My tea,
2 cups castings
2 cups kelp meal
1 TBS fish hydrolysate
5 TBS molasses
5 gallons of RO.
36 hours of the fizzy bubbler.
Checked PH and it was 4.9, added 1 tsp potassium bicarbonate and check ten min later and was up to 5.7 and added a little more PB checked again and was at 6.5. A half hour later and was back to 4.9.
Is this PH level killing what I’m trying to produce? If so how can I adjust PH so that it will stick.?
It might be bio activity driving the pH down… but I keep looking at the RO water 
There isn’t any buffer in RO. Are you using RO because your domestic water is not suitable for the plants??
Cheers
G
Yes, my tap is in the 600’s.
I added silica to begin the tea and PH’d the water before adding anything else.
Fuck this, I did better in sunshine #4 and GH bottled nutes. For way less money and less work.
Are you running that at constant temps no ups and downs?Heat fluctuations will cause PH fluctuations when the heat in the water goes up and down.I cant use my bubble cloner in my house because it gets too hot and i dont have Forced air.I noticed then ph goes out of whack with the temp going up then back down again
No, tea is at 72.
I may have it now, a bunch of baking soda brought it to 7.0 which only fell by .1 after an hour.
Hopefully the biology will recover enough to be of some use to the plant.
Godspeed my friend
The tea is going anaerobic. Though it is being bubbled the amount of food in the mix is feeding a ton bacteria. The bacteria explode in population, eat up the oxygen and then their population crashes. The remaining microbes enjoy being in a low oxygen environment as well as an acidic environment. This is why the tea is most likely acidic.
Sorry i dont have any solution for you on the tea. But I will say that after doing a few teas when i starting using organic soil, i stopped. Was to much work to me. I just ditched the teas and just top dressed in more nutrients before i would need them. Seemed i could get the same benefits with top dressing.
Once a month or so i would water with Neptune harvest fish and seaweed.
Someone told me once… “just make the tea in your soil” 
I never looked back.
Ya pretty much what i got told…lol
I was just to coming back to say the same, I’m over it.
I got to say, I’m a little disappointed with how many wives tales are floating around in the Organic community. I had thought that organics was a more settled science.
Fungi tend to thrive in lower pH and create acidic conditions. Yeast is a fungus, for example, and yeast fermentation of sugar lowers pH. 4.9 is comfortable for many fungi. Bacteria tend to prefer a higher pH than that though there are many that tolerate a lower pH also.
Microbeman has a website that details a lot of good information about worm casting tea. I learned from there what to expect out of my small, cheap aquarium air pump - it can handle about .25-.5 gallons, more than that and it cannot supply enough oxygen to keep the solution aerobic.
Worm casting tea is a good way to maximize your microbes given a limited supply of worm castings.
Thanks for the tips, I read that site and bought a pump that outputs 2.5CFH or 70 litters an hour. I’m running two 5 inch diffusers in two 5 gallon buckets filled half way.
You’re absolutely right. Everything mainstream organic is full of old-wives tales and dudes like Jeremy from Build a Soil do nothing but perpetuate those myths.
Teas are not necessary. Flat out.
If you want real organic science then run some soil testing and amend your soil per Albrecht standards. Everything else is foo foo.
At the same time, use tap water instead of RO and the alkalinity will balance out the acidity. Simple solution. I wouldn’t use potassium bicarbonate unless you’re trying to slam the K. Worm castings has lots of K already.
I’ve backed off of last night’s rant.
I’m actually interested in the science, I would like to apply this stuff to my landscape plants. Especially something that would help my tree’s deal with summer heat.
My water comes from either a well or from an irrigation canal here in Yuma, normally the canal, our water is 92 degrees out the tap, reeks of chlorine and is full of salts from farming. Most have RO systems and those that don’t buy their water at roadside coin op RO dispensers, there are hundreds of them.
Maybe I’m working with a bad ingredient?
