I have been gardening this block for 5 years, not an enormous time, but I don’t use animal products to fertilise I just use compost/mulching/weed tea/and cover crops.
Everything seems fine. Yet every gardening show or whatever will be like “slather that manure and blood and bone on each year, use fish emulsion, fucking sacrifice your firstborn on that shit”. Am I an idiot or do you just not need to do any of that?
edit: not looking for the peanut gallery. Interested in opinions from people who don’t use animal products and what their experience has been.
I don’t use animal products intentionally. I can’t know for certain if soil I buy contains compost that includes animal manure, but other than that nope.
It’s really hard to find compost but if you don’t need the bulk and you just need the PKN, synthetics are readily available. We’ve been growing plants specialty to compost so that we can get that bulky material to add to our heavy clay soil.
Personally I use synthetic on houseplants and alfalfa meal/kelp meal outside.
Yeah I use synthetics inside as healthy living soil in a pot long term is hard.
Our council hooks people who don’t compost with people who do. So between an overgrown garden and the street I have plenty.
That’s amazing! Most of my neighbors just have grass on their land and leave the clippings there but I should definitely ask around. We have municipal compost but I compost everything that I can at home.
Yeah I have mixed opinions on my council after they had a vegan hate fest when one member suggested they live their goal of a green council by not serving animal products at events.
But some of the initiatives are defs v cool.