Is there a Fishmonger in the house?

I decided recently that because we don't have great soil, don't do raised beds, and don't know what we're doing that we should start fertilizing the garden on some sort of schedule. I did a few minutes of online research and looked in my gardening books and determined that the safest fertilizer for us fish goo.

This fish emulsion is supposed to be quite good for many plants in the garden, but the kicker that sold me on it was that it's supposed to be quite foolproof and isn't supposed to burn plants. I'm sure other fertilization methods might be better, but they probably involve a learning curve and my garden can't afford another Kate-learning-curve if it's going to continue to grow this season. The Kate-learning-curve is like playing Russian Roulette with my plants and I can see them quivering with fear as I stand there squinting my eyes trying to read another set of directions on the side of a bottle.


Fish emulsion fertilizer was hard to find, but we eventually located a gallon of the stuff at our local small-town Ace hardware store. When I bought it the cashier (who's worked there for 20+ years) told me that I should save myself some money and make my own. She then told me her recipe for stewing up fish guts and storing it in big pickle buckets for use on her garden. I told her that we don't fish (which surprised her because everyone fishes in her world) but that I'd definitely come to her if we ever end up with any spare fish guts and no plans of what to do with them.

So I mixed this junk up and sprayed it on the garden. I couldn't find anywhere online that said how or where to apply it so I just sprayed it all over everything - the leaves, soil, stems, anything that looked like it would benefit. The problem with this method is that if you are getting spray-happy and waltzing around your garden spritzing the most foul-smelling rotten fish juice you can imagine on your plants and then find yourself downwind of the stuff, you're covered from head to toe before you know it. I didn't think it'd be that bad - afterall, the stinky smell was clearly the garden and not me.

When I was finished I walked over to the boys who were catching lovebugs and feeding them to the chickens and Aidan said "AHHHH! What's that stinky smell?"

"It's the fish goo I sprayed on the garden," I said. "You're smelling the garden."

He walked closer and sniffed my arm.

"YUCK!" he wretched. "It's you! You smell like cat food."

Well the boy was right. I came inside and washed my hands - twice. I tasted fish when we ate dinner last night, yet we had ham. My two Siamese cats were following me around all night in a most-disturbing manner - chattering and flicking their tails as I wafted past them.

So lesson learned: Never stand downwind when you're spraying fish fertilizer.

The Power of the Poo

My Aunt Jill in the UK is one of those natural-born gardeners with acres of gorgeous flowers in a truly British country garden. She swears by the power of the poo for the success of a garden. They have horses and she says that the key to a successful garden is fertilizing your garden with the appropriate poo. She swears by horse manure since she's got it on-hand all the time and told me that I need to focus on acquiring some poo for my sad little garden plot. She told me that old poo is golden and new poo is not. So I needed to search out old poo - black gold.

It turns out that we have a friend with three horses and a large manure pile on one of their back fields. Farmer B bought a garbage can just for poo storage purposes and we drove over there the other day to fill our can. The pile of poo was large and the horse owner told us to dig down because about 3-feet down the deep old poo had turned to black gold.

Because this is the sort of luck we have, we chose the one day that a huge storm front was coming through. The sky was black and looked like it did in Twister right before cows started flying. The boys were in the car crying because they wanted to get out and gaze at the mound of poo. But large drops of rain were starting to fall, the sky was dark, the wind was howling and blowing so hard that you had to brace yourself to stand up…and taking two boys out of their car seats to stand on a mound of poo didn't seem like the right choice. Especially since strapping them back into their carseats while they're covered in poo in the pouring rain seemed like an even worse choice.

So there we stood on a huge poo pile in a big storm with crying boys in the car, frantically digging up fresh poo to get to the dark, black old poo from the bottom of the mound. We're chucking it into the can as fast as we can…poo flying, rain starting, wind blowing...and I told Farmer B that I felt like we were in a grave-robbing scene from a horror movie.

We got the huge can in the car just in time. We jumped in the car and realized four very important things:

1) Never shovel poo in a major storm
2) Always bring a bungee cord to make sure the lid doesn't fall off in the car.
3) Always bring spare shoes
4) Always bring newspaper to lay down the poo-covered shovel in your car.

We now have a trash can of poo ready for spreading on our garden. As you can imagine the boys are itching to help with this project. So is the damn dog. It's on our to-doo list for this week.

6-6-6 The Evil Vegetables Begin

We haven't done much to the large rectangle o' dirt lately because we've had days of non-stop rain. One of the fun things about Florida summers is the insane thunderstorms that can last hours, flood your yard and if you're lucky ruin at least one major appliance with a power surge. Today was our first day to get outside since the rains didn't come until 7 pm.

Remember earlier I mentioned that our gardening book said "Don't Guess - Test!" and we both agreed that the exclamation point meant we really needed to get our soil tested? Well that was then and this is now. Now I have a man who doesn't read assembly instructions and likes to use power tools and who said "Bah! Soil testing? Bah!" So he bought a bag of Lime and a bag of 6-6-6 fertilizer and got to work today.

He got a little hand-spreader thingy that did not work at all to spread the lime all over the soil. It looked like some sort of biological warfare with this white powdery stuff floating all around the garden, but Farmer B insisted that we must have acidic soil because all his friends have acidic soil. So there. Lime apparently makes your soil less acidic and apparently less acidic is good. Then he spread half a bag of 6-6-6, which is some sort of fertilizer disguised as cheap bird seed. Finally he tilled it in, like a good farmer should. Afterwards we sat back and wondered whether lime and 6-6-6 should actually be put on a garden at the same time... and if not, what sort of horrible mutations that could cause.

What were the boys doing in all this excitement? They found a lone mud puddle in the yard. After splashing around in it for awhile, they decided to get sticks and go fishing in the puddle. That was fun until they realized nothing was biting and my old yellow dog kept standing in it. Then they decided to throw tiny little white flowers in the puddle and make a potion. They were very serious about the potion and said it turns people into bats. This occupied them for about 45 minutes. You know, it's fascinating stuff...being a kid with a puddle or a man with a hand-spreader thingy. I was worn out just watching them.