will be left with a thick goop of alfalfa in the garbage bin. There are two ways to treat this:
   
• Method A: You can add another half-cup of epsom salts, fill the garbage can one third of the way up again, and stir the mix briskly so that the alfalfa is suspended in the water. This slurry can be applied to your roses immediately. Choose the roses in the back of your beds for this tea, where the greenish brown puddle of alfalfa slurry won't be too visible.
• Method B: Add the full dose of Epsom salts, refill to the top with water and let sit for another week. Use the liquid, and then bury the alfalfa dregs into your compost pile (by this time they will be pretty smelly).

Alfalfa tea is a natural and inexpensive fertilizer. Alfalfa pellets and meal are available from garden and feed supply stores in 50 lb. bags. Get together with your neighbors to share the cost (and transportation) of a bag or two. Pellets are easier to handle, but I feel that the meal makes a better fertilizer. Epsom salts are also available in bulk. In our area, Buckerfield's, Borden Merchantile and Integrity stock them.

Alfalfa is a good slow-release source of nitrogen, but since you will be "digesting" it by letting it ferment in water, the resulting tea is a soluable, fast-acting nitrogen source. In addition to nitrogen, alfalfa supplies enzymes and trace elements that are not present in chemical nitrogen fertilizers (see below ).

If you don't have time to make alfalfa tea, you can still sprinke alfalfa pellets on the ground in the Spring - however the nutrients will take much longer to be released, it doesn't look as attractive, and the pellets can attract rodents. A better solution would be to use an organic fertilizer mix and add extra alfalfa meal to it, then scratch it into the surface of the soil.

Orchid and rose growers use alfalfa tea as a foliar spray. If you grow delphiniums and irises, they also love alfalfa tea. Some iris growers mulch their beds with alfalfa meal. And an additional benefit for delphiniums is that the Epsom salts in the tea help to ward off slugs and snails.

What's in it:

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