Organic Gardening – Can mosquito larvae breed in manure tea?

Ok, so you’ve started making tea with buckets full of manure with water on top. But you’ve begun to wonder: is it possible for mosquitoes to breed in tea?

Well, the truth is that mosquitoes require surface tension in order to lay eggs. The bubbling water created by aerating the tea should generally prevent mosquitoes from laying their eggs inside.

But what if you’re not aerating the tea? Well, if you don’t aerate, then you’re creating a concoction that will encourage anaerobic organisms like fecal coliforms and E coli. Due to the fact that anaerobes don’t exhale carbon dioxide but instead exhale sulfur, methanes, and alcohols, you’ll end up creating ammoniacal acid, alcoholic mixtures that will burn your plants and possibly encourage the growth of pathogenic bacteria.

The best rule of thumb when it comes to compost tea is: if it smells bad, don’t use it. Even if it smells a bit bad (sulphurous, alcoholic, ammoniacal, etc.), you should not use it on your plants, as it will do more harm than good.

If you end up with bad tea like this, you can put it in the compost heap, as long as you turn it every day until the smell is gone.

Like everything when it comes to successful organic gardening, there is a right way and a wrong way to compost. If you do it the right way, you can look forward to lots of nice, fresh vegetables to dig up and eat later.