Earth Worm Casting Tea

Hi everyone,

I am brewing some EWC tea to fight slime in my RDWC system. I followed the Heiseberg tea guide in a 5 gallon buck.

4 gal RO water
24ml Molasses
about 3 cups of EWC in a stocking suspended in the column of bubbles. temp is about 70-75 for the brew.

I am at about 15 hours but the brew still smells like molasses and has not "foamed" up though I have been told that EWC tea does not always foam.

For this tea to work and not end up feeding the slime the food source in the tea needs to be used up. My problem is i don't know exactly what it is supposed to smell like. I smell sweet but not earthy/fresh dirt.

Will a glucose meter for diabetics work to tell levels of sugar/food?

kingtitan said:

Hi everyone,

I am brewing some EWC tea to fight slime in my RDWC system. I followed the Heiseberg tea guide in a 5 gallon buck.

4 gal RO water
24ml Molasses
about 3 cups of EWC in a stocking suspended in the column of bubbles. temp is about 70-75 for the brew.

I am at about 15 hours but the brew still smells like molasses and has not "foamed" up though I have been told that EWC tea does not always foam.

For this tea to work and not end up feeding the slime the food source in the tea needs to be used up. My problem is i don't know exactly what it is supposed to smell like. I smell sweet but not earthy/fresh dirt.

Will a glucose meter for diabetics work to tell levels of sugar/food?

Click to expand...

i hear from the hydro guys at the grow store that mammoth P cleans out their systems better than they ever could. Not sure how much a EWC tea would take care of your problem, and may exacerbate it farther by supplying the slime with even more energy. Maybe your local grow shop has a mammoth P sample you could try out? Many people report serious yield increases of up to 25% when using mammoth in their water systems. Just something to think about. i mean sure it seems expensive up front... but it more than pays for itself in the first harvest and the app rate is like .5ml per gal so it stretches a looooooong ways

any kind of bacteria/fungal stuff seems to be unavailable in Canada, even hydroguard has been banned. the only thing remotely close to anything is Advanced nutrients piranha + tarantula (about $200) and I wont even touch AN stuff anymore. Also been told not to use AN microbes, few users did and it was a expensive mess.

Looks like I need to wait a bit longer according to Heisenberg until it smells less sweet and more dirt. ill check in on it at 36 hours.

I am still open to any suggestions on experience with compost tea and when to make sure all sugar has been spent. I tried my glucose meter, got a "LO" error. So I mixed in some samples of water/molasses to make sure if the thing would work. Looks like it will just say LO when its below 1 indicating you should be dead. So it can tell you when there is more than 1 but not less, so its still not an accurate way to tell.

Most if not all the sucrose should be consumed by microbes after bubbling for 36+ hours...I would go 48 just to be sure