Is seaweed + manure too strong a liquid?

I filled a 220 litre bin with horse manure, then added water to the top, lidded it and it's been there for weeks. Then I read on a site you only need a handful of manure to make manure tea, not a huge bag!

I've now got a small bag of fresh seaweed. I've thought of adding it to the manure tea for convenience. It would be very potent stuff I assume, so maybe 1 cup for a 10 litre (2 gallon) watering can would be enough?

Am I on the wrong track? I don't want to kill my plants with kindness; when I planted trees and grape vines in lots of horse manure they didn't grow well at all.

Horse manure is great for N-hungry leafy greens and corn but not fruiting plants, especially woody perennials like grapes (which can produce great wine grapes when jammed in between rocks on a cliff) and fruit trees. Horse manure is known for producing twenty foot tomato vines with two tomatoes. An approach you could try is growing N hungry veggies on it for a season or two and then transition to your fruiting plants. That is what Sepp Holzer suggests.

You can also feed horse manure to chickens and ducks or worms and they will improve it with phosphorus and other good nutrients and microbes.

For the tea, you could use it beneficially at 50:1 water-slurry for microbial inoculation.  1cup to two gallons (32 cups) seems pretty safe to me, but I’d start at 50:1 to be safe if you are banking on this. If you want another way, duck pond/pool water straight on most plants works pretty darn well, and only requires the work of having ducks, which in my experience is easier and more rewarding than chickens. For your slurry, You can use a simple siphon diluter-mixer (they mix 16:1 so you but you can start with a 3:1 or 2:1 mix in another container near each plot) and use your normal hose based watering method or hand water. But you are talking about 1500gal of liquid at 32:1 with 50gallons slurry, which weighs upwards of 12,000lbs. That makes a 16$ siphon diluter or four worth it.

If you can aerate it that thick I would, or at least stir it as thoroughly, vigorously and frequently as you can. Don’t let it go anaerobic, keep it to less than three days brewing. Kelp, oats, and most common weeds, mushrooms and fruits would all be great to mix in ASAP to get taken up by the microbes from the manure.


Look up Dr RedHawk’s posts on soil and biodynamic preps for more in depth info.

Tim Kivi wrote:I filled a 220 litre bin with horse manure, then added water to the top, lidded it and it's been there for weeks. Then I read on a site you only need a handful of manure to make manure tea, not a huge bag!

I've now got a small bag of fresh seaweed. I've thought of adding it to the manure tea for convenience. It would be very potent stuff I assume, so maybe 1 cup for a 10 litre (2 gallon) watering can would be enough?

Am I on the wrong track? I don't want to kill my plants with kindness; when I planted trees and grape vines in lots of horse manure they didn't grow well at all.

What you have there is pretty stout stuff, I'd think more along the lines of 1 cup per 10 gallons for a dilution to use on plants.

Don' t forget that you have an anaerobic solution in that tank now and that means you will need to add air to it for about 24 hours before you should use any of the supernate (the liquid).
You have the right idea but I like to use cloth "tea bags" to hold my steeping materials because I have to do far less filtering for the sprayer to not clog up.

Horse manure does not work well as a direct application, neither does any other manure for that matter.
All manures should be used in compost heaps for maximizing their contents for plant application.
Sea weed can be shredded and used as a mulch but I prefer to shred it and steep it in an aerated tea drum for 48 hours then dilute the supernate to 20:1 (water to supernate)

Redhawk