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Post by doglovingjim on Apr 6, 2018 23:10:40 GMT 10
How would one go about making liquid fertilizer anyway?
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Post by Peter on Apr 6, 2018 23:46:26 GMT 10
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Post by Peter on Apr 6, 2018 23:47:38 GMT 10
How would one go about making liquid fertilizer anyway? That's an excellent question which I've asked many times. Apart from worm-farm emulsion I'll leave it to those more knowledgeable than myself to answer...
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tan
Junior Member
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Post by tan on Apr 6, 2018 23:52:34 GMT 10
How would one go about making liquid fertilizer anyway? Worm wee, weed tea, manure tea, epsoms salts in water Or, a combination - weeds, manure, worm casings, maybe some well rinsed seaweed(to get rid of the salt), steeped in water for a few weeks (with a generous dash of pee if you aren’t squeamish about that kind of thing - citrus, tomatoes and passionfuit love urea - hell as a guy you could pee directly on the plants, the world is your urinal) in a lidded bucket. Drain off the liquid, dump the solids in the compost. Use rubber gloves when draining it into bottles for storage (reused soft drink bottles work fine) or it may take a few days to get the smell out of your hands and people will look at you funny in the office because this STINKS and may well lower property values on your street every time you drain off a fresh batch. Dilute it before you put it around your plants.
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Post by spinifex on Apr 7, 2018 15:28:53 GMT 10
How would one go about making liquid fertilizer anyway? Step 1 : drink beer. Step 2 : relieve yourself in a bucket (only good for fruit trees and if you're a bloke - step 2 entirely optional) Or: Put a bucket or two of good compost in a sack and steep the sack in a plastic tub full of water for 24 hours. Add a few handfuls of urea for extra nitrogen. I used to make good soil conditioner (hesitate to call it fertiliser) by brewing Ecklonia seaweed (kelpy type stuff common in rocky areas on southern coasts) in a big drum for several weeks. Low in N and P but rich in trace elements and attracts thousands of worms where it is applied. (Picture: These days I bury ecklonia whole during bed preparation.)
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ygidorp
Senior Member
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Post by ygidorp on Apr 13, 2018 12:25:37 GMT 10
use pots at least 30cm diameter and depth. and good soil. I use loamy, organic rich soil mined out of my chook pen (20 chooks for 13 years makes some good dirt). This is a basil plant bought from the food section of woolies. Planted it back in late december and its now 40 cm high and I've been scalping it regularly. The tomato is a volunteer that came up (they always do in chook pen soil) This pot is in afternoon shade. If I was growing tomatos etc out in full sun I'd wrap the black plastic pot in foil because the sun on black plastic is hot enough to cook the roots. I water so just a little bit of drainage comes out the bottom after 30 minutes. If you see drainage water within a minute either the soil is too porous (most potting mixes) or the soil has shrunk away from the pot and water is flowing down the gap and not through the whole root mass. Either is not ideal. I use discs of geocloth in base of pot to allow drainage and keep the soil in. Water with rainwater as tap water has dissolved salts that build up. I have this problem a lot - the pot dries out completely really quickly when using potting mix. The flip side my soil is predominantly clay which does not allow water to percolate easily at all. Maybe a better mixture is in order? Did you have to compost the chicken poop soil before use?
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Post by spinifex on Apr 13, 2018 18:12:11 GMT 10
The best potting soil for growing vegies is a sandy loam. It can often be collected from old drift soil mounds found along roadside fencelines in agricultural areas. I always carry a few poly sacks and a shortened spade in the back of the car to collect from good deposits along back-roads. Add composed manure to that and it should be a winner. Maybe even mixing 1 part of your natural clay soil to 12 parts of fine sand might go ok.
The material I use out of the chook pen is already well broken down - I sweep away all the loose surface materials and use whats underneath. The fresher un-composted droppings ends up in the trenches below my main garden beds along with the kelp a few weeks before planting out begins. If you have it in the pots it generates methane and ammonia as it rots and these gases damage the roots for upto a 6 weeks. It won't kill the plants but they will not look happy while those gasses are being generated.
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Post by doglovingjim on Apr 16, 2018 17:06:57 GMT 10
What would you say are the best perennial fruits/vegetables for this Australian climate? (if anyone has any experience growing things in Melbourne specifically I guess that'd be even better)
Anyone knows any good guides or sources of information for this sort of thing?
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Post by spinifex on Apr 16, 2018 18:09:47 GMT 10
For home scale:
Best fruit growing guide for Oz I've come across - for all climate zones - is Complete book of growing fruit in Australia by Louis Glowinski. Best vegetable guide is probably the Australian Vegetable Garden - whats new is old, by Clive Blazey.
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Post by doglovingjim on Jul 12, 2018 3:41:01 GMT 10
Well I can say that tomato season is probably over, while my crops have been horrid I am glad for the experience and the fact that now I have a good setup going. I noticed however that my coriander in particular seems to be thriving right now, so it's not all that bad. I also have several ideas on what to experiment with next to see how they fare in this Victorian climate.
Are dead tomato plants good for compost or should I just throw them away? Any suggestions with how to get a compost heap going (at the moment I just have a container which I'm throwing leftover weeds and manderin/banana peels)? Should I cover the container (at the moment I'm just leaving it open for more oxygen)?
Thanks!
(P.S; things have been a bit hectic so I haven't had time to post here in a while but I have been lurking, I got a small book from vinnies about wilderness survival which I've been reading as well as continuing my fitness/boxing training and training my German Shepherd on how to track among other non-prepping things.)
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Post by spinifex on Jul 12, 2018 10:51:08 GMT 10
Hey DLJ, good to see you back.
Don't put old tomato plants in compost. It can carry over diseases. In a similar vein mulching around toms, cucumbers, pumpkins etc with peas straw is not wise because the pea straw often carries Powdery Mildew spores which go on to infect the crops.
Key to compost is keep it moist (but not soaked) and keep it turning. Bit like kneading bread dough ... keep moving the uncomposted surface material into the centre of the heap. Having the heap in direct contact with natural ground surface is a good way to go ... the worms, insects and microbes will move into the heap and help it break down better. I'd leave citrus peel out ... it tends to repel worms and bugs that help the heap break down.
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Post by doglovingjim on Jul 13, 2018 14:41:28 GMT 10
Thanks! Yeah the whole manderin/orange peel thing came because I was reading an article about its unintended benefits in Costa Rico which I found fascinating, since one orange juice company was using an arid land to dump left-over orange peels and 15 years later they discovered that it was thick with plant-life. newatlas.com/orange-peel-forest-costa-rica/51012/
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spatial
Senior Member
Posts: 2,191
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Post by spatial on Jul 13, 2018 14:54:26 GMT 10
Hey DLJ, good to see you back. Don't put old tomato plants in compost. It can carry over diseases. In a similar vein mulching around toms, cucumbers, pumpkins etc with peas straw is not wise because the pea straw often carries Powdery Mildew spores which go on to infect the crops. Key to compost is keep it moist (but not soaked) and keep it turning. Bit like kneading bread dough ... keep moving the uncomposted surface material into the centre of the heap. Having the heap in direct contact with natural ground surface is a good way to go ... the worms, insects and microbes will move into the heap and help it break down better. I'd leave citrus peel out ... it tends to repel worms and bugs that help the heap break down. There are Australian standards for Compost, if it gets to the right heat then pathogens and weed seeds are destroyed. www.nasaacertifiedorganic.com.au/documents/information-sheets/407-info-sheet-1-composting-guidelines/file.html
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Post by spinifex on Jul 19, 2018 20:50:36 GMT 10
Heh, heh ... yeah. That's the theory. In my experience very few people, including myself, will reliably produce 'sterile' compost.
Pity that Methyl Bromide is no longer available. No point having an Ozone Layer if we can't nuke the nasties in the soil.
I suppose if one was keen they could put it in a steel drum and light a fire under it to cook it.
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Post by doglovingjim on Feb 23, 2019 0:08:57 GMT 10
And so... I must revive this thread once more. Year-2 with a year more experience.
I have focused mainly on capsicums and radishes, with my largest radish before consuming being roughly the same size as a potato. I was lucky enough to stumble on a fertiliser bag filled with maggots and used it on the pots I have and they certainly seem to be thriving now.
I added strawberries to my containers (bloody ants keep eating them before they are ripe though) as well as paprika plants, and will later experiment further once I run out of radishes (got potatoes in mind). Had to MacGyver a little shade for the capsicums thinking the sun might be too much. For some reason I can't seem to upload pictures from my mobile so until I figure it out I can't show anything.
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Post by doglovingjim on Mar 14, 2019 13:34:03 GMT 10
I moved two of my capsicum plants to bigger pots and now they are wilting, I gave plenty of water and they have sunlight and I'm not sure what's going on (the leaves are still green, thought it might be a drainage problem but the hole isn't blocked).
Had to cut off a bunch of unripe capsicums in an attempt to let the plant focus its energy on not dying.
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Post by spinifex on Mar 14, 2019 15:21:48 GMT 10
A couple of possibilities spring to mind if the plants were healthy before re-potting and are now wilting and not responding to plenty of water:
How big were these caps plants? I assume if they had fruit they were quite large. Were there lots of roots at the edge of the soil where it met the old pot? Did that mass of roots get damaged? Often large plants in pots have much of their root mass around the edges and bottom of the pot where they are easy to damage during a transplant. The more roots that get damaged the less top growth a plant can sustain. If that is the case remove a heap of leaves. Caps are quite good at sprouting new growth from stripped branches.
Or ... did you repot it with a lot of new liquid fertilizer? That can create all kinds of difficulties for plant roots and the plants natural salt balance. The cure for that is to apply lots of rainwater through the pot soil (from top of soil - not putting the pot in a tub full of water) and let it drain out. This will leach a lot of excess nutrient salts out of the soil and help the plant sort itself out.
Or ... it could have developed a root rot from a combination of root damage during transplanting and/or too much water. Overwatering can make plants wilt. If it's this ... scrap the plants and don't re-use the soil. Disinfect the pots with bleach before reusing.
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Post by doglovingjim on Mar 14, 2019 16:35:46 GMT 10
A couple of possibilities spring to mind if the plants were healthy before re-potting and are now wilting and not responding to plenty of water: How big were these caps plants? I assume if they had fruit they were quite large. Were there lots of roots at the edge of the soil where it met the old pot? Did that mass of roots get damaged? Often large plants in pots have much of their root mass around the edges and bottom of the pot where they are easy to damage during a transplant. The more roots that get damaged the less top growth a plant can sustain. If that is the case remove a heap of leaves. Caps are quite good at sprouting new growth from stripped branches. Or ... did you repot it with a lot of new liquid fertilizer? That can create all kinds of difficulties for plant roots and the plants natural salt balance. The cure for that is to apply lots of rainwater through the pot soil (from top of soil - not putting the pot in a tub full of water) and let it drain out. This will leach a lot of excess nutrient salts out of the soil and help the plant sort itself out. Or ... it could have developed a root rot from a combination of root damage during transplanting and/or too much water. Overwatering can make plants wilt. If it's this ... scrap the plants and don't re-use the soil. Disinfect the pots with bleach before reusing. Thank you for your response. I think maybe some of the roots must have been damaged when transplanting so I'll trim some leaves too, if not however how can I tell if it's root rot?
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Post by spinifex on Mar 14, 2019 16:55:54 GMT 10
No worries Jim
Basically its root rot if the plant doesn't recover after a couple of weeks. When you scrap it, check the roots. With root rot there will be lots of dead brown shrivelled looking roots and few firm, whiter healthy looking ones. If it is rot be careful not to spread it between pots on tools or your hands.
If the plant is really wilty strip off a lot of leaf. New leaves should emerge 7 days to two weeks time if it was just root damage without disease.
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Post by SA Hunter on Mar 14, 2019 19:02:44 GMT 10
My blueberry plant is going into a large pot - friend of mine has one, and says they go really good.
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