Liquid Fish

Fertilizer.  We don't use normal fertilizer to encourage growth in the vegetables in our garden.  We mainly work to build healthy soil by amending it with organic matter and compost.  This attracts worms which in turn add fertility to the soil.  To that soil, we'll also work in composted chicken and cow manure into the soil between crop plantings.

In addition to those all natural fertilizers, we use another one - fish emulsion.  We use it in several forms - one is a powdered form, shown below, that you mix a couple tablespoons of the fish powder with a gallon of water and then pour the stinky liquid in a garden sprayer, shake it, pump it and spray it.

Powder form of fish-based fertilizer

Today, however, we're going to use not a powdered form of fish, but a liquid one. It's called Shafer Liquid Fish.  Liquid fish.  Think about that.  This bottle of brown sludge is exactly that.  It is fish caught out of the Mississippi River that is ground down and pureed into a 'soup.'  This soup is chock-full of nutrients and minerals that plants need to grow.  Remember how the Native Americans taught the early settlers to bury a fish by the newly planted corn?  This is the same concept.  As the fish decomposed, it released fertilizer that the corn utilized to grow.  Well, here is a bottle of liquid fish. Let's get busy!

Liquid Fish

As I popped the top and unscrewed the bottle a smell filled the garage.  A foul smell. It reminded me of the smell of the pogy plant south of Lake Charles around Cameron.  When I was a kid, we would go crabbing down there and I remember that awful smell.  Pogies are a small fish that were caught and then brought to the pogie plant where they would be ground and cooked.  It was a smell like no other and a smell I still recall years later.  This smell now filled by garage.

A liquid fish cocktail

The ratio of liquid fish to water is 1:20, so i poured the bottle of liquid fish into my garden sprayer and then poured 20 bottles full of rainwater in the garden sprayer that I fished (pardon the pun) out of the rainwater that I caught off of our roof after the previous days' rain.

Filling with rainwater

I shook the sprayer to mix the water and fish sludge and then pumped up the sprayer to pressurize it and then walked out to the garden and began to spray it on the plants.  As you can see below I began spraying all of the leaves of the plants. The picture below shows me spraying the row of broccoli with liquid fish.  This spray provides a good foliar feeding to the plant.  Foliar feeding is where leaves are given a generous spraying of fish emulsion so that their leaves are able to absorb nutrients in the liquid fish through their leaves.

Foliar Feeding of Foul Smelling Fish

As a cold front was coming in, some of the fish mist splashed up into my face, providing a reminder to always stand upwind when spraying!  When I was finished a strong smell lingered in the air around the garden. Despite the smell, this will give our plants a boost.  One thing of note, since we are currently harvesting kale and bok choy, I did not spray those rows as I wanted to ensure that our greens weren't fish flavored when we eat them.