Can’t find much on this blog and wondering if anyone else is growing without animal-derived fertilizers? Would love to hear what you use. I currently use alfalfa and seaweed and trying to find the time to learn the nuances about different rock minerals to mix my own fruit fertilizer. DTE has a vegan mix but its first ingredient is soy, which is out for allergy in my house. I know everything plant-based is less potent so I’m expecting more applications, but I’m fine with that.
This has been prompted by trying to figure out a vegan fertilizer for container citrus and fruit trees.
I have 27 acres of heavy timber… mostly oaks (several varieties), Hickory (several varieties) and several other types of trees in smaller numbers… persimmons, black cherry, poplar, maple, ash, etc.
The oaks and hickory persimmons black cherry grow very well and produce huge crops… yearly… with no help from me at all.
Their leaves and wood debris falls to the forest floor… it compost there over time and is constantly being added to as the trees go thru their normal life cycles.
No doubt there is some animal product added as well… deer, squirrels, coons, possum, bobcats, foxes, coyotes, turkeys crows other birds… all poop and pee… and die and rot there in the forest.
We make compost here using food scraps… mostly veggie, we do add all egg shells, and stuff from the garden (spent crops, bad fruit)… grass clippings maple leaves, woods compost… year old half rotten hay.
I compost it for close to a year and a half before it is used.
Thanks for sharing what you do. I think the natural cycling of nutrients in a food forest is what I have to try to mimic. We do compost and o hope to have some of that to use this year. Last year, it was turned into a mouse motel.
Had eggshells here in the compost for years and they never broke down. Who knows how long it takes. In the winter, the deer pulled out rotten banana peels and orange rinds from the compost to eat them. We would just throw things in it year-round. Gave up on all that. More or less all fruit trees now. You have to be a slave to the garden to do it right.
You can’t wildcraft a garden like you can do with trees. Well, maybe some of you can, but I could not. If a tree can’t be wildcrafted it gets chopped down. (And wildcrafted may not be the correct term for the anal members here.) Maybe I should say semi neglected or left alone.
The vegan deal? It is not natural. Animals are all around and they poop on the ground. How are you going to prevent that? Or does OP have a vegan tree farm that is protected from animals getting in? Animal poop and trees are pretty natural.
alfalfa pellets. slow release but works well . NPK 2.5-2.5-2.5. $16 for a 50lb bag. sprinkle around your plants and water well. once they break up , lightly rake in or cover them with mulch. comfrey works the same if you grow some nearby. more labor intensive though. i snap off leaves and just lay as a mulch.
In my vegetable garden, I’ve only used two fertilizers for the last 15 years:
Alfalfa pellets in the specific hole or row when I plant
Thick layer of leaves for mulch that I put around the plants in June to retain moisture once they are big enough not to covered up when they get blown around. By the end of fall they are 80-90% decomposed and eaten by worms.
I collect bags of leaves from around the neighborhoods in fall and dump them in a corner of the garden so they get matted down over the winter and I can pull them up in sheets and layer them easily around plants.
For my in-ground fruit trees, I don’t really ever fertilize them. Wood chips mulch them all around; as they break down I add more…
I start a new pile each December … and the old pile at that point was started the previous December… it is a year old at that point and has never been turned.
Between December and April/May I will turn it a few times and it finishes nicely.
You can still recognize eggshell in it but it is mostly finer particles at that point.
I load my tomato row up with compost… probably 100 pounds or more.
The next spring when I break my garden… have never found any recognizable eggshell in the dirt.
It partially breaks down in a year in the pile… and fully breaks down once in the soil.
Thanks! Yup, totally good with poop. I just have to find a source since I live in suburbia…there’s a rescue farm close by with a few cows, I plan on checking in with them.
There may be stables near you too. We get all the horse manure we could ever want from local stables, they’ll even drop it off with their truck (otherwise they have to pay to dispose of it).