Worm Farming - Aerated Worm Tea vs Leachate a Must Read.

I am going to discuss the difference between worm tea and leachate since this is a big topic in the worm industry and many people go by calling it all worm tea or cute names like worm wee. This is all confusion in the market from suppliers that want to sell worm bins with the impression that they produce worm tea. There is no worm bin on the market that produces worm tea. Any bin you see with a collection, spigot, or nozzle on it is collecting the leachate from the worm bins not worm tea.

Worm tea is aerated and made with finished worm castings along with a feed source for the microbes depending on if you are making fungal worm tea or bacterial worm tea and that is decided not only by you and for what you are brewing it for but also by what type of castings you have. A casting made with mostly manure style feed stock will make a great bacterial tea but not so great fungal tea but adding things like fresh top soil from a forested area that is high in carbon from leaf decay can produce a lot better quality fungal tea as opposed to a bacterial tea. Their are also lots of things that can be added into the brew to change or super charge the outcome but at the end of the day "worm tea" is aerated with finished castings and actually brewed for anywhere from 24 hours up to 72 hours for some brews at lower temps which allows you to have more dissolved oxygen to feed higher counts of microbes. There are many simple worm tea recipes online that are super easy and can be done with an air stone and a bucket to ones that have many ingredients and brewing techniques but they all have one thing in common that makes them worm tea and that is they are aerated and made from finished castings.

Leachate is neither made from finished castings or aerated it is usually just collected from the bottom of the bin, preferably fresher the better, and diluted with water and then added to whatever it is being used on. The catch with leachate is it has a higher chance of phytotoxins and dangerous pathogens since it is essentially just run off water from your bins and anything in it that is still unprocessed. I always discourage people from using leachate especially from bins that have manure as a feedstock because of the chance of what you are collecting in the leachate from the unprocessed feedstock. Also a bin that produces leachate is usually from either overfeeding or overwatering and is usually, but not always, too wet. I will admit some people do have good results using leachate on their plants since it can contain useful nutrients that have seeped from the castings but also some people have experienced killing their plants or getting different types of diseases from using leachate. My personal opinion on this is if you are producing leachate from the bin then you are potentially robbing your finished castings from nutrients that are being seeped out into the leachate from the bin being overly wet. There is information on the internet on how to use leachate from people that do use it with good results but since I do not use it I don't indorse using it and at lest suggest using it on ornamental plants only and not on food crops but that is just my suggestion and if you are going to use it then at lest do some research on how to use it safely.

My rule on leachate is pretty simple and that is if you don't know the difference between leachate and worm tea then you should not be using leachate but if you want to do some research and educate yourself on leachate then you have all the information you need to make your own informed decisions.

I really hope that this has helped anyone with any confusion on this topic.