Help! Why is someone feeding meat to Rose?

The editor sent me a picture, and my fruit flies and I were stunned.

There are fleshy flowers in the rose pots｜Xiao Xu Huanhuan/Xiaohongshu

If you want to add fertilizer to your flowers and plants, can you just bury the plants? Let me first say the conclusion: Beginners should never do this. If you really want fertilizer, you can try home composting - just use "vegetarian" waste such as fruit peels and vegetable leaves . In addition to obtaining fertilizer for your flowers and plants for more than ten years, home composting can also consume your kitchen waste , which can be regarded as turning waste into treasure.

If you feed meat directly to plants, aren't you afraid of maggots growing?

I don’t recommend composting meat directly for one important reason: have you ever heard of forensic entomology?

This discipline relies in part on the sensitivity of scavenging insects to the decay of corpses . Once a dead body is completely dead, they will fly across mountains and seas to lay eggs. The age of active insects on the body can be used to determine the time of death , and calculate the molecular clock of the world of death (not really). Piling meat in a flower pot is like fermenting miniature corpses at home. Even if the doors and windows are closed, I am afraid that flies from all over the neighborhood will squat in front of the window to kowtow to you!

Forensic anthropologist Dr. William Bass once created a "body farm" to study insect activity in different stages of corpse decay, which provided an important basis for determining the time of human death. | Lisa Bailey

The second reason why we don’t recommend you to pile up (meat) manure at will is that it stinks . The stench of compost is so stinky that my husband (who used to be a forensic pathologist) became alert and stood up, sniffing and searching… Even if you have been in an abalone shop for a long time and your olfactory cortex has stopped paying attention, some odor molecules in the decayed matter are fat-soluble and will penetrate into the pores. If you live with it for a long time, you will also have a smell that is difficult to remove .

Therefore, the general gardening guide on fertilizers is to thoroughly ferment them first , then dilute them with water at a ratio of 1:1000 before feeding them to plants. Similarly, it is not recommended to feed plants with egg shells, Lao Baigan, Longjing tea, beef brisket pot, etc.

However, green fingers have their own habits. I have also heard of the legend that the boss feeds chicken liver to the tree. As an ordinary skilled worker, I dare not say that stacking meat is absolutely not okay. But novices need to remember: the horticultural industry is like other fields. There are many legendary operations that the bosses can do, but you can't . Think about the wife of Wang in Mantuo Villa in "Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils". She cut off people's hands and feet to make fertilizer for the camellia. The camellia said it was totally impossible! Duan Yu looked at it and shook his head.

The correct way to compost

Correct home composting usually uses "vegetarian food" such as fruit peels and vegetable leaves. Through home composting, you can harvest fertilizer to water flowers and vegetables, improve the soil, and make flowers and fruits grow more vigorously . On the other hand, the materials generally used for composting are common wet garbage at home. Through composting, you can understand the process of wet garbage resource utilization .

Mainly use unseasoned vegetables, fruits and other wet garbage for composting｜sh.gov.cn

The principle of composting is simple: after biological materials have been fully decomposed and fermented, microorganisms decompose them into components that can be directly used by plants . My rough understanding is that living plants can directly eat the feces of fungi after they eat dead plants (plants generally cannot directly eat the feces of other organisms, and they need to let fungi eat them again).

There are several ways to compost at home. I use a Bokashi compost bucket + EM bacteria , which is more convenient for urban residents and is sealed and has no odor.

Bokashi Compost

There are some ready-made Bokashi composting barrels on the market. They have a filter inside. After the liquid fertilizer leaks out, you can turn on the tap to release it. The liquid produced by composting can be used as liquid fertilizer . Generally, it is added to water at a ratio of 1:1000 to water plants. The remaining solids can be mixed with soil to make solid compost . After fully fermented, it can be mixed with soil and used directly as soil.

In addition, there are EM bacteria for sale, which is a collection of photosynthetic bacteria, yeast, lactic acid bacteria, etc. There is no way to make EM bacteria yourself, you can only buy it, and it is said that the effect of fertilizer is better and safer.

For a ready-made bucket like this, you can directly put shredded kitchen waste into it, then put in EM bacteria, seal it, and wait for fermentation｜bokashiliving.com

Will composting at home cause it to stink and rot? One way to alleviate the stink is to control the raw materials : generally, raw, unseasoned fruit peels and vegetable leaves have a milder smell when fermented . If you put meat, eggs, milk, or seasoned vegetables in, the bacteria will have difficulty digesting them, and the taste will be bad...

To speed up the fermentation, you can cut the compost material into small pieces or crush them , put them into the container, cover it, sprinkle EM bacteria, and seal it for a period of time to fully ferment. For specific operation methods, please refer to the instructions.

Bokashi Composting Instructions

Soil Compost

If you have a large yard at home, you can try soil composting. A simpler version is to dig a hole, fill it with compost materials, cover it tightly with soil, and it can be used naturally as soil after a few years. A more complex version requires considering the carbon-nitrogen ratio of the compost materials, maintaining humidity and providing oxygen to the inside of the compost pile, and taking some time to observe the smell and temperature of the compost.

The editorial department of Guokr Nature tried soil composting in a small box last year, and this year they planted water spinach and choy sum｜Guokr Nature

If you have a yard, this method is very convenient and can produce a lot of fertilizer . However, it can only produce solid fertilizer and takes up a lot of space. And if flies find the rotten things that are not covered tightly in the corners, they may quietly create a prosperous paradise for maggots.

Worm Composting

In addition to letting microorganisms participate in the degradation of kitchen waste, you can also let earthworms help. Earthworms can process waste fruit peels and vegetables into nutritious earthworm soil . It does not take up a lot of space and is said to produce fertilizer much faster. Friends who have a yard can explore it. For small living things, there are naturally some things they don't like to eat and some they like to eat, just like raising a pet.

Worm tower, earthworms will shuttle back and forth in several layers of soil, processing wet garbage into earthworm soil. Friends who are afraid of earthworms should use it with caution｜unclejimswormfarm.com

Trash becomes treasure, flowers and fruits grow rapidly

How is the fertilizer from compost? It works wonders on flowers . After two applications of six times the fertilizer, it becomes thirty-six times the fertilizer. The problem is that it cannot control bacteria/fungi (it is difficult to avoid this problem with homemade organic fertilizers. It is best not to use it on plants that are susceptible or in unventilated places indoors). Roses will mold if touched, but they will grow rapidly while they mold, and the number of flowers will triple. Until the abnormally hot summer last year, the mold was killed by the heat, but the roses did not. It also works well on berries. That year, I harvested a lot of strawberries and raspberries. Overall, under my extensive management, it performs better than chemical fertilizers .

Some small harvests | Photo provided by the author

One of the better uses of home compost fertilizer is to adjust the soil . I use tap water to water the flowers, and the soil becomes seriously compacted after about a year. After adjusting the soil with this liquid fertilizer and solid fertilizer, this problem is greatly alleviated.

Comparison of the same pot of Dancing Spring Flowers without and with solid fertilizer in May of two consecutive years. ｜Photo provided by the author

I collected wet kitchen waste for several months, and started to produce liquid fertilizer from the second month. I got about 5 liters of liquid fertilizer in total, which can be used for ten years for my pots of grass. It took two years to get fully fermented solid fertilizer, which can be used directly as soil. The effect is good. The figs and grapes suddenly grew in size.

After two years of fermentation, the solid fertilizer can be poured out and mixed with soil to be used as soil. ｜Photo provided by the author

Put kitchen paper in the empty bucket, pile up new kitchen waste, mix in EM bacteria and start the next round of composting. ｜Photo provided by the author

The liquid fertilizer does not smell bad. It usually smells like a watermelon peel that has been left overnight at room temperature, which is a bit sour but still has a bit of fragrance . If it smells bad, it means that the bacteria are not enough or the bacteria are ineffective. Just add more bacteria. A practical suggestion: Don't put liquid fertilizer in a Coke bottle. After they are fully oxidized, they will be a very confusing color.

At first I put liquid fertilizer in a Coke bottle. One day my husband walked into the room while twisting the cap and holding it to his mouth and said, "You forgot to put the Coke outside and it got hot..." | Photo courtesy of the author

In addition, when it comes to microorganisms, you don't know what you are dealing with. It is best to wear a mask and gloves when operating, do not breathe deeply, do not touch with your hands, and wash your hands carefully after operation , and it is best to wash your face as well.

In addition to fertilizer, I gained more

Making fertilizer can actually be very complex and delicate. How much investment a home gardener makes depends on personal needs and conditions . With my planting volume (steady 40-60 pots of balcony plants), a Coke bottle of liquid fertilizer can last for five years. The compost bin cannot cover all gardening needs. I use it partly to accumulate experience in sustainable plant management in the future, just in case I have land in the future!

On the other hand, after Shanghai implemented garbage sorting, I was curious about the composting use of wet garbage, so I used Bokashi to simulate it on a small scale, and I could have a rough idea of ​​where the wet garbage goes . Shanghai can separate tens of thousands of tons of wet garbage a day, which is a rich resource if it can be used well.

The wet garbage resource processing projects in Songjiang District and Jiading District of Shanghai adopt the "pretreatment + wet anaerobic digestion + biogas power generation utilization" route to turn wet garbage into usable resources.

From an environmental perspective, home composting is an interesting attempt. However, home composting may not meet the needs of every plant, and the output is too large for you to use up. So if you only have 5 pots of plants, you don't have to compost them yourself, you can ask your composting friends for some fertilizer. In daily life, it is more important to reduce garbage generation and do a good job of garbage sorting .

Since I started composting, my perception of the world has changed: I used to think that kitchen waste, fruit peels, and vegetables were garbage, flies were dirty pests, and microorganisms were sources of disease; now I understand that they are all part of a cycle , and I feel calm and even a little appreciative when I think of them (as long as they don’t kowtow to me, just be well!).

Author: Dadazi and Hammer

Editor: Little Towel, Mai Mai

This article comes from GuokrNature (ID: GuokrNature)