Fertilizers Used In Growing Organic Food
You hear a lot about how bad fertilizers are for the planet. They flow from farmland into the water supply during a hard rain. And yet, organic food is grown with fertilizers. What kind of fertilizers? Organic fertilizers, of course, which means they haven't been synthesized or altered in their basic chemical makeup. When the media talks about the dangers of agricultural fertilizers, they are only talking about synthetic fertilizers.
Plant Material
Chopped up plant material can make excellent fertilizer for organic food and flower gardens. These include ground up seeds known as "seed meal", ground up alfalfa hay known as "alfalfa meal" and the rather eye-opening name of "green manure". No, they don't gather the entire green poop crop from cows and use that on the fields. Green manure is a little more complicated than that.
Green manure is called a cover crop for organic food crops, even though it's never harvested for sale. By planting a small crop of clover or vetch provides all of the actions chemical fertilizers do. The green manure provides aeration of the soil, needed biomass, and helps the cash crop retain water. The green manure also takes away the places weeds can sprout and grow. So, you plant your green manure, and then plant your cash crop of organic food.
When green manure like clover matures, they attract insects that help in pollinating of any organic food crop that happens to be in the field. Green manure can be used by itself, or in conjunction with mineral compounds like a phosphorus-calcium mix or animal based manures.
Animal Material
Organic food is allowed to be grown with a wide variety of animal based substances like bat guano (bat poop), bone meal (made from steamed ground up bones), blood meal (made with exactly what you think it is made out of) and fish meal and crab meal (made from ground up crab shells and offal from the crab food industry).
Animal manure is still perhaps the most popular fertilizer for organic food, usually from cows. Human urine has also proven to be a promising source of organic fertilizer for organic food crops, especially for cabbages - although that probably will never get a lot of press.
Liquids And Teas
There are other, less work-intensive fertilizers for organic food crops available. There are dried fertilizers made in big tea bags so you make the tea and pour it on your crop. Being shipped in a tea bag style makes it lighter to ship than liquid fertilizers. If you want to go straight to the ready made liquids, they are available, too.
