Today, we will share with you how we use the fish waste and duck waste, and remnants of everything at the bottom of our koi pond, on our garden beds.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Using Fish & Duck Poop as Fertilizer
1:18 Fertilizer Jackpot
2:58 Diluting the Waste
3:25 Adding Emulsion to Garden Bed
5:03 Being Sustainable in Your Garden
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Hi, I’m Lindsey, and I’m at the Urban Farm. And today I am gonna share with you this, which may look disgusting, but is actually really exciting.
So this is fish waste and duck waste, and just remnants of everything that was at the bottom of our pond. In redoing the pond when all the water was drained, this is what was left over. And this is a fertilizer jackpot.
This is the waste from our koi pond, which also has a lot of wild ducks that come through. This is essentially a fish emulsion duck waste fertilizer that we are gonna be able to use in our garden. We set up this temporary little retaining pond out of cinder blocks and liner, and this is just holding it until we can use it and until we can put it in buckets and store it.
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So as you can see, it was a lot more liquidy, but it’s been sitting outside for a while. So this is just pure waste, and duck poop and duck waste has a really high NPK. So NPK are the essential nutrients for plant growth, they’re nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. So duck waste is one of the highest NPK ratios for all of livestock. So we love using this and we get fertilizer from our coop as well because we have ducks in our chicken coop. So duck waste is an essential fertilizer that we use. And then fish, EMS also have a really high nitrogen count, and that helps with micronutrient uptake and soil enrichment. So this is gonna be an amazing benefit to our fall gardens. So what I’m going to do is just scoop some of this, and because this is so concentrated, we’re gonna wanna dilute this. So you can dilute waste like this with either water or you can compost it. That’s another great way to use it.
And like I said, this is a little thicker than it would normally be if you were draining it directly from the pond. But once we add some water to this, this is gonna be an amazing fertilizer that plants can absorb really easily, and it’ll make our soil really nutrient rich and healthy.Now that we have about a fourth of our bucket filled with the duck waste and fish emulsion, I am going to add water to this. So we’re gonna wanna dilute it and that’ll help it more easily spread in the garden bed that we’re gonna put it on and also dilute it a little bit. And I’m just gonna stir this up a little bit and just help break apart some of those more clumpy parts.
Now that I have diluted the emulsions and the waste with water, I’m gonna add it to this bed. And this is an empty bed that we haven’t started planting anything in yet. And the reason I’m not gonna use it on a bed, like say this cucumber bed, is because this is still actively waste and it has all those microorganisms and those decomposing factors, and we have cucumbers. So we wouldn’t want any of this actual poop and waste to get on our cucumber crop. So what I’m going to do is just add this and disperse it throughout. And this will give the soil a really nice nutrient upgrade and just really help with the organic matter.
And then if you want, you can kind of mix it into your soil. And this is another great reason why composting this would be a good idea too, is because then you could put it directly on your bed. And you can also put this on a bed with per say baby cucumber plants that don’t have active cucumbers growing on them. We just don’t wanna contaminate the actual plant. So once we mix this in and add a little bit more, this bed is going to be full of those NPK nutrients and micronutrients in organic matter, and that’ll help this bed be really successful.
So I hope seeing this shows you how you can use things from your garden sustainably in ways that maybe you didn’t know you could. So even things like fish waste and fish poop at the bottom of your pond can be great sources of fertilizer and can be amazing additions to your garden. I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you find creative ways to fertilize your own garden.
