| One of the great urban myths of gardening is
that Blood ‘n Bone is a soil panacea. If you believe that you’re probably still
looking for the Tooth Fairy at the bottom of the garden too. Check out the contents
label.. 60% FM means 60% of what you are buying is sand or some other inert material
(Filling Material), plus the organic component of blood meal returns about 6% nitrogen. If
you think that is value for money……. well it’s your money. The ‘n
by the way is added synthetic urea. Hell you might as
well pee in a bucket and add that to your soil, at least that urea source is 43% nitrogen
by volume and it’s free. Make sure you add five times its volume of water before you
dose plants with it though, otherwise it’s too rich and it may burn them. Don’t
use it on native plants or slow growing conifers.
What the keen organic growers use is blood meal or bone
meal. The later is pretty expensive and doesn’t break down very rapidly in soil. The
last 20 kg bag of blood meal I bought at the abattoirs cost $26 and it lasted years.
It’s a fine powder and is best scratched into the surface of the soil or it sets like
a gel when wetted. It must be time for some enterprising soul to make this product more
readily available.
Another nitrogen fix for your soil is human hair which most
hairdressers just dump in their bins. It’s rich in protein (CHON and amino acids) and
breaks down pretty fast. So do leather shavings, although with the fashion of wearing
sneakers, that don’ t get repaired, the shoe maker hasn’t got so much of it
these days, but wool & skin dealers may have raw offcuts.
As the soil is cooling at present, available nitrogen in
the soil from organic sources slows down and that’s why I recommend water soluble
nutrients be used during winter, if you are growing winter vegetables. They have brand
names like Thrive™, Aquasol™, Vital™ and then there are the slow release or
controlled release ‘snails eggs’ like Osmocote™ and Nutricote™. The
controlled release fertilisers only leach nutrient into the soil in the presence of
moisture and soil temperatures of over 12°C. We’ll dip below that in this area.
Of course you can use organic compounds, but the
nitro-bacter soil-organisms that break them down into soil nutrients, that plants use,
multiply very slowly in cold soils. Still at least the nitrogen is still there in spring,
so all’s not lost. |
