IF your compost is completely done, i.e. nice dark brown crumbly stuff, you can make a 'tea' out of it and use it as a mild fertilizer, David. But there's no telling what you'd get using compost that's not done.
Especially since you had that old pile with all the stinky stuff going on, I'd hold off on trying to use any of it for compost tea at least until it's done. This gardening thing, it takes a lot of patience.
In addition, there's no guarantee what your plants are getting when you use compost tea. That's why fertilizer bags say on the labels "Guaranteed analysis" which means for sure your plants are getting the Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium plus the trace minerals. For now, you should break down and buy a little bit of organic fertilizer that suits your needs (what plants you are growing) to be sure you're not going to burn, starve or poison them while you experiment and learn.
The compost itself is really a soil amendment, used for adding those important cellulose fibers to the soil to add nutrient and moisture retention. The cellulose fibers in your compost act like tiny sponges that retain water, and as they dry, shrink a bit to allow air into the soil. The valuable soluble nutrients in compost are used up by the plants or washed away by rain and irrigation quite quickly. So, while we'd love to think we can just feed our plants with compost, unless you have vast amounts (and none of us ever have enough
) it's not going to supply enough nutrients for most plants.
