Garden Witches' Brew: A Midsummer Plant Boost
Living close to the land helped me embrace my inner witch (which is a longer story for another post,) but trust me this intuition and craftiness with using natural elements reaches way back into our ancestry. It's the end of June here in Rimrock, and Phillis and I spent an afternoon over Earl Grey tea (with oat milk, infused with lavender we'd just harvested) doing what we do every few weeks this time of year — brewing up a batch of our garden witches' brew.
We drink tea while we make tea for the plants. It feels right.
This one's become a staple around the farm. It's not fancy, it's not expensive, and most of what's in it is either homemade or something we'd have used anyway. Think of it as an immune tonic — the kind of vitamin mix your naturopath keeps telling you to take, but for your dahlias.
How We Make It
Everything starts with rainwater. It's already carrying more minerals and nutrients than anything from a tap — even a little nitrogen, straight from the sky. If you've got even a small rain barrel, that's your base.
From there, it's kelp, calcium, molasses, fish fertilizer, and weed tea — five simple things that, together, do a lot of quiet work:
Kelp builds roots and eases transplant shock. If you only ever do one thing for your plants, do kelp.
CAL (our homemade calcium, made the Korean Natural Farming way from eggshells and vinegar) builds strong cell walls — the "highways" that let nutrients move through the whole plant.
Molasses feeds the microbes on the surface of the leaves, giving them a whole team to lean on.
Fish fertilizer brings nitrogen for leaf and stem growth, right when the plants need to bulk up before bloom.
Weed tea, made from months of fermented weeds sitting in rainwater, returns all the calcium, magnesium, and minerals those weeds mined out of our soil in the first place.
A scoop of worm castings on top is a nice bonus if you've got it — but everything above already does the heavy lifting.
The Proof Was in the Dahlias
Our dahlias had been eaten down to almost nothing this spring. We administered the brew, and within a week they shot back up, full, green and healthy. That's really the whole pitch.
It's also what we use on every plant we grow in our nursery — no synthetic fertilizers to induce a fast bloom and then crash once they hit the ground. This tea helps our build strength naturally and establish without shock.
When and How We Use It
We spray early in the morning or at dusk, when the stomata on the leaves are open and the plant can actually take the nutrients in. There's a nice side effect, too — plants sprayed this way seem to get left alone by pests, because the brew leaves behind a kind of barrier, actually feeding the microbes on the leaves so they can do their work to protect the plants!
You can apply it with a watering can as a soil drench, or with a backpack sprayer as a foliar feed.
Want the full recipe card, with exact measurements and step-by-step instructions for the brew, the weed tea, and the homemade calcium? HERE IS THE LINK TO THE FULL RECIPE or sit down with a cup of tea and watch us brew it on YouTube.
May your plants feel pampered and proliferate.
— Kate and Phillis