Compost Tea Sprayer
How to Modify a Boom Sprayer Into a Compost Tea Sprayer
Purpose built compost tea sprayers are quite expensive. So to reduce costs we purchased a less expensive boom sprayer and modified it for compost for the cost of a couple of hundred dollars and some elbow grease.
The sprayer in the above picture is a 50 gallon Scorpion 3pt hitch sprayer, which cost around $1000 CAD. This sprayer had folding booms on either side of the fixed bar and screened nozzles which would plug up very quickly when strained compost tea was used in the sprayer. To resolve the issue of clogged nozzles two Boominator nozzles were purchased. These nozzles spray left and right of the sprayer rather than spraying grass between the rows. Boominator makes a variety of nozzles and you can pick whatever suits your needs.
The brass mount for the nozzle was also picked up at the same time as the nozzles. A trip to the hardware store was needed to purchase the ball valves (in case you want to turn off spraying on one side), hose, clamps and anything else that was needed.
Since we do not dilute our compost tea and our compost tea brewer is 50 gallons this system works out quite well for us. We have sprayed several hundred gallons to date without any issues with this sprayer. Although the Boominator nozzles will allow fairly large particles to pass through them you do need to strain the compost tea through an 800 mesh screen to ensure that really large particles do not clog the nozzles or damage the pump.
If there are any questions, please drop us a message.