Fertilizer making on a 38 degree day in Oz

Hi Everyone! I'm happy to bring you another post from Ligaya Garden.

It's a pleasant 38 degrees Centigrade here this arvo, so I'm alternating a bit of gardening outside with a lot of writing inside and drinking lots and lots of water. We Aussies hibernate in Summer, not in winter as you northern folk do. The weather bureau reckons it'll get to 40 today and Google seems to agree. That's pretty average for the warm season here and last year, home and garden thermometers reached 50 Centigrade. That was a bit warm. In Gawler, we are on average 1 - 2 degrees warmer than Google predict and 1 degree above the weather bureau's' educated guesses.

The pic's not a bucket of spaghetti sauce, its actually a bucket Fish Amino Acid vinegar extract erm... extracting. Smells great too! It's the second stage in the process of drawing out the maximum goodness from fish scraps and because the first extraction stage, the traditional method of making Fish Amino Acid (FAA) fertilizer using sugar or molasses in an anaerobic environment reduces the smell a lot, when I add vinegar to the leftovers, the smell is just that of pickled fish. Delicious!

After making a batch of FAA the traditional way, all of the leftovers get dissolved in home made Apple Cider Vinegar over the next month in one bucket. This draws out more calcium and phosphorus and some micronutrients that are soluble only in acid solutions. It's as good as any fish emulsion you can buy at the shops.

In the bucket in the next pic, all of the fruit that's been damaged by varmints is getting a second life and fermenting nicely into a liquid brew so that it doesn't get wasted and boy are the varmints busy this year! We have a plague of rats getting at the fruit trees and the Tomatoes. They're like kids and don't bother with the leafy greens (of which we have heaps) but want the brightest, prettiest things, then they take a couple of bites and ignore it. Maybe I can work out a way of making fermented rat liquid fertilizer...but I don't think I'll go there...

Fruit is pretty well the life goal of most fruit trees and they put a lot of energy and nutrients into producing it, especially phosphorus and potassium.

This is one way to reclaim some of the nutrients so that they can be added to the root zone of the trees without the hassle of making regular compost. We don't have a compost heap here in the garden. We have a deep litter system with chooks working over most of the organic material that comes into the garden, breaking it down, removing bugs and mixing poo and feathers into it. We also make a lot of liquid additives for our plants and soil and as I'm getting the hang of making them, I'm also incorporating them into the aquaponics. The ultimate goal is to reduce the reliance of fish as a nutrient source in the aquaponics system. The fish will just be pest control and the homemade liquid fertilizers will be the nutrients. Such a system is called 'bioponics' and reduces many of the expenses of an aquaponics system, especially on in which the yield is reduced because folks like us don't eat the fish. Plus it's one less thing that needs doing.

The pulp left after either of the mixes I've shown you today get strained out and are favourite of the worms in the worm farms. I think I can hear them smacking their lips now. At least, I think it's their lips 💋 😅