Nettle Tea

I've had a bucket of nettles sitting under my water tank, since Autumn. As it is Spring now, I've bottled it up and am using it as part of a 1/20 dilution (with added seaweed tea, and worm tea) to water my plants. When I researched it, people talked about not doing it if there were seeds on the plant, and cutting the roots off. All sorts of complicated nonsense, with no reason why it would be a problem. I just push as many nettle plants in a bucket as I can fit, then add water, and tie a cloth over the top to prevent fruit flies getting in, and then leave it.

Then I take a cut off 2.25L coca cola bottle as a funnel, and use that and some old mutton cloth to sieve the resulting green liquid into empty plastic milk bottles. The coke bottle funnel fits in there perfectly, and the mutton cloth collects the seeds, which I scatter somewhere so I can get even more nettle at later date. The more the better! I go through this stuff too quickly.

Acquiring Seaweed

I've been bottling my nettle tea, which has been sitting festering away for the past six months, and wanted to extend my natural fertiliser selection by adding seaweed. So I headed down to the beach out from Winchester (the east coast), and gathered seaweed. Walking half a kilometre each way, I gathered two ute loads, which are either soaking or have already been bottled.

The south view down the beach. There's a dead seal there somewhere, so don't look too hard. Hopefully you can't see it in the photo.

The beach entry point.

The north view down the beach.

Unfortunately, I've been too lazy to take a photo of the bottled seaweed tea. Or the pile of seaweed which is in the backyard. Or the citrus I poured it over which have become damaged, likely from the salt. But I've fertilised the garlic, beans, peas, cauliflower, chickpeas and so forth, and they've started coming away nicely.