Foliar Feeding
(Page 5 of 5)
May/June 1988
By Peter Donelan
Rodale's manure tea: Mix two cubic feet of manure with 60 gallons of water.
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Lee Fryer's basic spray: Combine ¼ pound of seaweed meal and ¾ pound offish meal with five gallons of water. Ferment one month, and dilute this five to 10 times before using.
Henry Doubleday's skipper tea: Steep 10 pounds of kitchen waste in 10 gallons of water.
Rich weed spray: Soak 20 pounds of wilted comfrey, nettle or thistle in 20 gallons of water. Ferment one month. This very rich fertilizer should have close to the same NPK concentration as a commercial 10-10-10 fertilizer. For foliar use, dilute it five to 10 times with water.
Seafood spray: Place scrap fish in a barrel, barely cover with water, and let ferment for two or three months. Skim off the top layer of oil (compost the leavings), and use it diluted with water in a 1:80 ratio. You can store unused oil in a closed container.
Prove It
Experiment for yourself. Regularly spray the leaves of part of a crop, but be sure to leave an untreated portion of that same crop as a control. That way you can honestly assess the effects of your foliar application. After all, foliar feeding is another task to add to that long list of gardening chores. If you spray nutrients only because this article recommends it, your enthusiasm for the job may diminish as soon as your recollection of these words does. But if you really see the difference in crops yourself, the noticeable improvement might guarantee foliar feeding a permanent place in your gardener's heart.
Peter Donelan was a one-year gardening apprentice with John Jeavons's Ecology Action of the Midpeninsula (5798 Ridgewood Rd., Willits, CA 95490). Jeavons is trying to help solve world hunger by developing gardening techniques for raising maximum food in minimal space. (His current indications are that a gardener may grow 322 pounds of food in six months on as little as 100 square feet.) Donelan is now teaching agricultural literacy at Stanford University.
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