Air Pump Went Out Overnight

by Joe
(Florida)

I had a batch of compost tea brewing last night and at some point, the power cord that (the air pump was plugged into) went kaput. The tea smells fine, so first question is, can I still use it? And if so, I’d like to keep brewing it for another day (since I don’t know how many hours it brewed) – can I just add some more sugar for the bacteria to eat and keep on brewing?

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Apr 01, 2012
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I Would Start Over
by: Dave

Hey Joe,

Sorry I couldn’t get to this earlier. I’ve been having a few hiccups with my blogging software as of late. Tell me…what did you end up doing?

If I were in your shoes, I would start over. I would have dumped the “power-outage” tea in my compost pile, thoroughly washed out my compost tea brewer, and then started a new batch.

As you may have seen in Haydn’s recent post about oxygen levels in our brewers, it doesn’t take long for conditions to go “south”. That doesn’t necessarily mean that your tea would be harmful if applied to your garden; however, your purpose was to brew aerobic tea, right? If so, the conditions in your brewer were without oxygen for several hours, so let’s reset the electrical breaker and start over.

I’m interested to hear what you did…

d

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Apr 02, 2012
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Kept on brewin’….
by: Joe

Well I actually did just add a little sugar and another handful of compost and kept brewing. I don’t know – the tea seemed ok to me, smell-wise at least. I don’t have a microscope so there’s no way to know for sure, but one thing I did notice was a good amount of ‘slime’ on the equipment and in the bucket. Is that bacterial slime, which would be a good thing???

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