The Plant Pub: Fertilizer Beverages

Ah! It's been so refreshing yesterday, the intense heat that's been on my patio for so long finally broke through. I rolled up my bamboo shades and let the little plant babies take in some cool sprinkle of rain. I don't think the peppers really like this different weather. It's more atypical for this time of year though. 

I can go on for ever about what's actually in the rain. All the pollution in the atmosphere being brought down in the form of water, how it's slightly acidic from the emissions from the city and what not. But to be honest, that's not all that intense here in this specific patch of the world (it rains so often, nothing really sits in the atmosphere too long). Now if I were back in Colorado, I'd be highly over protective of the rain water in my plants. I'd much rather collect the rain and snow in barrels and purify it however that's illegal in Colorado (*face palm* omg, back to this). Sometime at the end of the season I will be eating part of these plants and whatever toxins they take in, my body will take in too. Some people don't think about that and what the huge agricultural companies are putting onto the produce as pesticides and fertilizers. Some of it is really dangerous and only now are

actual image from my facebook feed

some of the information about them coming out to the public. Everyday I see more and more posts about them on facebook and twitter showing proof that there are people who are educating themselves on the matter. And that makes me rather proud and happy. There are still some amazing ignorance that persists throughout all the information and proof...that or they're aware but don't care. I'll save the GMO rant for another article. It's getting closer and closer to the 25th of May and there's something special happening on that day (no, not my birthday). 

But as I said in my Quest for Organic Pesticide article, There are many at home remedies for taking care of unwanted pests in the garden. There's just as many ways to do this for fertilizer too. I mentioned in the Memory Reflections post that a lot of nutrients from the soil are not returned because the produce and plant is shipped out to the consumers. I am growing primarily in pots and buckets (BP free plastic buckets) so I don't have to really worry about this so much. I just get a medium planter soil that has a lot of peat moss mixed with forest compost. It says 'organic soil' but how much can you really trust labels these days? My starters like the mix though, the peat moss helps hold in the moisture they need and it's soft enough to let baby roots quickly penetrate the soil. I've looked up lots of information about starting a worm compost for when my gardening really takes off, but my partner has concerns about potential smell of rotting stuff bothering the neighbors. We are after all in a confined apartment space and I'm already kind of breaking the rules with my bamboo shades. 

We were laughing the other day cause there was a leaf company that comes and cleans out the gutters and takes the leaves and gunk with them and then right across the street was a mulch company who buys that gutter gunk from the company across the street, turn it to mulch and compost and sell it back to us in the form of composted soil mix. Lovely little ironic system going on there huh? It's so silly. What you can do for yourself, why not do it? I always hear the excuse that no one has the time to do it. Well, honestly gardening doesn't take that much of your time to do. The plants aren't going anywhere in anytime soon.    

Aquaponic Garden

There was something that came up not too long ago when I first started talking about the gardening to my partner. He mentioned the Aqua-ponic garden. One where you farm fish of some kind (tilapia or catfish normally) and the phosphoric acid waste of the fish poo is filtered up to a layer of tanks where plants have their roots right in the water instead of soil. The plants filter out the fishy wastes as nutrients they can absorb and the cleaned up water returns to the fish tank. It's a very interesting cycle that is almost 100% self sufficient. The only part where it needs some intense care is getting set up in the first step. Which, I can recommend a store here that actually specializes in selling the equipment, yep the Portland Hydroponic & Organic shop. I didn't start talking about this with the guys running the store the day I was there looking for pesticide and fertilizer. It's a pipe dream for me to think about starting such a system on my tiny little patio, as cool as it would be. But if you have the space, I say do it! Do it for the both of us! 

They actually sold a form of fertilizer that that is fish emulsion, similar to what you would get from the fish farm in an aquaponic system. And it was $10 for a huge jug of that stuff! Of course I got something a lot smaller for my mini-garden (cause that stuff has a shelf life). And this was mixed with squid emulsion and it's high in nitrogen and phosphorus, the NPK most plants need (* NPK, if you don't know, is the abbreviation for the three main nutrients a garden needs. Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium). You just mix the dark brown ooze into a gallon of water and water the plants with it. Now, the first couple of times I did this, my patio had the distinct smell of a lake. Not too terrible fish smell, but I wouldn't want to put this stuff on my indoor plants. Then my home would smell like the

General Organics Bio Marine Fertilizer

nearby Sushi Hana. But it is amazing stuff. My tomato plants seem to like it the most, they were kind of limp and some of their new true leaves were fading in color (I'm not experienced enough to say why...), but as soon as they got a refreshing Squid Poo Beverage, they perked up and have a lot more green and vibrant true leaves. And this is an effect of two light feedings in a matter of four days.


The company that sells this product, General Organics, I haven't done a lot of research on them on my own. The gentleman at the store gave me a little run down about the product and the company itself (while cracking a few jokes on Monsanto). He said the way that this company 'harvests' the cold processed squid is in a way that is tenderly careful about its footprint on the environment. How does this guarentee that the product is organic? It doesn't unfortunately. However, the term 'organic' gets thrown around a lot these days, because some companies see it as a trend. Many people do too and shop organic cause they've been told it's better without really thinking why they should. People will trust the labels if it says organic and then most of the product has the main ingredient as high fructose corn syrup. Not very organic...is it? 

Now when shopping for sea food and whether that's organic or not is a different subject all together. It comes from the ocean. There's no super huge squid hatchery somewhere, messing with the genetics of the squid. At least... none I've come across reading about (it would be twisted reading straight from a Soylent Green kind of nightmare). There are, however, huge hatcheries messing with the genetics of Salmon. But, one could argue that the ocean isn't really 'organic' with all the oil spills and garbage being tossed in the mix. Not to mention the question which ocean are these squid emulsions being collected from? Was it the Pacific, where there was that nuclear waste seeping out from the Japanese plant? Or the Atlantic, where it is getting toxic chemical leak from the cover up of the Gulf of Mexico's big oil dump (that was too big to call an oopsy 'spill')? These are important questions to think about when you're shopping for anything, be it products to use on your garden or food you're going to fix and put on the table. 

The interesting thing I find about this product, is that all over the label it has many different sites (not just the main General Organics website) for information about the company and product. Miracle-Grow, the light fertilizer I've used in the past, doesn't have that at all. In fact, you have to kind of question where they get their NPK at all in that stuff. It's mostly processed chemicals. More often than not, when I use that stuff it makes my plants sick. The young plants, it kills almost instantly. This Bio Marine squid poo can be used on very young plants, seedlings in fact. Seedlings are very fragile at times with shallow roots and baby leaves and this product is guaranteed safe for them. That alone tells me that it's a rather good investment, cause those baby plants need the extra help they can get.

I've been using this fertilizer along side my new pesticide for the marigolds too. I think it's helping them stay durable and strong through the turmoil of being snacked upon by aphids. The main pot that got the infestation first, lost almost all it's blossoms, but there's almost no bugs in it now, and in fact a ladybug moved in and started eating at the few that survived. I still don't like the ladybugs...  :(