While your at the Asian market get some sashimi and make some homemade fish emulsion, I heard it is good for vegetables too.

Couldn't I just buy whatever fish is on sale or the entrails (free)from the seafood area instead of high priced sashimi-grade fish?

Sorry Admiral, just messing with you. It would be absurd to use food grade anything in your garden...including seaweed. Input costs should not exceed returns in my opinion. While seaweed and kelp might be good for your garden, it is not practical unless you live by the ocean. Look for a local organic material to incorporate in your soil...gotta be something. Look on farm and garden section of Craigslist to start.

You can't just go grab kelp, you have to contact the lifeguards in that area and many will turn you down. Even after you haul it home, you have to wash it, grind/chop it fine, and composting it with o.m. is better than emuslifying it anyway. Just buy emulsion, I'm at the beach twice a week and I still do.

I've already incorporated composted manure and yard trimmings along with composted green waste from the kitchen. I am looking to make a small batch of seaweed emulsion to try it out on a few tomato plants.

I'm trying to make tea out of dried seaweed. About 1-2 cups in a gallon of water with a tablespoon of molasses and a little fish emulsion. I figure the kelp emulsion is mostly water so hopefully this will work, one pound of seaweed was less than a quart of kelp emulsion.

dicot, you ought to move to Maine. Here we can bring home 50 lbs. of growing seaweed a day or all the washed up (dying) seaweed you can haul. And we don't have to wash or grind our seaweed. We just put it straight from the beach onto our gardens.

Dried seaweed meant for human consumption costs several dollars for a few ounces in the Asian markets. It would be ridiculously expensive to try to use that. Plus some of it is salted.

annpat- How do you put the seaweed straight in your garden? I live on the water and keep looking at all the great green product in the ocean and wonder just what I need to do with it. I also would like to make homemade kelp emultion, but if all I have to do is bury the stuff please tell?????????????

I think annpat uses it as a mulch so she just spreads it around on top of her soil

Hello all:

I wish someone would answer the question rather than judging its cost-effectiveness. I have several kinds of leftover dried seaweed that I'm never, ever going to use for anything else (my husband hates it and I hate cooking for just myself). I would love to use it for my garden.