Fish fertilizer is an awesome product for promoting plant growth. It’s high in Nitrogen for growing plants, can be naturally produced, and is an awesome food for microbes! Fungi love this stuff. Fish fertilizer can be expensive in the store, but it is easily produced at home.
Fish hydrolysate fertilizer generally starts out the same way as fish emulsion. It gets broken down using enzymes, proteases, or chemicals. However, fish hydryolysate doesn’t undergo the heating and skimming process that you get with the fish emulsion. The higher quality fish hydrolysates only undergo “cold-processing” which just means they are never heated enough to break down significant amino acid chains. Good fish hydrolysate also retains the fats and oils that microbes love!
What you will be needing:
- A fish
- A tank to ferment the fish
- Non-Chlorinated water
- A Blender
- Sugar
The recipe:
1. Get a fish.
2. Now, ideally you would throw the fish into a blender to mash it up into little pieces. I cut my fish into 8ths or so and then chuck it into my kitchen blender but I’m a bit of a caveman. If you’re squeamish, buy a separate blender for this, just make sure it is powerful enough, mine is 500W and works fine for small-medium size fishes. Remember, the finer the fish bits, the more effective the fermentation.
3. Add water. You can use a simple guide of 3:1 – 3 parts water to 1 part ferment material. 1 roughly 8in tilapia comes to about 500mL when ground up, so I add about 1500mL water.
4. If you are using a blender, blend up the mixture. The water helps keep it loose so it blends much better after you add the water.
5. Add lacto bacilli to blended fish mixture. I use 2tbsp per L. You can use more or less if you want. 2tbsp/L is plenty though.
6. Add 1/3 parts sugar. This should be 1/3 the amount of fish you’ve added. Sugar will be either molasses or normal cane sugar.
7. If using sugar, the equivalency is about 1KG sugar = 1L solution. So if you have 500mL, you want 1/3 of that in sugar. You’d use about 167g sugar, or roughly ¾ cup.
8. I blend the whole mixture up a bit. It’s good to have it as fine as possible.
9. Up to you how much you blend it, I blend until I don’t hear so many bones crunching in the blades of the blender.
10. Now you have liquefied fish, sugar, and lacto. Pour this mixture into a container. Loosely cover the container. No need to seal, because the container will explode as CO2 is released by fermentation. You just want to make sure other things don’t get into it. I use a container with a lid and loosely screw the cap on top (just make sure you don’t seal it because it WILL explode).
11. The process takes anywhere from 3 weeks to over a month. How do you know its finished? By the smell.
12. You know when it’s done when there is no smell anymore. During fermentation there is a nasty smell, but once completed, there will be almost no odor. You can open it, and put your nose right up to it. Take a whiff. Nothing but a faint vinegar smell. Now you know its done. Congratulations! You’ve made your own Fish Hydrolysate!
13. Now, usually I transfer it to a smaller container, usually just a smaller water bottle, just for convenience. At this time, I use a strainer and a funnel to strain the bones and scales out of the hydrolysate. But don’t expect a lot. From a whole 8-10in tilapia, you will only get a little tiny pile of bones/scales. They will feel kind of rubbery, not brittle. Throw these in the compost pile or garden, they are excellent fertilizer and microbe food, already inoculated with microbes!
14. Leave the cap on the strained concoction loose until you see no more little bubbles forming. Mix 50/50 with the Cannabis Enzyme Extract. Then cap it and store it for use as your own natural fertilizer.
How to use:
2tbsp/gal of non-chlorinated water
