Cooked seed meal tea for seedlings

[outsiders71]

Since organic amendments take time to break down and generally work better in an outdoor environment, could you just boil the amendments to 1) sterilize and 2) extract the nutrition out of it? Then dilute water your seedlings with it? Haven't found anything regarding this.

[Suze]

I think boiling or even very hot water is going to likely kill a lot or all of the benefit of most organic amendments or ferts because you'd be killing the beneficial microorganisms.

I don't mean to sound too dogmatic, but why not just use something like a fish or seaweed emulsion if your desire is to feed seedlings organically?

The "nutrition" in many organic feeds relies heavily on microorganisms breaking it down (either in the product itself or in the soil), then making the nutrients available to the plants. Or, the nutrients in the product are fragile, and would likely be destroyed by high temps.

For example, the seaweed product (powder form) I sometimes use is not to be mixed with very hot water and it even says that on the label.

[eyolf]

I believe there are some organic concentrates available, and I've also heard of worm castings being used to make a "tea".

Cooking a seed meal product would do little or nothing for you. Seed meals work a little differently as a fertilizer: the soil microorganisms make essential nutrients in them available as they metabolize them. While some portion of these would be directly water soluble and available to feed microbes in your seedlings, I believe most of the value would be left in the "grounds".

[outsiders71]

So the hypothesis is that these seed meals have no nutrients at all without the presence of soil microbes? That none of the nutrients will get leached out via boiling? I'm not doubting or arguing that the seed meals will benefit the soil better if left to the microbes to digest, however I'm using a soil-less mix indoors. Thanks for the replies.