Growing Good Soil with Fish Scrap
Healthy soil grows happy plants. Photo by Emily Miller.
As an experienced gardener, and someone who has been cultivating organic vegetables for over a decade. I know that the most important part of any organic garden is its soil. If the soil is healthy and full of nutrients, your crops will be healthy, delicious and robust.
With all the advances in agriculture and modern techniques of growing food, today's crops are less nutritious than those grown over 50 years ago [1]. Relying on synthetic fertilizers actually deprives our plants of many essential nutrients.
To understand how to ‘grow good soil” we need to learn a few ancient techniques of planting.
Native Americans knew the secret of fish as fertilizer. While preparing the ground to plant corn, indigenous people placed a small fish in the soil. They mounded fresh soil on the buried fish and planted a corn seed. Throughout the growing season, the fish slowly decomposed, feeding the crop until harvest [2].
Fish has long been used as a natural fertilizer in many parts of the world, because it supplies a healthy and lasting supply of nitrogen and other nutrients.
I recently learned about the Korean Natural Farming (KNF) method. Popularized by Master Han-Kyu Cho in his book Natural Farming, KNF is a set of agricultural methods originating in Asia that date back hundreds of years [3]. One of the techniques used is incorporating fish into a fermented mixture that creates a blend rich in nitrogen, proteins, amino acids, and micronutrients. What this does is it introduces indigenous microorganisms (IMOs) from the wild into a garden’s soil structure, that results in healthy plants, and is also a step towards creating a closed-loop system in your garden.
How can you use fish scraps as fertilizer?
To go the easy route you can bury whole chunks of fish parts at the base of your plant or at least a foot deep and then plant over. Or grind the fish parts to make your own fertilizer. I would recommend a hand grinder and not a kitchen blender as it is easier to clean. Then work the ground mixture into the soil. Remember to protect the area with a fence or chicken wire as the strong smell might attract nocturnal critters or your dog might enjoy digging the area.
If the idea of burying entire guts and gills beneath your edibles shocks your sensibilities, consider processing scraps into a solution known as Fish Amino Acids (FAA) to use as a fertilizer. Following this recipe for your soil from Fishful Future’s project manager, Emily Miller.
This is an excellent method to turn all the fish waste produced locally into an organic nutrient rich amendment your plants will love. The practice is environmentally sound, closes the loop, and prevents the loss of valuable organic matter to landfills.
Turn the final pieces of a fish into food for your garden with this simple process by Emily Miller.
Click the button below to try the process yourself.
Sources
[1] Scientific American. (2011, April 27). Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/.
[2] Mrozowski, Stephen A. "The discovery of a Native American cornfield on Cape Cod." Archaeology of Eastern North America (1994): 47-62.
[3]. Cho, H.-K., & Cho, J.-Y. (2010). Natural farming: Agriculture Materials. Cho Global Natural Farming.