Grow Healthier Plants with Worm Tea
Organic soil care for home gardeners
Learn simple, proven ways to brew, apply, and troubleshoot worm tea so your soil stays alive and your plants thrive.
What is worm tea?
A microbe-rich liquid fertilizer made from vermicompost
Feeds the soil food web
Adds beneficial microbes that help plants access nutrients more efficiently.
Gentle, fast-acting support
Great for seedlings, containers, and stressed plants when used at the right dilution.
Supports resilience
Healthy soil biology can improve root growth and overall plant vigor.
Worm Tea Basics
New to worm tea? These are the questions we see most often from home gardeners.
While the technical term is vermicompost tea, “Worm Tea” is a simple, funny name to describe what it means to take the ‘natural output of what this surface-dwelling worm does ‘poop’ Red Worms make as they eat things like plants, fruits, vegetables, coffee grounds, grass clippings, etc., and turn them into worm castings: one of the most naturally accessible types of matter found in soil
While all plants need water, they also need more to stay healthy, grow and produce. A plant’s root system relies on a microscopic food chain in its soil that includes primary nutrients like nitrogen, phoshorous & potassium, secondary nutrients like calcium & magnesium, protozoa that eat bacteria, and beneficial nematodes that are microscopic worms that work the soil.
Worm tea provides, benefits & bolsters all of these needs (and more) to make plants healthy.
A healthy brew smells earthy (like soil). While it may take some getting used to at first, after a while many gardeners don’t notice a smell at all. However, if it smells rotten or sulfur-like, discard it because that means the good microbes have died and putting it in your soil may be harmful to your plants.
Most gardeners use it as a soil drench, which means dumping a large volume directly onto the soil. It’s like watering, but with a whole bunch of vitamins & nutrients in the mix.
Foliar sprays can be helpful too, as this limited application has specific benefits like treating pests, healing leaf diseases, etc. Spraying can be done with a regular spray bottle in the early morning or evening to avoid sunny conditions that lead to leaf burn. You will want to fill your bottle every time you apply foliar spray, as leaving it in the bottle over 24 hours will cause the microbes to die and your tea to become toxic to plants.
It depends on a variety of factors, such as the type of plants you’re feeding, how mature they are (seedlings don’t need as much as those with mature, growing fruit), and the condition of the soil.
Our Worm Tea Party Brewer uses it everyday in his garden year round, as its benefits are significant even during wintering. While a wet winter certainly helps keep plants alive year after year, rainwater alone doesn’t provide the type of healthy benefits worm tea does, especially in harsh conditions.
It is not recommended to store it, as it contains living organisms that die fairly quickly, so use it soon after brewing for best results. The whole point of worm tea is to help your soil with the good bacteria and microbes that flourish in freshly brewed tea.
If you must store it, keep it cool and aerated—stagnant storage can turn anaerobic and be harmful to your garden.