Nutrients your plants needs are key if you get them from sea salts, lobster shells, bone meal, oak leaves, ag lime or azomite if you need it you will notice a difference. That’s not to say I’m not a believer in lobster shells, crab shells, sea weed compost, seal salt , shrimp shells, and so on I am but there is more than one way to get there. Apple’s as an example use a lot of calcium. Some people swear by chicken egg shells which I admit they are very good for blossom end rot of tomatoes or apple trees but there are other ways to get there. I’ve composted Japanese beetles which smell really bad but work great. I added m.fungi to my soil once because I needed it. At the time @alan mentioned in my case he thought m. fungi was a good idea since there were no trees here and just grasses here but in 99% of the cases he would not recommend m. Fungi because they exist. The point @alan makes about nutrients is valid. Sometimes products like green sand cost a lot are they really better than his worm castings, kitchen scraps and leaf decay mixed into a compost? Biochar is really good if you make it yourself I see the value but I would not spend lots of money when you can get there in a less expensive way. When he speaks of magic powder like azomite he’s right I used it once saw some improvement over using nothing but the next time I used wood chips and saw better results and they were free. Wood chips are very nutrient rich but take 3 years to break down.
wood chips have greatly improved my soil in many ways over the last 7 yrs… esp. hard wood chips. i no longer fertilize my trees and bushes and theyre doing great. eventually as my food forest fills in i will discontinue top dressing every spring. i agree that using different sources for compost is a good idea. i use whatever is available but coast of maine compost works so well it has cut my need to amend with other things so the cost to fertilize is the same minus my time to mix and cook before using.
Just get one of those dead deers on the side of the road, haul it home, and bury it in your garden. That should feed your plants for 2 whole seasons. I’m assuming those deer ate pretty healthy stuff out in the woods.
ive done that with fish scraps and it works good just need to put it down enough the coons dont smell it or youll have a mess on your hands. i worked for a farmer years ago that composted a whole cow that died of disease, in a manure pile. that thing smoked for 2 months. you could feel the heat standing next to it. the following spring he dug into the pile and all that was left was the skull and larger bones. compost was black and full of worms.
This product is about the Chitin which is food for the fungi. Not any specific macro nutrients like calcium or nitrogen.
Either am I but chitin is all that. It’s a very worthwhile nutrient for various reasons. Besides lobster just being a good compost. If you have problems with any type of grubs, this is what you want to use. You do not have to buy Bt bacteria for Japanese beetles, June Bugs, or cicadas. Use this stuff and you will attract and multiply the BT bacteria used for Japanese beetles. The bacteria occur naturally all over. I decided to make sure and bought the bacteria and for 2 years used lobster compost. It’s been 4 years since I have seen more than 10 Japanese beetles. It is possible they declined for some other reasons but for over a decade I have battled them. The decrease was so dramatic and I don’t believe in coincidences.
For the price why not buy the lobster and enjoy it? Lobster tails in this area are $5
Why are you getting lobster fir $5 when im paying $14 in NJ that just makes on since. But actually I am saving all my shells and think quite often about how to acquire some from a seafood house. In DC it was easy to go down to the warf and get buckets on buckets of free fish cleanings. But seriously like @alan Alan said this compound in shells feeds the beneficial fungus and bacteria you agree our depleted soil soils need. Its only logical if the soil is
Everything I’ve ever put my own compost on rotted. So i don’t use my own compost on plants. I just use it as a way to dispose of organic waste.
I buy rotted manure, bagged topsoil, and sacks of plant food.
Somehow I don’t believe your compost was compost, it may have been on the way to being that, but mellow compost is airy and doesn’t cause anything to rot.
I throw all my household garbage including meat into garbage containers with holes drilled in the bottom. I throw some fresh stable waste over the garbage every time I add it to the can. After about a year I have 5, 32 gallon cans of slop crawling with red worms (they seem to need very little free oxygen). I dump it all into a natural dirt pit layering it with more stable waste and covering it with the stuff to reduce the horrible odor. Fortunately my neighbors are far enough away that they don’t complain about the smell that lingers for a few days, smells like rotting corpses, I imagine.
In about 9 months it is airy compost (now crawling with worms that require lots of oxygen). It won’t smother anything when used as a top dressing and must be a high percentage of worm castings. Very unscientific composting method I have.
As far as anecdotes about J. beetles- I used to get them terribly and spread some milky spore around my property and they have not been a problem for over 2 decades disappearing in perfect concert to the MS app- no chitin included. . But I do believe in coincidences and science. I have used milky spore unsuccessfully at other sites and Cornell says it doesn’t overwinter well in our climate. However, the science is spotty on all of this because the level of research tends to be rather low, especially outside of commercial agriculture.
However, testing products in controlled studies is far more reliable than some anecdotal observations shared over the internet, IMO. If a gardener near me uses some kind of magic potion that produces better results than what I get I would likely try it, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Good sunlight and well aerated soil with adequate N usually brings you most of the way to realizing good results as far as what we can control- as long as we are attentive to pests.
Could be. I’m not at all scientific about it. I called it the mulch pile, until my husband started burying the kitchen vegetable waste in it. It’s basically a pile of leaves mouldering away, with additions of spent tea-leaves and whatever else we put in the compost bin. Because it’s so heavy on dried leaves, it never smells bad. Even nasty stuff like the rotting jack-o-lanterns quickly disappears into it.
Dig down a foot and it looks like beautiful soil, full of earthworms. But when I’ve tried to use it as soil, or even spread a layer of it on top of soil, whatever tried to grow there rotted. So I don’t try to use it any more. I just keep dumping the fall leaves there, and my husband buries the kitchen waste into it.
I’ll add my japanese beetle anecdote – I noticed a lot of grubs when we first moved here. I put down milky spore, and now 20 years later, I’ve never had a japanese beetle problem. I still have some grubs, but not an overwhelming number of them. Maybe that first year was just a good year for some other kind of beetle. I dunno.
It is the land shrimp (cicadas) we in the mid Atlantic can soon be adding to our compost.
I did some research and the amount of studies on chitin clearly show it’s an excellent amendment. Unlike many this has been proven to be extremely beneficial in numerous ways.
@lordkiwi Great research links you posted. I looked around and the web is full of the praises of chitin.
Not many soil amendments have been documented so well with proof positive of the benefits.
This study tested it in potting soils. Since I garden as much in containers as I do the ground this interested me.
In this study chitin in the potting soil for lettuce increased yield, increased root mass.
What really floated my boat was that chitin doubled the biomass in the soil. Important as in containers I on occasion use soluble fertilizers which can hurt the biomass. This is a work around as far as I’m concerned.
This study confirms the benefits to the biomass
I could easily list 10 more studies. All come to the same conclusion.
I also applied shrimp crab and lobster meal with my milky spore and Btg and today while getting some soil samples I found a infected grub. Made me smile
I saw a study done once on strictly sea salt alone and I’m a believer something as inexpensive as salt water in small quantities is great for the garden soil. In large quantity it kills plants. It’s very likely many are deficient in trace minerals like boron as well. These things are all very inexpensive. If you apply shrimp shells to your garden do I believe it’s beneficial ? Yes and like lobster shell a few dollars yes ofcourse! Bone meal is equally very good or better at supplying trace minerals as well so use both ofcourse. Do I believe in spending lots of money? No I have bought very expensive powders and their are often cheaper ways like I mentioned.
The study in Pub Med is evidence that it is helpful for growing lettuce in artificial soil which is relatively sterile and not very indicative of its affect in real soil that is teeming with micro-organisms and rich with nutrients to begin with. However, it does spur my interest in experimenting with it in my starter mix for veg plants, but the experiment involved a 2% chitin content which I would assume would be unrealistic to obtain in real soil.
What is more, if it is this helpful for other vegetables or even just lettuce in greenhouse conditions, I have no doubt it will not be a secret magical ingredient for very long. Hot houses are very energy expensive and their use in vegetable and fruit production is a billion dollar industry at this point- including to produce lettuce for restaurants year round.
It is difficult for me to fathom how this industry and the university land grant system with all their researchers would overlook a study like the one in Pub Med- a study completed about 5 years ago.
In the search I just made, the only study about real affects to plants is either in reducing pest pressure in greenhouse settings or the single one you found about lettuce- plus the nematode article (nematodes aren’t a big issue in my region),also in an artificial greenhouse setting. Reveal these other studies you claim to have found, please, I cant find them. I didn’t even find anything about an experiment in controlling nematodes in an actual orchard or even in real soil. Maybe you can find that in the copious collection of research you referred to.
Proving a point for the sake of winning an argument isn’t my goal here. I don’t want this forum to become a conduit for unproven claims that are often a bit like conspiracy theories containing some scientific jargon and rationalization but very little real world evidence when there is a world of people interested in achieving larger harvests for less money. I trust capitalism to sort out what is real and what is religion in horticulture, but mostly it in the realm of commercial production, because farmers can’t afford to throw away money.
This makes no sense to me- what are you guys eating 
What is the pH of your compost?
I have spread copious amounts of my compost around small veg plants when I set them in my soil every single year for decades now and have never had negative affects from it. Nor have I heard anyone else share your complaint.
Now I’m really curious- please try some again this spring, even if with a single plant.
Of course you cannot use pure compost as a potting medium- it is too dense for that and will drown the roots. I mix some with my commercial pro-mix type formula I buy by the bail from my local greenhouse guy. I like it mostly because it holds water longer and I imagine the nutrients help too, but I only use it in at least 8oz containers.
I also make a mix for my nursery container trees using compost, but I use stuff made from yard waste that I buy 10 yards at a time- not more than a third of total ingredients, with a third peat and a third perlite or sand.
But that’s not what’s happening, A number of forum members are reporting years of direct experience with the product. Lamentations of it getting more popular. And posting research going back to 1963 for studies and methods for this product. And while some industrial chemical versions do exist they have not been posting only 2 small business organic producers.
RogersChitinUsesinAgricultureSAR-2018-CHITO-019Original.docx (4.8 MB)
- As a nutrient additive its a good slow release as it has to be degraded over time. Its not rated superior to other slow release agents but its good.
- Chitin and Chitosan stimulate and support plants natural bio defenses.
- Does not have any direct anti bacterial properties
- Appears to degrade the cell walls of pathogens
- Anti nematode by action of increasing the biomass of anti nematoid fungus.
Anecdotal recommendations are made every day and I’ve made some that have proven wrong over time. Claims here are not deserving of an endorsement that suggests scientific verification as far as what I’ve read that’s been posted. Drew’s read like a promotional ad with claims of research I’m still waiting for him to post.
And why do you suppose that is? Chitin has been studied for decades and there are tens of thousands small organic farms in this country.
I’m dead serious that I don’t want this to become a forum for true believers- the link you provided reveals a pre-existing prejudice in its first sentence, IMO, and doesn’t include research, only claims.
If you like the results of the product and want to share your enthusiasm for it, fine- I am merely objecting to any claims that the your endorsement is founded on solid science.
My enthusiasm is for using stuff around us that isn’t pre-packaged and shipped- that’s where my true-believer nature tends to shine. And I truly believe that the odds are that this product would not produce superior results in my garden than what I have around me- but next year I may buy a bag and do a little experiment with my starts in potting soil. I don’t start my own lettuce, however, but let’s see what it can do with peppers and tomatoes. But you are the one who should do it, really. Such an easy thing to give some to some plants of a type and withhold it from others.
I almost never lose plants to disease when propagating them as it is- it hasn’t happened for years now that I know to make sure air circulates in the greenhouse during long periods of rain.
All I know is I love this product. Extremely pleased with results over numerous years. I use Neptune’s Harvest crab and lobster shells. The 12 pound bucket of stink. Really great for problem plants like tomatoes. Other benefits like no grubs anymore and increased biomass in my containers and raised beds. Although I like a lot of other fertilizer products too. I use top rate products at the best price I can find. I have been using some fantastic slow release fertilizers for fruit trees and shrubs. Some great high tech fertilizers out there with patented slow release technology that actually works.