Best liquid organic fertilizer
 

Hi all. I have been growing my orchids strictly organic for the last year now. So far it has its ups and downs. But for the most part it works much better for me than using chemical. I was wondering if anyone else grows strictly organic and if so, what liquid fertilizer do you use. And if not liquid any water soluble ones out there?
I'm just looking to mix it up a bit.

The primary question is what do you mean by "organic"? Most fertilizers are based on naturally occurring elements. It sounds as if you have been using slow release pellets.

There are many high quality water dissolveable brands on the market. Buying fertilizer in liquid form is generally expensive so look for crystals which dissolve. I know First Ray Orchids on this site sells several high quality formulas for orchids.

I am not sure why you feel it important to use a "liquid organic fertilizer", but to each his own. Good luck, :waving

Cym Ladye

With organic I never get fertilizer burn, I can put paphs in sphag moss, feed plants more regularly and not have to worry about the ph of my water.
I grow organic because it eliminates many growing problems and shows better and more steady growth. An orchid in the wild doesn't get its nutrition from chemicals so why feed them chemicals? Just my thoughts.

I'm sorry and no offense please, but those statements are just so incorrect in so many ways that I wouldn't know where to start rebutting them, except maybe to point to a near identical thread from last week if I can dig it up. Just for starters an orchid in the wild most certainly does get its nutrition from chemicals (and sunlight). I don't think organic means what you think it does.

Most often, it is not the type of fertilizer used but the rate of application. If you allow orchids to dry too much between watering or use too strong a dose, the salts from the fertilizer go to the leaf tips and cause the "burn". It has nothing to do with organic vs non-organic.

If you have ever been to any areas where orchids grow wild, the condition of the plants is far less than the optimal state us hobbyists would like to see in our collections. To do well, orchids need nutrients supplied by the growers. We are not growing out in the wild with the same rains containing minute amounts of micro-elements and minute amounts of nitrogen generated by nature.

CL

So an orchid gets boron, chlorine and disodium ethyenediamine tetra acetate in the wild?
True organics stay in the media and don't get washed out easily. Chemicals do. Organic is far less likely to burn chemical will burn if over used.

---------- Post added at 12:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:52 PM ----------

I'm also curious to know what organics you are familiar with. The stuff I use is composed of fish meal, blood meal, kelp and potash. Thats it. No other stuff other than some mint extract to make it smell less fishy. No salts from ammonia to build up. My plants dry up plenty and I fertilize heavy. And yet no salt build up and no burn.

I use a mixture of both, organic and chemicals on my orchids... but I use strictly organics(both dry and liquid) in the garden. I feel a mixture of bat guano, fish, seaweed and worm tea are the best. If you make a tea with all the above you will have a fairly good fertilizer. I recommend you reduce your feed rate alot if your a heavy feeder. I feed my orchids @ 15ppm N every watering with K-lite and my plants are happier then when I was feeding @ 125 ppm N(recommended dosage). At the moment I'm feeding with guano, seaweed and added beneficials twice a month but that changes depending on my work load.

---------- Post added at 12:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:41 PM ----------

Use a charcoal filter to filter out those chemicals. A must if your using organics and city water.

Yes they do get boron and chlorine. Boron is considered to be an essential element for plant growth. No EDTA though; I use aspartic acid instead of EDTA in my formulations.

Thank you David for chiming in on this discussion with your technical background. I am not the chemist, only the grower who knows what works when used properly.

CL

I used Merrill's Compost Tea from Merrill's Organics for about a year. Merrill's is a chicken farm and they use composted chicken manure, seaweed and humate. It's in the form of a tea bag that you put in warm water. I had decent results but the individual tea bags are too expensive to use long term. I also looked at another compost liquid called Great Big Plants but I never used it.

Merrill's Organics

Organic Gardening : Garden Soil : Plants Food : Tomatoes Growing : Easy Compost : Great Big Plants, LLC

It is my understanding that organic fertilizers need soil in order to break down and be utilized by the plant. But most orchids are not grown in soil, and organics merely accumulate in the medium and begin to burn the roots. If you do use organics, what medium do you grow in?

Its not an issue of no soil but a lack of beneficial bacteria and fungus. Most mediums will have these if the conditions are right.

Most organic fertilizers are soluble and non-soluble. The soluble can be use right away by the plant and the non soluble needs to be broken down via fungi, enzymes, ect.

---------- Post added at 06:10 AM ---------- Previous post was at 06:03 AM ----------

9 times out of 10 there not beneficial! I find it important to add trichodrema to help protect the plants from attacks. Fungi which do most of the eating of organics really only like moist woody mixes.

Fish meal and blood meal produce ammonia as they decay. Potash is a salt of potassium.

Nutrients-- all of them, regardless of their source-- ARE chemicals, by definition.

Many of those chemicals are, technically speaking, organic, and many are salts. No way around that. The term "organic" as it has been applied to agricultural styles is a really awkward, confusing usage of the word. If you're going to talk about the specifics of fertilizing, a more specific vocabulary helps. Organic vs inorganic is a different use of the word than organic vs artifical, and so on. Hell, when you get right down to the nitty gritty even scientists argue about what's organic and what isn't, and does carbon dioxide count, etc.

So, when you say "organic" are you trying to refer to compounds that contain carbon, or are you actually talking about compost, or humus, or are you referring to something natural vs something artificial, or something solid vs liquid, or...?

"Organic" is not quite the issue. The question is bioavailability, or whether the nutrients in the fertilizer exist in a form that is directly available to the plants or not. If the nutrients are contained in compost-- chunks of decaying stuff-- then yes, they need to be broken down further before plants can utilize them. It's not so much that soil is needed for this to happen, as soil/humus tends to be the result. Along the way, the active decay of unfinished compost or the pileup of material can hurt roots, by different mechanisms of damage than that caused by accumulated salts.

Epiphytic orchids in the wild get most of their nutrients from stuff carried in the water that flows over them, and can't tolerate a constant rot-happy cover of soil/humus. This means we generally need fertilizer that's already pretty thoroughly broken down for them.

I use live fish and aquatic compost (tea, I suppose?), myself, with some added micronutrients.

Folks:
this is one of my favorite topics. In summer when the orchids are outside, I make up a batch of witch's brew for them. The ingredients are chicken manure (from my chickens - high in ammonia), seaweed and/or fish fertilizer, a little epsom salts, and whaterver else is on hand that looks "delicious."
Bat guano, yes for the ceologyne, brush up from barn floor and just toss some on the plant.
This is only for the summer diet when dunking and hosing are possible. People really admire my plants, and when I mentioned this ritual at a club meeting, the president said, "Stop scaring the beginner!" ha ha ha ha hah ; -) Works for me.
Cheers~
ML in WMass

Goldfish pond water is a great fertilizer. I miss my ornamental pond everytime I water the plants (but I don't miss all the work I put into it!). The fertilizer for the lotus were probably a good addition to what the goldfish and decaying plant-matter provided. :)

Has anyone checked the dissolved salt content in fish pond water on a DSL meter?

Good point, I would think that the dissolved solids might get rather high. With pond water you are starting with tap water and then adding more tap water to make up for evaporation. Lots of other variables too. I much prefer to start with RO purified water and add defined amounts of chemicals.

There's a multitude of ways to test aquarium/pond water. Fish are much more complex, sensitive organisms than plants, and good water chemistry is crucial to keeping them healthy. Bad water will kill fish quite a bit faster than it kills plants.

We can test everything from pH to TDS and ORP, general hardness, carbonate hardness, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, phosphate, copper, iron, dissolved oxygen, carbon dioxide, chlorine, etc etc. Unfortunately other things are not easy to test for-- potassium for instance, and most micronutrients.

There's a huge amount of information available if you look up planted tanks, aquascaping, aquaponics, and so on. The water that will keep aquatic plants happy can feed lots of other plants too!

When you see how the lilies and lotus thrive in a pond (especially a lotus with those lovely, fragrant blooms and five foot high leaves) you realize how good that water must be. :)

So what sort of TDS is usual for a decorative fish pond? How do you keep the TDS below that of tap water?

Edit:
From a bit of searching on the web I see that some people do install large RO units to supply water for their ponds in order to keep the TDS down but then I would still rather use the RO water and add my own well defined nutrients.

Yes, if you invest in the expensive fancy fish, the prized lilies, lotus, and 'bog' novelties, then spend many hours a week caring for the pond, you tend to worry quite a bit about water quality. The plants and fish are highly dependent on what is in the water. I even had a microscope and prepared slides to make certain I had a healthy ecosystem. Being outside, exposed to everything, if one has a problem with water quality, things can go downhill very quickly. I had the pond thirteen years then downsized to a barrel pond after a neighbor's cat developed a taste for my very tame fish.

Very quickly. Yes. I once had a pH crash that annihilated half of my fish in the space of 2 hours.

Also nothing quite like wandering outside half-awake to feed the fish and finding yourself eye to eye (and I am not short!!) with a great blue heron 3 feet away and like 1" wide, pretending to be a stick with big yellow eyes. Until it realizes you've seen it, and then the 6' wingspan comes out. Good morning!

My current yard is infested with raccoons. I don't have the space for a proper koi pond like I used to have back home, but I want to throw in a 200-gal container for Wakin goldfish, too tall/steep for critters to hop into. I'll get a Scarecrow as well, see if that helps.

And I want a lotus SO BAD. I'd love to put a dwarf one in my indoor tank, as well.

It's interesting, in the koi community there's this huge stigma against plants-- they don't want ANYTHING in the water with the fish. No substrate, no rocks, definitely no fertilizer, etc. Then after I lost my pond and was forced to switch over to an aquarium I ran into planted tanks (just have a look at Aquaforest here in SF, omigosh) and there's no going back.

The plants in my aquarium feed and grow so fast that I have to supplement the nitrates from a separate compost-critter tank!

I'm actually pondering adding some Malaysian trumpet snails into the reservoir of a S/H pot to see how they like it in there. Or maybe there's some kind of worm or other crawly critter that could live in the damp portion above the water, eating algae and such. That would be awesome.

After reading this thread, I went to Amazon and found a product labelled "Organic Liquid Fish and Kelp Blend". It is produced by a company called GS Plant Foods. Reviewers gave it four+ stars, so I figured this was a good place to start. This product arrived last Friday (05/31/2013). I was going to water all my plants but it has such a strong fish odor that I've staged watering by sections, allowing plants to dry and diminish the scent before I watered another set of plants.

A dwarf lotus could easily live in a two hundred gallon pond. My pond was 5' x 6' x 23" (zoning meant a pond had to be under 24") and had a Mrs. Perry D. Slocum as well as another, medium-sized, that's name was forgotton. I have been missing my lotus and might buy another tub and put a lotus in it. No need for a pond but mosquito control is a neccessity (dunks, bettas, or small goldfish). Raccoons can get into nearly anything, unfortunately, and netting just gets torn/chewed through. A raccoon isn't likely to bother a lotus in a tub, though.

Back home I was using a 100-gal Rubbermaid tub for my smaller fish. Those are 2' deep. For a while I also used one of those 1500-gal backyard pools with the inflatable rim, which was even taller. The neighborhood raccoons actually made a visible path past it on one side, so many footprints from their daily travels to and from the river nearby-- but they never touched the fish, and I never bothered with netting. The Rubbermaid tub's upper edge is too narrow and rounded for them to climb or perch on, and the water is too deep for them to stand in if they did manage to climb in. Raccoons like to hunt waist-deep in the water, feeling for fish with their hands, and herons hunt while wading knee-deep. Vertical sides at least 18" tall/deep can be pretty effective at preventing predators from having a comfy perch to hunt from, raccoons and herons at least-- certainly wouldn't stop osprey I suppose, but they've never visited. In 4 years I never lost a fish, until one winter the water level in the inflatable pool got too low and the sides slumped-- letting that heron walk in. At full depth, it was impervious. Even though a big heron is definitely more than tall enough to look over the edge of any tub, for some reason they don't like trying to strike from that angle.

Of course that means you may not want an edge around the pond that you can sit on, or put plant pots on-- and you don't want a shelf or pots in the water near the sides for a raccoon to use as a foothold to stand on. Bog planting areas would have to be limited to keep herons from using them.

If the container is short enough for them to climb in, they absolutely will though. I have a small like 5gal tub of water on my patio that has a few extra pieces of driftwood and java fern in it-- raccoons come almost every night to crawl around in it, wash in it, and look for snails to eat. It's a downright nuisance, actually. They've been digging up my calla lily bulbs and gloriosa lily roots, knocking over my plumeria cutting, uprooting my fescue plugs, and overturning my violets. Sheer luck that they haven't mangled my dendrobium kingianum yet. Definitely want a Scarecrow out there as soon as I can manage it.

That sounds terrible! The lotus might be a trick then. Unlike water lilies that like to be planted deep, lotus likes to be planted close to the surface. The lotus tuber is pretty delicate at first because the growing tips don't regrow if broken so you may need to cover the tub with a cage or something sturdy to protect it until it is established. Just a note: Follow the directions on fertilizer. They are heavy feeders but you have to wait each year until the tuber is growing well.
They are really special plants. If you do flower arranging, the pods are really cool though you wait until the stems have dried to remove them (water getting into the hollow stems is a no-no). The seeds and tubers are said to be edible so when you run out of friends who want to grow lotus.... :)

We seem to have drifted a bit off topic, but to keep a smaller pond for the water it will be necessary to stop blue herons and raccoons. I have discovered two remedies which work:

Raccoons - invest in a product called "Fido Shock". It is essentially a low voltage electric fence system with 100' of wire and 12 green plastic stakes. It is unobtrusive when placed at about a 10" to 12" height around the pond and once hit with it, the racoons leave it alone to the point you can turn it off and just leave it there as a reminder.

Blue Herons - this solution is not as unobtrusive, but it definitely works. For the smaller pond, lay a piece of 1" x 2" 14 gauge wire fencing over the pond. Although the herons conceivably could get their beaks into the water, they cannot open them to get the fish. This fencing also thwarts raccoons if it is anchored down a bit with some attractive "lightweight rocks" so it does not shift around. My pond is 400 gallons and it has been raccoon and heron safe for 15 years.

Cym Ladye

Yeah a tad off topic I suppose... but if people want to make liquid fertilizer at home, there's gonna be water involved, and probably a large container of it. And if it's outdoors with mosquitoes and all, there will probably be fish, and, and... :D

The Scarecrow I mentioned earlier is a motion-sensitive sprinkler. It sprays whenever it sees something moving (sensitivity can be adjusted). Nice thing about it, is it's not very obtrusive like a large barrier-- just don't forget to shut it off before you go to feed the fish! :p

Such heresy! The "fact" that orchids grow much better in the wild is one of arguments used over at Slipper Talk to explain the need for "K-Lite". I once stated the opposite and one of the rabid defenders of "K-Lite" asked if I had ever been out of the city.

If you've ever been fortunate enough to see epiphytic orchids in the wild, they are often pretty ratty specimens, but I can say from observing the same plants over many years that their "rattiness" may not be entirely due to the fact that they live in the wild, but because that environment is changing. A plant colony can be lush one year, look awful a couple of years later, and then return. If a few nearby trees come down in a storm or due to man's hand, they can deteriorate rapidly.

Domesticated plants often look better simply because they are given a more stable environment and a better-than-subsistence diet.

I really don't care what others may be saying about "K-Lite" fertilizer - each individual has different observational and objectivity skills - but it is designed to provide proper nutrition while ensuring better long-term viability, NOT to make plants grow noticeably better immediately. My personal opinion is that if your culture is pretty good to start with, and upon switching to K-Lite you see improvement, then you were doing a poor job at nutrient management in the first place.

I think that various fertilizers work better with various mediums, water, orchids/plants and conditions. That is why there is such a variety and, with each fertilizer, successful growers that swear by them. Organic fertilizer is really good stuff but much of it relies on slow decomposition. A few that do not are, as often noted, hard to find and expensive. Goldfish, in my opinion, provide the best bet. :)

I use Seagrow and Seaweed as liquid fertilizers.. You can dilute it to 100ml to a liter and it still wont burn your orchid or its roots ( not recommended though) I use 25ml to 8 liters of water.. The seaweed really stinks though. And to really prove that these dont cause any harm the first time i used the seaweed i accidentally knocked the bottle over and one of my dogs started licking it up. She just had a bad stomach for about 2hrs and that was it.. I took her to the Vet and she told me that there was no harm at all. The dog just felt a bit down for the rest of the day though. The next she was up and running again. Getting back to the point. The seagrow i use for root growth and seaweed for overall. They actually work better than the other Fertilizers i used in the past.

Did the dog grow? ^^

Marcel Lecoufle used for decades only urea mixed with the local tap water, it worked somehow… ;) (Got almost the same water quality, I'm not far from there, got to try it)

Hey there,

A friend of mine with a large orchid collection feeds her orchids an organic guano fertilizer called buddha grow (i sell this on my website Buddha Grow | Planet Natural) but she also supplements it with the MSU chemical fertilizer. She has excellent results with it.

Personally, I do one watering of MSU orchid fert, then a watering of liquid kelp (which is organic) and then a flush of pure water, and then repeat the process.

One thing to note is kelp is not a complete fert, but contains a rooting stimulant and breaks down into trace nutrients so it is just a supplement to a complete fertilizer.

I'm using a product called Orchid LOve, it is very organic, with fish emulsion and sea weed and earthworm castings. My orchids love it, I have lots of new growth and blooms.

I believe you, the smell of this stuff is

Awesome

:goodluck:

The stinkier the fertilizer, the most delightful the orchid smell in bloom…*



(*totally invented at the minute)

Chicken poop is organic and will burn any and all roots
Organic is not what you think
Dick

I totally agree.

BTW, chlorine is also an essential plant micronutrient (but one we rarely need to supplement). In nature, enough chlorine is in the atmosphere to provide plant needs. It is essential in the function of the stomatal openings, in photosynthesis, cation balance and transport, resistance to fungal disease, and regulating the form of nitrogen used by plants (favoring ammonia utilization over nitrate). Deficiencies are rare, but they are known to occur.

Chlorine is dispersed in the atmosphere from sea water (it is well established that Cl is higher in areas receiving winds from the ocean, lower in inland areas).

---------- Post added at 01:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:35 PM ----------

I see one website for Orchid Love, but no information on the composition and guaranteed analysis?