I have been gardening this block for 5 years, not an enormous time, but I don’t use animal products to fertilise I just use compost/mulching/weed tea/and cover crops.
Everything seems fine. Yet every gardening show or whatever will be like “slather that manure and blood and bone on each year, use fish emulsion, fucking sacrifice your firstborn on that shit”. Am I an idiot or do you just not need to do any of that?
edit: not looking for the peanut gallery. Interested in opinions from people who don’t use animal products and what their experience has been.
You could try with some (treated) urine to get some extra potassium into the soil. In combination with terra-preta charcoal for nutrient storage it can really help soil fertility.
But you are probably lucky and have good soil for which compost and mulch is sufficient.
It’s all a sham. There’s so much blood and bone that needs to be sold so it gets put in fertiliser and a bunch of other crap. No need to put commercialised corpse in your garden, but you may want to reconsider readding your first-born. I had great success with my garden going that route…
100% a way to squeeze more profit out of all the murdering.
spoiler
Tina Hull specializes in making small farms profitable and is a recognized authority in organic fertilizer, according to the following article in the Commodity Futures Trader. And while the fish processing industry is looking for ways of utilizing the inedible waste from their plants for ever higher purposes, some material may be best suited for the production of agricultural fertilizer- liquid, fish emulsion organic fertilizer.
Once again, we need to repeat that organic growers need not worry that fish emulsion fertilizer is depleting our oceans of the important Menhaden fish or other fish that people need for food. Fish emulsion if primarily made from fish waste of the established animal feed and fish oil industries, which would have been dumped in landfills if not used.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956053X20303913
Fish industries generate a substantial amount of FW (fish waste). Depending on the level of processing or type of fish, 30–70% of the original fish is FW.
The amount of FW available in Norway for production of fertilizers may facilitate the establishment of an industrial product that can replace the currently common use of dried poultry manure from conventional farming in organic farming.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3614052/
Efficient utilization of by-products has direct impact on the economy and environmental pollution of the country. Non-utilization or under utilization of by-products not only lead to loss of potential revenues but also lead to the added and increasing cost of disposal of these products
Waste products from the poultry processing and egg production industries must be efficiently dealt with as the growth of these industries depends largely on waste management.
The United States Dept. of Agriculture Economic Research Service has found that 11.4% of the gross income from beef is from the by-products. The figure for pork is 7.5%.
Meat and bone meal (MBM) was widely recommended and used in animal nutrition as a protein source in place of proteinaceous feeds because of its content of available essential amino acids, minerals and vitamin B12. MBM and related rendered protein commodities have potential for use in applications other than animal feed, including use as a fuel or a phosphorus fertilizer
I don’t use animal products intentionally. I can’t know for certain if soil I buy contains compost that includes animal manure, but other than that nope.
It’s really hard to find compost but if you don’t need the bulk and you just need the PKN, synthetics are readily available. We’ve been growing plants specialty to compost so that we can get that bulky material to add to our heavy clay soil.
Personally I use synthetic on houseplants and alfalfa meal/kelp meal outside.
Yeah I use synthetics inside as healthy living soil in a pot long term is hard.
Our council hooks people who don’t compost with people who do. So between an overgrown garden and the street I have plenty.
That’s amazing! Most of my neighbors just have grass on their land and leave the clippings there but I should definitely ask around. We have municipal compost but I compost everything that I can at home.
Yeah I have mixed opinions on my council after they had a vegan hate fest when one member suggested they live their goal of a green council by not serving animal products at events.
But some of the initiatives are defs v cool.
You’ll probably have the answer in another five years…
Much will depend on the soil you inherited and the crops you plant.
