Green leaves gives green leaves

Comfrey and nettles are both known as weeds, but they do have one thing of value: it's possible to make liquid fertilizer out of their leaves. I won't keep the fact that it smells bad, but experienced gardeners swears on it, so it's worth a try making it.

Comfrey
Making fertilizer out of comfrey has to be one of the most easiest thing in the garden. Make a hole in the bottom of a bucket and put it on a stand to make it possible to put a can under it. Then pack the bucket with comfrey leaves and leave it for a couple of days. A blackbrownish liquid will start dripping into the can and that's your concentrated natural fertilizer. To use it you dilute it with 10 to 20 parts of water. Rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

Nettles
Nettle water is well known for its rancid smell. You make it by putting nettles in a bucket of water and leave them to soak for some days. Filter the liquid and dilute it to the colour of tea before you water it out. A mild fertilizer with good credentials.

Comfrey and nettles can be dried for future use. In that case you use the recipe for nettle water for comfrey too.

And then another kind of green fertilizer:

Grass klippings
Grass klippings are easy to handle and full of nitrogen. You mulch around the needing plant with it and the nutrition is released through nature's processes. Appart from feeding the plant it keeps water in the ground and may even reduce weeds. The back side is that it's a dream environment for slugs and snails, so if you have a slugproblem you should probably look for other fertilizers.

I have yet to try comfrey and nettle water indoors, these are the two fertilizers I'd like to try in my containers. Outdoors I could use all three, but I have to make some extra arrengements for the green mulch; we do have a slug problem in Uppsala right now. What I'd do is to use it in raised beds with a slug barrier.

From chemical to natural

Have you ever wondered how healthy you would be if your food consisted of dextrose, vitamin and mineral pills, a shot of cooking oil every now and then and a daily pure fibre cookie? I've pondered this for some days, since it struck me that this is almost the 'mealplan' of plants fed with chemical fertilizer. The solution I use promise to provide every mineral and nutrient a plant needs. Since my plants stays healthy as long as they get their weekly clean water shower there may be some truth in that.

I use chemical fertilizer for two reasons; it's easy to store for a long time in room temperature, and there are limits to how advanced I can be when I'm starting something. In the beginning of this experiment the idea of growing vegetables indoors was odd in itself, I wasn't in the mood of experimenting with "natural" fertilizer too. Now I'm changing into nutrients I can make out of plants and plant waste, and are cheap and easy to produce.

Since I'm growing stuff indoors there are limits to what I can use - I'm reluctant to use anything that smells for example. The dark fluid in the glass above is the water left when I parboiled nettles a few days ago. This is what I use now, mixed one part to ten with clean water (you may remember that I think this fluid contains nutrients because of its colour). It doesn't smell much, and I hope it'll make my iceplant taste better. Since I've only used it once I can't say if it works or not. It's a temporary solution (ahaha), and when I've emptied my fertilizer carboys of this I'll replace it with something made from an old established recipe.

So, are there any old established recipes to use? Well, I know about two which involves fermenting, and one of them is known to have a smelly result (ie. nettle water). The other is easy to describe; you make a hole in the bottom of a bucket, fill it with comfrey leaves and place it over a tin. When the leaves rot a dark brown fluid drips into the tin, and this fuid is then diluted with water (one part to fifteen parts clean water, we are talking strong stuff here) to a liquid fertilizer. Neither do this sound as something sweetly fragrant. But since I live according to the motto "better living through reckless experimentation" I'll try it to see if the smell is something that stays or if it fades after a while.

I've also ordered some tiger worms to start up vermicomposting, and from this I count on having both dry and liquid fertilizer. If you keep your compost in plastic bins, which I intend to do, the worms and the waste will produce fluid that is good for making liquid fertilizer (and we could now say it together "dilute it with clean water"). The good thing about vermicompost is it doesn't smell much, the finished product is said to smell like soil (surprise). I don't know if this goes for the 'composttea' too, but this is my favorite candidate for a future standard solution.

Besides I think plants too deserve a cucumber decoration on their drinks every now and then.

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I'm pretty fond of Cafe Press. The feeling of seeing one's pictures printed professionally on everything from teddybears to posters is hard to beat. That's why I started to put up my pic of the day there. If you like the blog or the photo you can buy some prints. (I'm doing this for the fun of it, but this doesn't keep me from saying "Shop 'till you drop!" ;-) )

Prints of today's pic here.

Flash of genius?

Not nettles but my own window herb garden, waiting in line for a taster.

Right now I'm picking nettles like crazy - nettle soup is really a humdinger! I still use gloves and cook my harvest before I eat it (last time I played HaRd Woman my thumbs were swollen for two days). Today, when I boiled three to four litres (about a gallon) of leaves, it struck me that some of the nourishment flows into the first boiling water, the water you normally poor off in the sink. Wouldn't it be possible to use as liquid fertilizer instead? Sure, it isn't a classical recipe for "nettle water"*, but it's worth a try.

Thus I brought out a bucket and cleaned it thoroughly with soft soap, hanged our colander over the rim and drained the nettles. The water proved to be dark brown - definately nutricious. I took the cool water I'd used for cooling the leaves and diluted it (recycling, cooling and diluting in one go - what a hat trick!). Now I had a 'middle brown' solution to pour on a defenless plant.

The choice fell on the cherry tree on the balcony - it'll have its first cherries this year and signals an acute need for nourishment. It helped that the container is big enough to take the entire bucket of liquid. However I poured some on the rose and the watermelon plant since they seemed to need it.

I'll pick more nettles tomorrow, and I have to admit I have plans for the harvest of a month. I hope I'll be able to give every indoor plant a ration a week, and it'll be interesting to see how this works out. Later in the summer the nettles will become bitter, according to consulted expertise, and then I can resort to classic nettle water.

*Nettle water is made by leaving nettles in water for some days. Apparently it smells bad but sustainable growers in Sweden swears by it.

Evil twins

One of the reasons I wanted a citrus bush is that they smell so good when they bloom. We gave my mother in law one and it perfumes the entire flat with a scent of orange and jasmines every time. That's why I was surprised when I started to smell liquid manure around my calomondin.

First I blamed the farmers around Uppsala. In this place you're never far from a field in need of fertilizer, especially not in the spring. Then I started to think over the fact that the smell was located around my citrusbush. Lastly I started to look, and found a shy flower under a leaf.

It does smell like liquid fertilizer, but better. As if liquid fertilizer was an evil twin of a smell, and that smell was calomondin. I have mixed feelings, but prefers to take the flower as a kind of flatter; I do some things right at least. If I continue in this way I'll soon have new little citrus fruits for my marmalades.

Things are progressing in my seedlin boxes; the ordinary nasturtium have 'hatched', and the strawberries are on their way. Soon I have the entire collection firmly stuck in the boring phase.