'Manure tea'

This tea is not for humans. Instead, manure tea is for vegetable plants.

Concocted by the Central Luzon Agriculture and Resources Research and Development Consortium (CLARRDEC), the organic fertilizer has been packaged by the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD) into an information bulletin for the benefit of the farming sector.

Here’s how to make the tea.

Soak a sack of 12 kilograms of animal manure in 120 liters of water. Water will penetrate and diffuse the solution out of the sack.

Incubate the solution from one week to one month. After a week, nitrogen in the solution will range from 300 parts per million (ppm, or the measurement of the concentration of chemicals) to 400 ppm, and after a month it will be 800 ppm to more than 1,000 ppm.

Dilute the tea to 75 to 100 ppm and use it to drench the leafy or green vegetables at one liter per week.

For fruit vegetables, dilute the tea to 100-180 ppm (lower rate is used if the plants are still young) and drench at the rate of 1-1.5 liters per hill per week.

Insect pests can also be controlled with the use of leaves of oregano, mint, and jatropha; hot pepper fruits (siling labuyo); marigold flowers and leaves; euphorbia stem and leaves; fire plant leaves and flowers; and luyang dilaw tuber.

CLARRDEC recommends that to prepare botanical pesticide using these materials, weigh and chop one kilogram of material to be used then add two liters of distilled water before blending.

Ferment the solution for 24 hours. Squeeze off the solid particles in fine cloth. To be more effective, prepare the extract a day before spraying, it advised.

With a knapsack sprayer, spray the extract to runoff on plants at weekly interval. Dilute four cups of the extracts in 16 liters of water to produce one spray load of solution at 16 liters. — Rudy Fernandez