Re: Using bones for fertilizer?

I've been wondering about this myself. I have a *lot* of bones I need to dispose of quickly. Is the garden a good place for them?

Reply to
William Orth
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Yeah, i'm running out of places to hide the bodies too.

Reply to
Bpyboy

Our 150# black Newfoundland, Natasha (RIP) could smell bone meal a mile away and dug quite a few pits as a youngster. Fortunately she outgrew the habit after she was around two years old. I used to have to hose her off with the garden hose--- what a mess LOL.

Reply to
Phaedrine Stonebridge

That is one of my all-time favorite gardening books. My dad used to do that in his garden and he always had fabulous gardens.

Reply to
Phaedrine Stonebridge

It is a really good book . I aquired mine one x-mas, when a nutty cousin (he's still nuts) gave it to me from his back pack when he realized that he didn't bring me gift for the holiday. I read it, and a couple by Bradford Angier (especially "How to live in the woods on pennies a day) and they shaped a lot of views.

what's driving me nuts these days is that, as a student, I don't really have a place to invest a lot of time and things into. just to move in a year or so.

I'm here to help out with my tiny little garden, and try to amass info from everyone for when this firewalk is over.

john

Reply to
Bpyboy

Phaedrine Stonebridge wrote in news:phaedrine snipped-for-privacy@news-50.giganews.com:

Interesting. But I wonder if it's still a problem? I guess that incident was around 7 years ago? I picked up a package of bone meal for my mom recently and it said some fancy smancy stuff about a "special steam purification process", so I wonder if that got rid of whatever attracts animals, and if something similar could be done with home-made bone meal etc.

-- Salty

P.S. I remember some people mentioning trench composting bones without any problems.

Reply to
Salty Thumb

Being the paranoid person that I am, I wouldn't use bone meal in the garden because of BSE (mad cow disease). One case of it was recently reported in Canada.

I just wouldn't want to be spreading bone meal around my place, and certainly not in the garden with the edibles.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Meadows

Hi All, the only trouble with composting bones is that they take a long time to decompose. I have found them in compost that is two years old, and taken them out and transfered them to a new compost heap. hope this helps you.

Richard M. Watkin.

Reply to
rmw

I wondered about that too. I don't think they've found anything that kills prions yet.

Reply to
Phaedrine Stonebridge

You might try bonsai until you are able to settle in one place. :)

Reply to
Phaedrine Stonebridge

The steam sterilization process will *not* kill BSE prions. (I'm a beef cattle rancher, and have been playing real close attention to the whole BSE deal.)

Jan

Reply to
Jan Flora

snipped-for-privacy@xyz.net (Jan Flora) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@98-pm5.hom.alaska.net:

All the more reason to figure out a way to home compost bones ... at least until 'crazy chicken' disease becomes a problem. :-)

Reply to
Salty Thumb

Nothing wrong with container gardening either. I've grown an awful lot of veggies and herbs in containers.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Meadows

There are several thousand head of beef cows out on islands in the Aleutians (in Alaska) that we are trying to get the state to declare off-limits for now. They are quarentined herds, just because of location. The original animals were put on the islands by Russian fur traders in the early 1800's. If we ever needed clean (disease-free) stock to rebuild herds should the unthinkable happen (like the FMD massacre in Britian), those herds would be a source of clean stock, not to mention hardy genetics.

The commercial food supply sure is scary these days!

Jan

Reply to
Jan Flora

My thoughts precisely.

Pat

Reply to
Pat Meadows

yes it's great. my father would by bone meal. looks like baby powder. he used it for starting roots, seedlings, tansplanting & grafting. he had the best vegys, fruit & flowers around..

ZZ

.

=BF~~<

Reply to
zzbottom1

What's your experience with heirlooms? Are they disease and pest resistant? I'd just love to grow heirloom 'maters, but getting any 'maters at all to grow at 59 degrees north latitude isn't easy. There are some old varieties from Russia, Czechoslovakia, etc. that are supposed to do well in cold climates. I want to start doing trials with them. (My SO just built me a little greenhouse!!! Late is better than never. There's always next year. *g*)

Stockgrowers who feed meat to herbivores should be run out of business. We feed our cows green grass in the summer and hay in the winter. And we feed our dogs fish and meat, not kibble that's mostly corn.

Jan

Reply to
Jan Flora

"len" wrote in news:%TUWa.4767$cf.757@lakeread04:

Probably about $$$.

Reply to
Salty Thumb

Well, Jan like I said, this is the first year We've planted heirlooms. So far so good, we've been harvesting for a couple of weeks. Seriously, we have

30 plants, sometimes we use a wheelbarrow to bring them to the house. It may just be selective memory, but I can't remember tomatoes tasting quite as good, really they remind you that tomatoes are a fruit. Now here is the dilema, the ones we grow here, S.E. Va. will not work for you. They are beefsteak varieties. I tried that when I lived in upstate NY, if you like fried green tomatoes or green tomato pickles, they will work. You might try a google search for heirloom tomato, and then look for short season detirmenant. I bet you will find something you can use, especially with that greenhouse. It looks like you have already got some good ideas. We decided to use heirlooms specifcally because of the resistant factor. Last year, we picked our tomato sets from the local feed and seed, us and everybody else, had a really bad year. So we decided to change step. I am begining to believe that we are being decieved by the lables, by seed companies, as far as resistance is concerned. Now, cattle are herbivores dogs, like us are omnivores, leaning toward carnivores. Our dogs love trips to the garden, which is why I had to fence it, years ago. Len
Reply to
len

Yes, there are horrors in the killfloors (slaughterhouses) of this nation.

I may be even more horrified than a normal person, since I raise cattle and *like* cows. When we work our cows, we *never* yell or jump around. It stresses the animals. The SO and I use mostly hand signals when we work the animals on foot. (Like putting the calves in the weaning pen. We drive the whole herd into the corrals, then sort the cows, steers and bulls out and let them out of a gate, one by one. No yelling allowed. And we don't allow dogs around our cows.)

We're going to start construction on our own slaughterhouse, here on the ranch pretty soon. We don't like taking our cull cows to the state killfloor. All of the stockgrowers in the area will be able to use our killfloor and work their own cattle up, for resale. It'll be DEC certified. None of us like the common practices in commercial killfloors, even the good ones, because we all like cows...

Jan

Reply to
Jan Flora

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