Plants too, need tea...

Breakfast, they say, is the most important meal of the day. In this part of the world, breakfast is incomplete without a good cup of tea.

Well, according to members of the Kyambogo University Agriculture Students Association, plants too, need tea. Members of the Agriculture Students' Association at the university have come developed a unique recipe, dubbed "plant tea", exclusively for plants.

The main ingredients of this this "tea" are nitrogenous plants such as Wandering Jew and leguminous plants. Cereals like maize, elephant grass can also be used as ingredients.

"These plants derive nutrients from the soil, and retain them. For you to recycle those nutrients you need to get these plants, cut them in smaller pieces, after chopping them, you put them in water," Balaam Twinamatsiko, a member of the association how one makes the "tea."

"You then get wood ash and some little urine whether from animals even from human beings. You need the urine to speed up the fermentation process, after fermenting for two weeks; it means that all the nutrients have been sucked from the plants by the water."

After sieving the water, you have yourself a "plant tea." Even after sieving, you cannot apply the plant tea directly because it is too concentrated. You have to dilute it.

"If you have one cup of plant tea, you get two cups of water and dilute it. If you are going to apply this tea to a banana plantation, you have to measure one foot from the banana plant, because that is the feeding area."

After digging a hole, you need to cover the hole with soil.

Twinamatsiko says results are visible within three months, and for smaller plants like vegetables, the results are visible much earlier.

Keeping it organic

The biggest advantage of using this "plant tree" to nourish plants is because it is organic, and every farmer can do this by themselves, says Twinamatsiko.

"This tea does not cause any harm to plants, because after the plant has consumed whatever it needs, everything else decomposes in the ground because it is organic. Inorganic fertilizers do not always decompose."

Are you thinking of giving your plant some tea?