Booster Teas For Cannabis Growth

Are you growing with organic nutrients, or have you built your own soil mix and mainly feed water only? You may want to look at these two recipes to brew your soil a nice booster tea. No, we haven’t lost the plot or gone down the hippy rabbit hole – your plants will absolutely thank you for it. 

What Your Cannabis Plants Need

Plants require different N-P-K ratios during the veg and bloom cycles. Overloading the plant with nitrogen when it is in the flowering stage isn’t going to help you yield lots of tasty flowers, and giving too little in veg will stunt your growth, and you will produce very little. So we need to strike the correct balances at different stages of the growth cycle. Potassium and phosphorus are necessary for making flowering sites and fruiting.

The Benefits of Booster Teas

When we make these plant/soil teas, we use aerobic stimulation to activate the microbes and catalyse the fermentation process before our ingredients enter the soil. We could just mix it up in the water or sprinkle the ingredients on top and water them in – but this would be a much slower availability for the plant’s roots to access. We want to deliver readily available compounds to the roots. So, taking this in mind, you will want to get an air pump, air line, and a bubble stone in your grow room arsenal. 

As with all tea, you will need some kind of bag to act as a strainer to keep the bulk of the sediment out of the solution. You can use a pair of old tights or a sock if you want to keep it on a budget – or you can buy a specific bag for it that has a mesh size designed to allow the protozoa and beneficial microbes to pass through. 

Protozoa are a microorganism that helps with the mineralisation of nutrients to become available to the plants through the roots. They feed on bacteria and fungi, creating useful decomposed material. Over 1600 different types have been documented, and they are essential for the soil food web. Worms feast on protozoa, so we will be utilising earthworm castings (EWC) as a base for our teas. 

Microbe Activation

When aerating our tea brews, it’s a good idea to give it at least 24 hours to activate. You can dip into it earlier, say 12 or 18 hours, but to get the best of it, 24-48 hours is recommended. You’ll notice the froth forming at the top of your bucket or water tank. This is the enzymes, amino acids, carbohydrates and signs of biological processes taking place. In other words, it’s good news. Great work!

Another factor you may want to consider when preparing your water is the temperature. The tea will brew and activate much more effectively around the 21-24C mark. If you are not yet monitoring your water temperature, I highly suggest you grab a water temp probe. If your water is going below 18C, you should think about getting a water tank heater available in different volume sizes. Make sure you get the right size for your tank. I prefer the metal cased ones as it leaves less room for human error when putting a slightly too warm glass water heater in water that is too cold – CRACK – science class flashback. Make sure that your root zones are not getting too cold at any stage, such as lights off. 

Getting Familiar with the Ingredients

If you’ve been building your own soil or adding organic amendments throughout the grow cycle already, you will probably recognise a number of all of these ingredients. If you don’t already have them on hand, you can find a few soil building websites in the UK and the US that carry tried and tested ingredients. Alternatively, you can search the web for more options, or even better, search your local community to see if you can keep it as local as possible. 

When you understand the principles of what you are doing, you can design your own tea recipe based on the ingredients you have available. Higher nitrogen-containing elements are desired in your veg recipe, and higher phosphorus and potassium-containing ingredients for your bloom tea. This may involve you carrying out some research into what each of the ingredients you’re thinking about using contain so you can calculate how much you might want to put in. But that is one of the great joys of hobby growing – you get to try things out and learn as you go – who knows what you may discover!

Many gardeners love to keep things simple by only using 3 or 4 ingredients. Others have spent time perfecting different blends. It is entirely up to you, but my advice would be to start simple, add things a little at a time, and remove something next time if you don’t like the results.

Ingredients for two Different Teas

Advice on feeding these would be every 2-3 weeks. When it comes to flower, an initial tea at the start will give it a boost and then no later than week 6 for an 8 or 9-week strain. If you are reading your plants well, though, and it is a plant you have grown before, you will have a better idea of how hungry they can get.

When adding the molasses, a tip is to use a hot water jug to loosen the viscosity. If you put this in cold or room temperature water, it will take a very long time to dissolve into the solution. This will waste precious time feeding the microbes. Molasses also add carbohydrates, magnesium, iron and potassium, so it is an all-around great component – make sure you get the most out of it and don’t end up with a thick black sludge at the bottom of your bucket/water tank. 

Veg Tea Mix

Earthworm Castings

Alfalfa

Stinging Nettle

Bat Guano (High Nitrogen)

Kelp/Seaweed

Insect Frass

Spirulina

Crab Meal

Blackstrap Molasses 

Bloom Tea Mix

Earthworm Castings

Bat Guano (High Phosphorus)

Insect Frass

Spirulina

Seabird Guano

Blackstrap Molasses 

Sulphate of Potash

Instructions

Makes 20 litres of tea

Booster Teas For Cannabis : Basic Veg Tea Recipe

In your strainer bag/sock

100g Earthworm Castings

100g Bat Guano (High N)

Suspended in 

20l dechlorinated/RO water

50ml Liquid Seaweed

3 tbsp Molasses 

Booster Teas For Cannabis : Basic Bloom Tea Recipe

In your strainer bag

100g Earthworm Castings

100g Bat Guano (High P)

50g Sulphate of Potash

Suspended in 

20l dechlorinated/RO water

50ml Liquid Seaweed

5 tbsp Molasses 

If you want to take things up another level, you can try out this recipe. 

Booster Teas For Cannabis : Expert Veg Tea Recipe

In your strainer bag/sock

100g Earthworm Castings

100g Bat Guano (High N)

Dried Stinging Nettle 50g/100g fresh

Dried Alfalfa 50g/100g fresh

50g Crab Meal

50g Insect Frass

20g Spirulina 

Suspended in 

20l dechlorinated/RO water

50ml Liquid Seaweed

3 tbsp Molasses 

Booster Teas For Cannabis : Expert Bloom Tea Recipe 

In your strainer bag

100g Earthworm Castings

100g Bat Guano (High P)

Dried Stinging Nettle 50g/100g fresh

Dried Alfalfa 50g/100g fresh

100g Insect Frass

20g Spirulina

50g Sulphate of Potash

Suspended in 

20l dechlorinated/RO water

50ml Liquid Seaweed

5 tbsp Molasses