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Ocean’s Harvest - The Sea’s Bounty in Our Herb Gardens
Ocean’s Harvest - The Sea’s Bounty in Our Herb Gardens
There are a good number of potential choices that organic herbalists face when selecting fertilizers to feed their hungry herbs. Many of us were drawn to organic gardening not only for the quality advantages that might be inherent in organically grown herbs, but perhaps also because it seems to be an environmentally friendly way to grow our herbs, fruits, and vegetables. Instead of using salt fertilizers produced by energy intensive chemical reactions that often involve hazardous substances such as sulfuric acid, we like to picture ourselves as using earth friendly products. But, as with many things in life, the reality we face isn’t always so simple.
Animal wastes like manures and guanos are the oldest purposely used fertilizers, but to some eyes they’ve also lost some appeal due to industrial scale animal confinement production techniques that can leave behind some unwelcome chemical residues, as well as being questionable ethically in some eyes. Lets be honest, nobody working hard to build their soil microorganism population wants to dump on animal wastes full of partially metabolized antibiotics, but unfortunately the overuse of antibiotics and other chemicals are seemingly inherent in hog and cattle confinement operations. Bird manures are no different it would seem, antibiotics are often overused, and the horrible conditions facing most commercially raised chickens and turkeys at least rival the cruelty imposed on other confinement raised animals.
Animal byproducts like bone and blood meal were once commonly used by organic gardeners. Leather and tanning wastes aren’t usually considered to be organic, but some kind of animal waste category would be their best classification for fertilizer purposes as well. While animal byproducts are still useful, we’ve noticed less and less reliance on these old gardening standards. Obviously, the people who are bothered by the ethical side of animal confinement debate will avoid these too. And the problems inherent on the overuse of antibiotics that appear in manure can certainly rear their ugly heads here too.
A variety of rock powders can be used for gardening as well. Most soil based growers use lime of some sort. And, a soluble rock salt - magnesium sulfate (epsom salts) - is at least somewhat familiar to most soil growers. But, rock phosphate and greensand and a host of other rock powders are slow release, so they are also probably of limited interest to growers who don’t remix their soil. And while rock resources may seem inexhaustible, that’s not necessarily the case, even in human terms. I’ve seen estimates that predict world wide shortages in phosphates and potash as least as soon as the planet is predicted to run out of oil. Just as oil prices have reached record heights, increased world demand and limited supply is already leading to steep and continuous price increases for both potash and phosphate fertilizers on the world market.
With all of that in mind, we’d like to explore the facts and alternatives offered by yet another alternative avenue of providing quality nutrients for herb gardening. While the ocean’s bounty is not unlimited, the majority of our planet’s surface is covered in water, leading to a obvious realization that our oceans may very well be the planet’s greatest renewable resource. Thus begins a series of journal entries devoted to growing medicinal herbs using the power of the ocean.
For North Americans raised on stories of the first Thanksgiving, the use of fish as fertilizer might be considered to be a time honored tradition. We all learned in school how Pilgrims were taught by Native Americans to grow corn using fish for fertilizer, so it should be no great surprise that fish can be an effective fertilizer. And though fish fertilizers may be the most obvious agricultural resource to come from the seas, they are just the beginning.
Seaweed, also called kelp, is already well known to the organic gardening community. It’s another sea based product of great value to organic gardeners, providing the entire range of trace minerals, as well as having the potential to provide fair concentrations of some nice plant growth hormones. In addition to those other benefits, seaweed meal provides organic matter when included in a soil mix.
Fish fertilizers and seaweed themselves are versatile enough to provide a veritable seafood buffet for plant nutrition from start to finish, but the bounty of the sea is not finished there. A range of other sea based organic fertilizers and amendments are also available, including crab and shrimp shell meal, and interestingly, sea salt fertilizers. Those, and other, lesser known sea based agricultural options offer their own benefits, and are worthy of their own exploration.
So please join the 3LB’s in an ongoing exploration of using the sea’s bounty in the herb garden . . .
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