organic vegan garden fertilizer?
Posted by ungreen on Feb 10, 2007 · Member since Jan 2004 · 152 posts
Hi Everyone,
I already compost, but I'm wondering whether others have found additional nice things to do for their gardens. All the commercial organic fertilizers I've seen have chicken blood and bone meal and things in them, which I'm definitely not interested in putting on my garden...
Any ideas for how to grow big, healthy, organic vegan plants would be much appreciated!!!
do you live near the coast? seaweed is great stuff. you could try making this. alternatively, look for a commercially prepared liquid seaweed concentrate which avoids those ingredients you do not wish to employ.
Seaweed & Comfrey Liquid Fertiliser
Use a food-grade plastic drum with a lid. Fill loosely with seaweed and a few bundles of comfrey leaves. Cover with water, filling to the top. Keep covered and leave until liquid is dark in colour. Dilute to form a pale liquid and use as a foliar feed (using spray application) or water into the soil. When liquid is used up, tip sediment onto the compost or garden beds.
*may also be made with seaweed alone.
enjoy your garden ungreen. and its fruits. in my experience, gardening is hugely therapeutic.
cheers!
rebecca
Seeds of Change have a vegan fertilizer.
My family used to do organic farming and the best thing that I can prescribe is grass clipping. The mistake that most people make with these amazing things is they compost them before they put them in their garden. The best way to use them is is after you plant your plants put them thickly around the base of the plant. We would put them up to 6 or 8 inches deep. The reason this is better is a) less time and effort, b)no more weeding, c)natural pest control, d)less watering. We had a deal with a couple of local landscaping companies that they would bring out truckloads of the stuff and for free. It was like gold to us. Every year the soil would get blacker and more lush. We usually had between 400 and 800 tomato plants and they would grow to about 8 feet or taller and produce more tomatoes than I have ever seen one plant grow. So collect your clippings and your neighbors and any one else you can convince to save them.
BTW, I think that corn was the only plant that we didn't use this on.
Could the grass clippings have been doused in fertilizer..hence their effective-ness? I know around where I live, people fertilize their lawn like no tomorrow. We don't....so if we used our own lawn clippings, should I expect the great results you got?
Thanks, you guys, these are all awesome ideas that I can't wait to try out! I do live near the coast, and so have access to seaweed, I'll look for Seeds of Change, and will see what I can do about getting ahold of some grass clippings (I don't have a lawn, but feel sure that I can find someone who does who'd happily give up the clippings). Super cool.
I use Seeds of Change seeds for my organic garden. Here's there website...They have a geat catalog as well. :)
http://www.seedsofchange.com/default.asp
Absolutely! The grass itself actually has tons of nutrients in it and it also has the: water retention, pest control, and weed stopper properties. Where we lived very few people treated their lawns regularly. I don't know why, it might have been that it was a rural town. There were less than 5,000 people, and 15 years ago the ultra lawn was not as popular. We also got most of our clippings from our own property which I know was not touched by comercial fertilizer. We kept about a 15 acre field just for this purpose. The trick is to get it as thick as you can. Do a test where you grow some plants w/ it and some w/o it and you will be amazed too.
Since i have a crew of chickens, we've found chicken poop to be one of the BEST fertilizers ever! We grew potatoes last year in "used" chicken hay..OMG they were HUGE! I had a few that were so large I needed 2 hands to hold them. The nice thing about the chicken poo fertilizer, with 7 chickens it's a never ending supply ;D .
Of course..youll have to first get a small flock of chickens...
Yknow I might start bundling up the used chicken hay and selling it as natural humane fertilizer!
If you have access to bat guano, it is the best fertilizer around!!!! Holy bat guano, Batman ;D
Those are interesting ideas, but I don't think chickens would be very happy on my townhouse's balcony... Although bats might do ok. My neighbors, thogh, would probably not do ok! ;D When I'm out of school and have a house with a yard I'd love to rescue all kinds of animals, so chickens are a definite possibility! I'll keep "chicken hay" in mind ;)
Also the feathers chickens and other birds lose when they moult are highly thought of here in Europe for compost.
Adopt a horse...fertilizer problem solved. :D
Ok--bare with me here--I have a weird thought.
Isn't animal waste considered an animal product...? I mean, you don't have the animal's permission to use his/her crap. Some animals use crap for communicating. Some eat their crap for nutrients. Maybe their crap is a comfort to them to have around? (Stupid story: I had a hamster once, and whenever I cleaned some of her crap out of her enclosure she got really sullen for three or four days....did she miss her own crap?! I left enough in so she could eat some...but w/e.....hamsters eat their crap for nutrients....fyi.)
I guess I just see animal poo as the same as animal flesh, eggs, milk, honey....just another thing that comes from an animal, that I don't have the right to take and use for my own purposes. :-\
If you let poo accumulate inside a chicken coop, they will get sick and die..amonia builds up..god forbid one is sick, has parasites etc..their coops need to be cleaned 1x per week and santized every month.
..so what am I to do with the piles of bird poop hay that accumulate in my yard when it's a good useful fertilizer for the garden that feeds not only us but our chickens?
I think that's a bit extreme to count a waste product as an "animal product"...I mean I can understand not buying manure from a farm shop because the cows are probably mistreated..but I know how my chickens are treated.
I agree with Majicka. I understand that you may feel uncomfortable using animal poop as fertilizer, but as far as Majicka's case is concerned, I do not feel it is an animal rights issue. And not that you are implying this (maybe, maybe not), but I definitely do not see it as an 'unvegan' practice.
since we're talkin about animal poop and by-products here, I have something to ask: Why shouln't I use honey? Other than it is an animal product. We need bees to pollinate all of our fruits and veggies. Are bees treated inhumanly in the production of honey?
yes bees are treated inhumanely.
They're crushed, burned, and sometimes starved to name a few. Plus the aggravation and torment they must face everytime their home is broken into!
Bees make honey to feed other bees. Just like cows make milk. They're a living being
I understand that you may feel uncomfortable using animal poop as fertilizer, but as far as Majicka's case is concerned, I do not feel it is an animal rights issue.
Using it as fertilizer doesn't bother me, however that "interesting" coffee that is made with beans that have gone thru an animal's digestive tract--now that bothers me! ;D Not as an animal rights issue, just because--eeew! ::)
Using it as fertilizer doesn't bother me, however that "interesting" coffee that is made with beans that have gone thru an animal's digestive tract--now that bothers me! ;D Not as an animal rights issue, just because--eeew! ::)
Huh? I've never heard that!!! And here i thought I was being a good girl by roasting my own coffee beans....
http://www.animalcoffee.com/
Check the link out, ramabanana, I couldn't believe it either. Now, I love a good cuppa joe, but no thankyou!
http://www.animalcoffee.com/
Check the link out, ramabanana, I couldn't believe it either. Now, I love a good cuppa joe, but no thankyou!
I don't mean to be close minded, but eew, gross!
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