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lauriek123

prob/? with fish fertilizer

LaurieK123
12 years ago

I bought Alaskan fish fertilizer last yr. I just used it on some seedlings and they all are all damping-off.

The seedlings were strong and 5 weeks old, so I don't think it is just a coincidence.

Has anyone heard of this stuff getting contaminated? Should it always be tossed at the end of the season?

Comments (6)

  • maplerbirch
    12 years ago

    Any type of rich, raw Organic Material will rot quickly and cause the demise of healthy living tissue...

  • Kimmsr
    12 years ago

    Damping off is caused by a number of pathogens that prefer soils that are warm and quite moist. The fish fertilizer most likely had nothing to do with the seedlings getting struck by one or more.

    Here is a link that might be useful: Damping off

  • terrene
    12 years ago

    I don't know if the fish fertilizer contributed to damping off or not, but it does seem quite coincidental. I am usually organic, but for seedlings and plants in containers, I now mostly use half-strength liquid chemical fertilizer. A small bottle has lasted a long time so far, since you only use a few drops. Once plants are in the ground I use seaweed, compost tea solution or compost to feed the soil!

    I don't think fish fertilizer goes bad, maybe use it on the compost pile if you need some nitrogen. The smell can attract animals though - the raccoons or some critters have dug in the soil, thinking there's some dead fish under there!

  • dicot
    12 years ago

    It's tough to say from the info given, but more importantly, fish fertilizer is a poor choice for seedlings in sterile growing medium, imo. If your soil medium wasn't sterile, that's the more likely fungal contaminant source. If the germinating mix is sterile, it will lack the soil flora necessary to take fish emulsion and convert it to usable nitrogen and other molecules for root uptake, making it essentially useless. This is a common mistake, one I made for years. Failing to differentiate between thriving and depleted/sterile soil microorganism situations can lead to bad fertilizer choices.

    It took me even longer to get off purchased soil mix for seedlings, I now germinate in composted organic matter with vermiculite and sand (or if I can get it, coco noir instead of vermiculite) and never fertilize. I water with dilute chamomile tea or a little peroxide if I'm worried about damping off, but I mainly focus on not over-watering, transplanting at the 4 leaf stage and never using tainted seed containers or watering cans as strategies against damping off.

    So it's my opinion that being an organic gardener is best in natural systems, but when you create an "unnatural" one in a container, gardeners have to be practical about the nutrients needed to kickstart the seedling into optimal early growth. The seed's germplasm only goes so far, so one must either use a formulation that does deliver available soluble, available N organically (see elsewhere), unlike blood or fish meal, or this is the one place to cheat and deliver a dilute amount of soluble inorganic N. Or you can depend entirely on the seed's stored germplasm as a food source and transplant very quickly after germination (i.e. the baggie method).

    This is why I germinate my crops in place as much as I can, we warm weather gardeners have that luxury. Which is a far from sterile situation, but I rarely have damping off if I let the soil surface dry between waterings, after germination

  • maplerbirch
    12 years ago

    A sterile soil medium stays sterile with liquid synthetics. Organics function through microbrial activity and most microbes 'rot' things.

    I usually move my seedlings into fertile soil once thev'e grown large enough to transplant. Not many seedlings need fresh NPK when they're sitting indoors, getting sun through a window. :)

  • Rising_Moon
    12 years ago

    A very simple weak tea made of Camomile flowers has shown to help prevent and fight damping off. Seedlings don't really need any added fertilizer if the growing medium is balanced.