Homemade fertilizer?

Just wondering if anyone has had good luck with homemade fertilizer (made with bonemeal, bloodmeal, green sand, banana peels, etc, not poo).

Thanks in advance!

Roger

Welcome to Permies!

Most of my fertilizer comes in the form of compost and plant/comfrey tea.

It is kind of amazing how sticking a bunch of comfrey/plants in a bucket, covering it with water, and letting it sit for a few weeks makes a pretty decent liquid fertilizer. Outdoor use, don't make the mistake of using it indoors!

I'll make a batch of biochar and then soak it in this solution to charge and spread out the biochar after the fact.

I have found Nigel Palmer’s “The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments” to be a great resource for this:

https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-regenerative-growers-guide-to-garden-amendments/

Since I only use homemade fertilizers and grow an insane amount of fruits and veggies, I’d say that I’ve had some success at it. But having said that, I use poo in some of it. By poo I mean horse manure, cow manure, chicken manure, and sheep manure. Although I could make suitable fertilizer without these manures, it is a fast way to get to my target of food abundance.

Why don’t I use manure all the time? Because it takes a lot of my time to collect it out of the pastures. There is no place around me where people make manure piles or have manure lagoons. And the rabbit and goat breeders price their bags of manure way beyond what I am willing to pay for it.

My non-poo fertilizers consist of poo-less compost, plant teas, and fermented fish solution. Grass clippings are used in place of manures. I use my lawnmower to grind up just about all the various vegetation that I use for compost and teas. The fish trash is obtained from local fishermen, soaked in a trashcan of rainwater until it’s good and ripe. It gets churned up once a day, and when the stench is right, it gets diluted and used.

Question…….is there a reason to avoid "poo". Actually, animal manures make marvelous fertilizer. There are a lot of micronutrients and microbes in there that the plants respond to in a positive manner.

Have you considered using urine? Or is that in your "poo" category? Urine is a marvelous fertilizer too.

Su Ba wrote:Since I only use homemade fertilizers and grow an insane amount of fruits and veggies, I’d say that I’ve had some success at it. But having said that, I use poo in some of it. By poo I mean horse manure, cow manure, chicken manure, and sheep manure. Although I could make suitable fertilizer without these manures, it is a fast way to get to my target of food abundance.

Why don’t I use manure all the time? Because it takes a lot of my time to collect it out of the pastures. There is no place around me where people make manure piles or have manure lagoons. And the rabbit and goat breeders price their bags of manure way beyond what I am willing to pay for it.

My non-poo fertilizers consist of poo-less compost, plant teas, and fermented fish solution. Grass clippings are used in place of manures. I use my lawnmower to grind up just about all the various vegetation that I use for compost and teas. The fish trash is obtained from local fishermen, soaked in a trashcan of rainwater until it’s good and ripe. It gets churned up once a day, and when the stench is right, it gets diluted and used.

Question…….is there a reason to avoid "poo". Actually, animal manures make marvelous fertilizer. There are a lot of micronutrients and microbes in there that the plants respond to in a positive manner.

Have you considered using urine? Or is that in your "poo" category? Urine is a marvelous fertilizer too.

Not avoiding it, we have a pet rabbit who is 'prolific' in his poo production (which is side dressed on plants and used in teas) but our main poo producers are our chickens, and it is too hot until it's composted.  We grow some things (lettuce, spinach, radishes and the like) inside our house. and really don't want a poo smell inside

If you have rabbit and chicken manure, that’s great! Great!

I don’t compost my chicken manure. I used to, but I have found a system that works for me without going through the hassle of hauling manure and composting. And the system doesn’t stink either. Perhaps you could come up with a similar method to achieve the same goal for your situation.

Most of my chickens are housed in a roofed over pen (just a tarp atop fencing). My own current pen is 10 foot wide and 30 foot long. It houses anywhere from 50 to 100 birds at anyone one time. Having it roofed over keeps it from becoming too wet. Wet = stink.

Four or five times a week I dump a trashcanful of freshly ground up plant litter into the pen (weeds, grass, trimmings run over with a lawn mower). Ideally I would do this 7 days a week, but some days don’t have enough time to do that, or it’s a day where it rains all day. At the same time I’ll remove 2 five gallon buckets of well kicked up pen litter. This goes directly to my garden to be used as a fertilizer/mulch on plants where rain splash won’t affect the crop. Thus I use it on corn, pole beans, pole peas, pigeon peas, okra, tomatoes, and any other crop that produces 2 foot above the soil surface. I also will use it on low growing crops that get cooked (not eaten raw) such as bush beans, cabbage, eggplants, etc. On low crops, if I have excess pen litter one week, I simply trench it near but not directly under any crop.

When I visit my chickens each day, I will rake or fork their pen litter into piles. The birds seem to enjoy scratching the piles apart, eating the tidbits and insects there.  At the same time they are churning the litter up, making a marvelous manure fortified mulch.

No compost piles needed.

For indoor growing, I can't say enough good things about worm castings. They don't smell and helps the plants grow. I like to add it into my potting mixes.

Timothy, I agree 100%. Worm castings are good stuff. I’ve never used it because of the large size of my projects, but I have seen the results from other people. As with all animal manures/wastes, the plants have evolved to respond to it.