THE use of fish meal, tobacco drenching and all other manner of home-brewed concoctions to enhance soil fertility, control pests and grow plants can be damaging to your garden's health, so brew wisely, or not at all.
For the self-sufficient gardener, brewing up homemade concoctions to grow plants may be the only way to grow, but for the rest of us, homemade concoctions have the potential to damage plants, kill soil organisms and cost more than they are worth.
A case in point is the use of homemade sprays and soil drenches made from tobacco juice. For centuries, plantation owners have used liquids made from fermenting or soaked tobacco leaves to control insect pests on their crops. While it may seem like a good idea to kill pests using organic materials, tobacco juice is highly toxic and hazardous to human and soil insect health. And applying the wrong dose or concentration can actually kill your plants or soil organisms and it may injure you. So please, relegate this idea into the category of "meant well, but not a good idea."
Compost tea is another one of the homemade brew concoctions that many people insist will bring health and vitality to plants in the garden. One of the main problems with compost tea is the difficulty in brewing up the tea to a consistency and composition that will benefit plants.
Compost tea that is made too early in the process of decomposition will be full of potentially toxic elements and it may burn plants instead of fertilizing them.
Compost tea made late in the decomposition process will actually leach out all of the valuable nutrients in the compost, leaving you with a pile of soaked and stinking compost that is effectively useless for fertilizing plants.
Another problem with compost tea is how does one go about storing enough compost to use in making the tea and how much work does it take to brew the tea versus simply applying the compost directly to the surface of the planting bed? The answer: it takes less time and effort to simply apply the compost directly to the garden than it does to make the tea.
And after all, who really has time to make tea for the garden when some days we barely have enough time to make a cup of tea for ourselves. Relegate this idea to the category of "just another hippie-guru idea that sounded good but really isn't."
Another homemade brew that is favoured by some gardeners, and illegally so, is the use of magnesium, zinc or copper solutions sprayed directly to plants to control pests and diseases. I have seen these products in use at gardens owned by some hobbyists and plant collectors. And I can tell that even though these solutions may work to some extent, such brews are dangerous to all life, highly toxic to skin and eyes and they are illegal to use under environmental pollution laws. Relegate this idea to the category of "simply uninformed and illegal."
Fish meal and blood meal are commercially available products that are also made in a homemade fashion by some gardeners. Those products are made from ground up animal or fish parts and packaged in either dry or liquid form.
My belief is that although those products may offer a limited benefit to plants, their individual composition is not accurately known and neither is their source. We don't know if those products are made from healthy animals, from useful byproducts of animal farming or simply made from all the scrapings on the floor of the slaughterhouse.
Regardless of what they are made from or how they are made, whether they are made industrially or brewed at home, their benefit is limited compared to other alternatives. Relegate this idea to the category of "something my grandfather did during the Depression because there was no other option, but not a good idea today."
To be fair to the do-it-yourself brewers of homemade garden enhancers, there are a few homemade concoctions made from plant flower parts that may be effective, if they are made using some form of scientific understanding and made by implementing suitable precautions. But for most of us, homemade concoctions that produce a slurry, liquid or powder are simply too dangerous and time consuming to make. Especially when it is unnecessary to brew anything at home to help grow the garden when so many products exist on the market today that can be used safely and effectively when the directions on the label are followed.
There are two exceptions to the myths of homemade garden concoctions used to grow the garden; there really is no substitute for the satisfaction gained by making homemade wine or beer, to help enhance the garden experience.
Todd Major is a journeyman horticulturist, garden designer, writer, consultant and organic horticulture teacher. For advice contact him at [email protected].
