What's manure tea?

Welcome to my new blog!  I live way out in the country in an old house built in 1804 which I'm trying to restore.  I have four dogs, four horses, 24 hens, one rooster, and 9 guinea hens.  I once kept a cookbook only because it had a recipe calling for 26 eggs because I figured I could make that anytime I wanted.  I also have a large vegetable garden, and from year to year have had some successes with it and some failures. What succeeds seems to be different every year, but I consistently fail with zucchini of all things.  I hate squash vine borers!  I want to share some of the experiences I'm having out here on my farm, with all these animals, an old house and a garden and maybe get some ideas from you.  I really want to learn to grow my own food, and to learn more about the farmers around me who are doing interesting things to produce high quality food for a local market.  Their efforts are helping to preserve farmland and a way of life at the same time they are helping us to get back to a way of eating that's more responsible and more delicious!  My old house has always been part of a farm and farming was the way the people who built it made their living.  I want to restore not just the building but the way of life that it has always known, so learning about different foods people are producing on their small farms is interesting to me and I hope it will be interesting to you too.   

So what is manure tea?  Frankie, the guy who cuts my hay, was telling me that he grew these amazing tomatoes last year and that he did it with manure tea.  His tomato plants got so big he had to brace the cages to support them.  And he didn't just have great plants either.  Those plants were loaded with tomatoes.  What he did was cut out the bottom of plastic milk jugs, stuck the mouth of the jug into the ground, put some manure in it and filled it with water. Voila!  Manure tea!  I thought, gosh, I have all these horses and chickens making manure every day whether I ask them or not, so I'm trying it this year with my tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant and it's working great.  My tomato plants have really jumped and have so many tomatoes.  Score one for the home team!  I was telling my daughter about it (she lives in the big city!) and we had a funny conversation about the state of my life.  Manure tea- why don't I think it's gross?  She clearly struggled to grasp my excitement.  But as she tells her friends, my mom used to shop at Bergdorf's, but now she shops at Tractor Supply!  Things change.