Something Smells Fishy!

Do you ever have things on your To Do List that linger?  I sure do.  I have had "Put Fish Emulsion on Garden Plants" on my list for the longest time.  Short days and busy weekends resulted in fertilizing my winter garden naturally on the back burner.  Until Christmas Eve!  I got off half a day and hurried home as fast as my car would take me.  It was a gorgeous afternoon and I had a few open hours to get this item scratched off my list at last!

I picked up this natural fertilizer up years ago at a hardware store.  It was priced at $7.99 per box.  It's what everyone needs - a big box of powdered fish.  I don't know how they make this stuff, but it must not be a pleasant job.  It is a grayish powder that has a very fishy smell to it.  As bad as it smells, your plants will love it.  It will make them grow lush and green.  Remember the old Thanksgiving story about the Indians planting corn and digging a hole right next to the seed and burying a fish?  That fish fed the corn.  Fish is full of protein and nitrogen.  Fish also absorb the minerals in the sea.  Those minerals will now feed your garden.  Plants really dig that!

The directions on the box says to mix 1 tablespoon of fish emulsion powder to 1 gallon of water.  I put the fish emulsion into my garden sprayer and then fill it with water up to the 1 gallon line.  I give it a good shaking and then give the sprayer 15 pumps and I'm ready to go.

I sprayed everything growing in the garden with the fish emulsion concoction.  I sprayed at the base of the plant, so that it saturated the ground where the roots can take in the nutrients.  I also sprayed the leaves of all the plants, giving them a foliar feeding.  Some of my plants were a little yellow.  I could tell they were missing something.  I'll bet that this weekend or a few days after that, the plants will have a nice, healthy color to them.

Feeding Our Sugar Snap Peas

I kept making batch after batch of this stuff until I had really given the garden a good dose of the smelly fertilizer.  Then the sun was casting long shadows and it was time to go milk the cows.

But my work wasn't done.  If you use fish emulsion, let me give you a word of advice: Clean your garden sprayer!  One time I didn't do this.  I left about a half gallon of fish emulsion in the garden sprayer and forgot about it for a week on the back patio.  Over the week, it had "cooked" in the sprayer as the sun baked and fermented the contents.  When I removed the top, it had a smell that... well, I can't describe.  It smelled like the worst sewerage I had ever smelled.  Furthermore, it clogged up the screen on the bottom of the sprayer and rendered the sprayer clogged and useless.  Learning from my mistake, I ran two gallons of water through the sprayer to wash it out and stored it back in the box.  I intend on dosing the plants up again with the funky fish as soon as they appear to need it!  I even watched a few YouTube videos on how to make homemade fish emulsion with fish guts, molasses and water.  You pour all that in a trash can with water and put the lid on it and let it ferment for several months. (Not a good idea if your neighbors live close to you!)

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.