I have been doing compost tea regularly, it's a great way to extend coverage of your vermicompost. But I'm missing an ingredient that seems to be very popular with making fungal dominant compost tea: fish hydrolysate (fish amino acid). The reason was I didn't want to spend more money on this pretty expensive liquid.

So today I thought I could try and make my own. I regularly go fishing and last season I brought back some bait fish that I was going to use but never got around to do it, there were some fish that we also forgot in the freezer. So I have my main ingredient, the fish :-). Most recipes are also using a lacto bacillus serum to break down the fish using enzyme, but I don't have any (this is another project for the future). But I have seen some videos of people using just compost, molasses and a bit of yeast and I have all those ingredient at hand, replacing compost with worm compost. So I'm giving it a try.

So I added old frozen Bream, Flathead and Yellow Tail Scad in a plastic container. Then I went harvesting some vermicompost from Quasimodo, my wooden worm box and collected about 10 Litres (2.6 gallons).

The worm compost was added to the container with the fish in it. I then added half a tea spoon of yeast and 250ml (about 1 cup) of molasses that I disolved in 2L of rain water. I added more water to fill about 2/3 of the container.

The container was then covered a paint strainer material to keep bugs away and create a little gap when I will cover it for air to come in.

I then used a 5 L bucket which fits very nicely into the container. The bucket is used to hold Zeolite rock dust but it will do just well as a lid for my project.

With the bucket on top, there is just enough gap for air to get in but that will keep the flies at bay. After the whole night, I went and check the setup and there was no bad smell, I could only smell molasses. There were small bubbles, so I guess the fermentation has started?

I will now have to wait about 2 weeks to a month for the process to complete. I will stir up the stuff every evening after work to aerate a bit. Fingers crossed.