Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Fun with Fertilizer

This weekend I was in Farmer D's picking up some worms for my worm composter. While perusing the shelves, I saw some fish based organic fertilizer and I picked up one of the pamphlets. The stuff is called "Neptune's Harvest" and it looks like this:
As I'm looking online at this wonder fertilizer once I get home, I see the price for a gallon. $30 or more, depending on where you get it. I am sure it works like a charm, because we know that Native Americans taught the pilgrims about using fish as fertilizer. Unfortunately for Neptune, I don't have that kind of money to buy liquefied fish for my plants.  Enter . . . a truly brilliant idea.

Maybe.

I think I'm just going to whip up my own fish fertilizer. 

A web search reveals that one can indeed make their own fish fertilizer, all search results however, have a warning to the extent that making one's own fish fertilizer is not for the faint of heart, stomach, or nose. Is this warning a deterrent?

I think not.

Sounds more like a challenge to me so after work, I swung by the Dekalb Farmer's Market, and stopped by the seafood counter and bought some Wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon trimmings. Upon arriving home, Andrea is in the kitchen putting away dishes out of the dishwasher and I plunk this sack of fish chum down on the counter. She peeks in the bag, thinking I have brought home something delicious, looks confused by the contents and then I tell her my plan about fish fertilizer. She laughs at me and says I am always up to some mad scientist experiment and heads to the gym. 

I proceed to put my brilliant plan into action by whipping out the blender. It is not as easy to liquefy salmon cuttings as you would think and I am amazed the blender stood up to the task. I am sorry to report that I do not have any photos of this salmon smoothie I had just created. After pureeing the salmon, I dumped it into a 5 gallon bucket with shredded newspaper, pureed nori, a 1/2 cup of molasses and a bunch of dried tree leaves. Not too offensive at this point, but now I have to open the lid of the bucket and stir this mixture up every day for the next 2 weeks. We'll see how that goes.

5 comments:

  1. Please say you are keeping the bucket outside?

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  2. Yes, the bucket is most certainly living outside.

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  3. Did your online reference specify Wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon as the fertilizer fish of choice? Because maybe you could've got any old YDFM fish trimmings for free if you asked.

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  4. I can haz salmon smoothie? Kidding. And next time, get a photo, dammit!

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  5. GREAT idea, Julie! I will have to see if they have any giveaways for the next batch of fertilizer.

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