OT/ Vegan Fertilizer

[Alex]

How are they made, and what are they made of?

I'm looking into making them myself, but find it hard to find some how-to materials online.

Alex

[Jennifer]

Looks like it's basically just compost and miscellaneous other plant materials.

Jennifer

[Cheryl Isaak]

And here I was wondering if he was composting vegans!

C

[Doug Kanter]

Vegan-Organic Principles? Give me a f..king break. No animal products - do they think horses and cows suffer if we use their manure??? :-)

[paghat]

Actually not all vegan gardeners are adverse to manure which can be regarded as vegan-organic because it is a byproduct of digested grass & oats & the like. But anyone adverse to shoveling shit into their yard & avoding especially the commercially manufactured manure composts is not losing out on anything needed by the garden, as the so-called green-manures are actually BETTER organic composts & are the kind of composts most gardeners would be making at home.

Personally I would not want to forgo my access to free llama poo (from llamas fed nothing chemicalized or gross), & I do use steer manure compost merely because it is cheap, but anyone who wasn't cheap-ass like me & wanted the BEST for their garden would have far fewer pollutants by avoiding commercially prepared manure composts which are a nightmare of chemical pollutants both from commercial feeds & from from

It takes almost no concession to "go vegan" for someone who is already an organic gardener. It would mean using kelp instead of fish fertilizer, which has the added bonus of not making the garden smell like a shit hole full of rotting fish. Going vegan would mean using alfalfa powder in lieu of bonemeal or other rendering plant fertilizers, which has the side-benifit of not introducing prions into the gardened environment & keeps keeps dogs & racoons from thinking there must be something meaty to dig up in a freshly planted & bonemealed bed.

I'm no vegan but there were too many additional reasons to avoid waist-meat byproducts for gardening. I prefer kelp & alfalfa to rendering plant waste products. It is moving UP the scale of quality & benefit. And any gardener who is not a closeminded snit would at least want to understand the benefits & know something about vegan-gardening techniques, borrowing what suits & not what doesn't.

Some of it may be assessed as merely political, religious, or emotional, as well as an absurdly exaggerated response to the OVER-exploitaiton of animal life causing some to feel that no exploitation of any kind should occur (which unfortunately would be as fast a road to animal extinction as any imaginable, if everyone on earth did suddenly follow such cultic thinking). Still, not wanting to fertilize the garden with rendered kittens & puppies & roadkill (which are indeed major ingredients in fertilizers that incorporate rendering plant sludge), that might be an emotional choice because its so icky, but it is easy to understand as even you probably wouldn't be running kittens through meat grinders as a regular part of our home composting system if you had to make it rather than buy it done for you so you can distance yourself from the process.

Or it can be an ecological choice because non-meat alternatives are frequently less polluted (due to the chemicals & pharmaceuticals in livestock feeds that do pollute bonemeal & commercial manure products). Or based on a reasoned sociopolitical or personal-moral choice not to support rendering plants & slaughter houses by buying products reliant on killing animals by the millions. Not wanting to be part of that system is pretty decent, if you ask me, just so long as it doesn't extend to categorizing as immoral anyone who raises or hunts their own meat & other idiot exaggerations.

Or on the religious basis a Jewish household wouldn't want rendered swine in their yard & Hindus wouldn't want rendered cattle in their gardens -- anything with rendering plant matter in it will have all these animals in the mix.

Plus, surprisingly enough, some vegan methods turn out to be the ones with superior results for the garden, so some of it may be adaptable even by people who aren't concerned with how many crunched up bones of kittens & puppies & chickens & cows & diseased livestock & miscellaneous slaughterhouse garbage & all-round suffering went into their meat-based garden products.

So while I might share a small part of your feeling because I regard the special language & attitude of so much of "Veganic" gardening movement (promoted by the likes of the "Gentle World Vegan Paradigm Center" I kid you not) to be New Age Noodle Braindamaged Dunce-hat Doofy-Wussy-Weanie & Cultic, nevertheless the basic choice not to garden with the blood & bones & guts of all manner of wild & domestic animals can be a completely rational & superior choice. Despite that if veganism were enforced as the only choice for all people, the repurcussions would impact negatively the very animal population that incites the worst blindered sentimental decisionmaking of an irrationally serious vegan.

-paghat the ratgirl

[Doug Kanter]

I stand mostly corrected. However, as a fisherman, I take moderate offense at that last remark. :-)

[Bourne Identity]

No, but vegans don't use any animals products in anything, including leather or any other form of animal byproduct. What's the big deal and why so hostile? I'm slowly going vegan, myself. Currently vegetarian lacto-ovo.

[Doug Kanter]

Bad day in the office. Sorry.

I'm not sure about the belief system behind this. Disclaimer: The long-term vegetarians I'm acquainted with cut their teeth on recipes from the original Moosewood cookbook. All these people are now obese, due (I suppose) in no small part to the enormous presence of cheese in those recipes. Take away the cheese, and how much effort does it take to find the necessary proteins? Is it still the grain & legume combo that does the trick?

[Wolf Kirchmeir]

Doug Kanter wrote: [...]Take away

It does the trick, but it ain't easy. You need the right combo of amino acids, and plants just don't have the same range of these as animals do. This means that you really need to know what foods contain what. Grains and legumes are the core, but oddly enough other plants matter, too, even letuuce and spinach. (That's why Popeye is such a powerhouse. :-)) If you're serious, there's lots of good data out there. But beware: there's more junk and danegrous data on the 'net than good stuff. Every loonie now posts his idiocy on the web.

Also, many vegetarians and vegans overdo the carbs, mostly because carbs don't have much in the way of amino acids, minerals, etc by weight, so people eat more in order to get sufficient amounts of these nutrients. IOW, whole grains are essential if you want to go vegetarian/vegan. (I always think of aliens when I hear "vegan" - you know, those blue fuzzballs from Vega IV. :-) Whole grains are essential in any diet, actually.

Recent work on fats indicates that the wide-spread belief that animal fats are bad for you is not only wrong, it's dangerously wrong, especially when it comes to brain development in infants and toddlers, and atherosclerosis in adults (--> heart attacks, strokes). There is also some worrying evidence that low animal fat intake may be implicated in the onset of MS. (MS is genetically conditioned - you develop it if your genotype makes you susceptible to certain environmental factors. Food is part of your enviuronment, as should be obvious.)

Me, I don't care what you eat, unless you get all religious about it. But please note that children, especially infants and toddlers, need animal fats and meats, and should not be deprived of them. You can introduce a more vegetarian diet as they grow, but AFAICT a vegan diet before puberty is completed is not healthy. Humans are omnivores, not herbivores or carnivores.

The best advice is Aristotle's, still.

[Bourne Identity]

Happens to everyone.

The need of protein is a huge myth. You do not need anywhere as much protein as you eat when you are a meat eater. We need approximately 50mg of protein a day. You can get that from soy, grain and legume combinations, or directly from vegetables containing protein. I am fat because I eat like a horse! Eating cheese is not what makes people fat, it's fat and sugar combinations, along with not getting enough physical exercise.

Since I've become vegetarian, my hair is thicker, and shiny and my combined cholesterol is 130. The good cholesterol (I forget which is what) is 75. I never had a cholesterol problem to begin with, so not sure eating the way I do now has anything to do with it.

Vegetarian cooking is hugely different than those books of years ago. I also do a lot of Indian cooking, which is yogic most times and delicious.

V

[peter]

I enjoyed those links, thanks Jennifer

[Philip Lewis]

relatively easy... you need a chipper/shreader, a vegan, and a compost heap.

Now, Go rent/watch the movie Fargo.

;)

[Janet Baraclough]

The message from "Doug Kanter" contains these words:

Yes Doug. It's stealing their resources, which is dishonest and manipulative. Horses need their poop to grow more grass to eat.

If God intended you to misappropriate horse manure to put on your garden. would he have designed horses to just poop at random on their own pasture/dinner, and grow more grass? Of course not. He would have designed them to do it in huge litter trays. Or at least, straight into plastic bags near the roadside.

Janet

[Alex]

Alex

[Doug Kanter]

OK. If you're so smart, how do YOU think it gets into those bags, if the horses aren't doing what you said? You think people package it? That's insane, Janet.

[Janet Baraclough]

The message from "Doug Kanter" contains these words:

Party-poopers do it on their wild nights out. That's how they got the name, don't you know anything???

Janet.

[extincted]

This vegans a closing their intel to this horse important product, while they eat food which is grown on it, or for example electricity use which is also product of far more polution, radiation, coal, weird

[Wolf Kirchmeir]

What's really wierd is that so many people don't recognise irony when they see it. I guess literature just isn't taught in schools anymore. Just "language arts."

[Janet Baraclough]

The message from Wolf Kirchmeir contains these words:

If his garbled post was the product of "language arts" teaching, your education system is deep in the "horse important product".

Janet

[Doug Kanter]

We already know this to be the case. Last week, my son's school ran an evening orientation event for students who're considering taking AP (advanced placement) courses next semester. The printed material from the AP English teacher contained two spelling errors and a handful of word/phrase combinations which were questionable, at best. They were the type of thing which, if your child wrote them, you'd say "Now....those work, but they're awkward. They don't 'read well'. Let's talk about this and see if we can make them more elegant".