flytier
Well-Known Member
I never thought that the salmon compost we make at work would have as much influence on soil quality as it does. I was wrong.
We add the peat moss and dead fish, and the flies, beetles and microbes et al do everything else. I ran out of fish compost a few weeks ago, but I still had bags of sheep and cow manure composts so I figured that they would kinda pick up the slack of the missing good stuff, fill its niche, however you want to put it. Nope.
The plants that are in the fish compost are doing amazing WRT nutrients. I never had any issues with leaves turning colour except for my biggest one in the five-gallon bucket starting the other day, when the lower leaves started yellowing for want of nitrogen. At least nitrogen is what I suspect. The plants without it, they kinda sorta somewhat didn't take off like the others and were never really deep green, so I had to buy some blood meal this morning and spread it on the soil of all the pots. I never had any at the time when some these girls were transplanted and overlooked it when I had The Big Calcium Crisis of '17. But I digress...
Bear in mind that the only difference in soil these plants are in - to the best of my knowledge - is that of my own compost chowder. What I'm showing you here is what I think it might be, so if anyone here can point me in the right direction it would, of course, be appreciated.
Now there's a whole lot of nitrogen in fish compost; every time I lift the lid I have to put up with the reek of ammonia, which is a bigtime product in fish decomp, whereupon the nitrifying bacteria take over and convert the highly toxic ammonia first to slightly less toxic nitrites, and then to the much less toxic nitrates - at least that's the chemical process in an aquaculture biofilter. And now this stuff I'm using is well-seasoned since it's last year's pile, and not sterilized, which keeps the biological processes going using the other soil media to sorta "dilute" it and give it more space to colonize.
Here is my White Widow. It was put into this 5-gallon bucket back when I had plenty of salmon compost. It was transplanted in early June and given next to no other nutrients. The yellowing in the leaves is just recent.
Now here are four CBDreams that came from the same pack of seeds. The one in the lower right has no fish compost in her soil. I ran out while in the process of transplanting them as seedlings. Hmmmm..... This plant was the last one to be germinated in the pack, but it was in the same size range as the others in the starter pots. Since it was the last to get repotted, it didn't get the good stuff.
And this is my Short Ryder, the only one of these planted at present. Also planted after I ran out. I'm hoping my application of blood meal today will give her a little kick in the proverbial arse. Cool plant though; I still have a full pack of similar ones for indoors over the winter.
But anyway, I got on here originally (after having a hearty helping of MJ butter) to gripe about my soil for a couple of paragraphs, but that was a few hours ago now and instead I ended up with a biology presentation. Went out and took these pictures, Photoshopped them up and stuff. Good a way as any to pass some time, although this morning I was getting acupunctured up, which is actually pretty relaxing, after making sure that I had some magic butter awhile beforehand, which is actually even more pretty relaxing.
I have my B.Sc. in Environmental Biology and I've studied a bit of botany, ecology, soils and things like that and now I'm playing with some more of the stuff that I've always found interesting. Welcome to my rant, I guess.
We add the peat moss and dead fish, and the flies, beetles and microbes et al do everything else. I ran out of fish compost a few weeks ago, but I still had bags of sheep and cow manure composts so I figured that they would kinda pick up the slack of the missing good stuff, fill its niche, however you want to put it. Nope.
The plants that are in the fish compost are doing amazing WRT nutrients. I never had any issues with leaves turning colour except for my biggest one in the five-gallon bucket starting the other day, when the lower leaves started yellowing for want of nitrogen. At least nitrogen is what I suspect. The plants without it, they kinda sorta somewhat didn't take off like the others and were never really deep green, so I had to buy some blood meal this morning and spread it on the soil of all the pots. I never had any at the time when some these girls were transplanted and overlooked it when I had The Big Calcium Crisis of '17. But I digress...
Bear in mind that the only difference in soil these plants are in - to the best of my knowledge - is that of my own compost chowder. What I'm showing you here is what I think it might be, so if anyone here can point me in the right direction it would, of course, be appreciated.
Now there's a whole lot of nitrogen in fish compost; every time I lift the lid I have to put up with the reek of ammonia, which is a bigtime product in fish decomp, whereupon the nitrifying bacteria take over and convert the highly toxic ammonia first to slightly less toxic nitrites, and then to the much less toxic nitrates - at least that's the chemical process in an aquaculture biofilter. And now this stuff I'm using is well-seasoned since it's last year's pile, and not sterilized, which keeps the biological processes going using the other soil media to sorta "dilute" it and give it more space to colonize.
Here is my White Widow. It was put into this 5-gallon bucket back when I had plenty of salmon compost. It was transplanted in early June and given next to no other nutrients. The yellowing in the leaves is just recent.
Now here are four CBDreams that came from the same pack of seeds. The one in the lower right has no fish compost in her soil. I ran out while in the process of transplanting them as seedlings. Hmmmm..... This plant was the last one to be germinated in the pack, but it was in the same size range as the others in the starter pots. Since it was the last to get repotted, it didn't get the good stuff.
And this is my Short Ryder, the only one of these planted at present. Also planted after I ran out. I'm hoping my application of blood meal today will give her a little kick in the proverbial arse. Cool plant though; I still have a full pack of similar ones for indoors over the winter.
But anyway, I got on here originally (after having a hearty helping of MJ butter) to gripe about my soil for a couple of paragraphs, but that was a few hours ago now and instead I ended up with a biology presentation. Went out and took these pictures, Photoshopped them up and stuff. Good a way as any to pass some time, although this morning I was getting acupunctured up, which is actually pretty relaxing, after making sure that I had some magic butter awhile beforehand, which is actually even more pretty relaxing.
I have my B.Sc. in Environmental Biology and I've studied a bit of botany, ecology, soils and things like that and now I'm playing with some more of the stuff that I've always found interesting. Welcome to my rant, I guess.
